Charles Macfie Campbell

Charles Macfie Campbell was a psychiatrist in the United States in the early 20th century.

Early life

Campbell was born in Scotland in 1876 and died in Cambridge, MA, on 7 August 1943. He received his medical degree from Edinburgh in 1902, earning both an M.B. and a Ch.B., after which he sought postgraduate training in France and then Germany, where he trained in Heidelberg under German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926).

Career

He returned to Scotland in 1903 and served under the psychiatrist Alexander Bruce at the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary. In 1904 he was invited by Adolf Meyer (1866–1950)to join the staff of the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals, which was based at the Manhattan State Hospital on Ward's Island in New York City.

Macfie Campbell spent 1907 back in Scotland as an assistant physician at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum but returned to New York to work again under Meyer at the (renamed) New York Psychiatric Institute in 1908. During the next few years Macfie Campbell would not only adopt Meyer's "dynamic" psychogenic perspective on mental disorders but would also be instrumental in introducing Freudian psychoanalytic ideas into American psychiatry with like-minded colleagues at the Manhattan State Hospital.^{[citation needed]}

When Meyer left the Institute in 1910 for a professorship at Johns Hopkins University and to plan for the new Henry C. Phipps Psychiatric Clinic (opened in April 1913), Macfie Campbell also left to work at the Bloomingdale Hospital in White Plains, New York. In 1911 he earned his Doctor of Medicine degree from Edinburgh after completing a dissertation on general paralysis of the insane (later known as neurosyphilis).

In 1913 he rejoined Adolf Meyer in Baltimore to serve as associate director of the newly-opened Phipps clinic. He was also appointed a faculty position as assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1920 he moved to Massachusetts to become the new director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and to assume the position of chair of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he remained until his death.

Macfie Campbell is not remembered for any single intellectual, medical or scientific contribution. He published very little. He spent his career promoting the "dynamic psychology" or "psychobiology" of his mentor, Adolf Meyer. Like Meyer, Macfie Campbell believed in the psychogenesis of mental disorders, denied the notion of biological disease concepts for dementia praecox, schizophrenia and manic depression, and insisted that extensive case histories of individuals was a more useful method in psychiatry than normative or generalizing experimental or statistical methods which do not consider the uniqueness of every patient.^{[citation needed]}

References

• Campbell, C.M. (1914) The mechanism of some cases of manic-depressive excitement. Medical Record 85: 681.
• Campbell, C.M. (1925) A Present-Day Conception of Mental Disorders. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Campbell, C.M. (1934) Human Personality and the Environment. New York: The Macmillan Company.
• Campbell, C.M. (1933) Towards Mental Health: The Schizophrenic Problem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Campbell, C.M. (1935) Destiny and Disease in Mental Disorders, With Special Reference to the Schizophrenic Psychoses. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Solomon, H.C. and Cobb, S. (1943) Obituaries: Charles Macfie Campbell, M.D. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 50: 711-714.
• (1943) Obituary: Charles Macfie Campbell, M.D. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 98 (5): 561-563.
• (1943) Obituary: Charles Macfie Campbell, M.D. Psychiatric Quarterly 17 (4): 722-726.

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Name	Campbell, Charles Macfie
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Date of birth	1876
Place of birth
Date of death	1943
Place of death