Stanley Cobb

Stanley Cobb (December 10, 1887–1968) was a neurologist and could be considered "the founder of biological psychiatry in the United States".^[1]

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Cobb's childhood and education were affected by his stammer, which it is suggested led him to study the neurosciences in an attempt to understand its cause. He married Elizabeth Mason Almy in 1915.^[2]

Cobb studied at and went on to work for the Harvard Medical School. In 1922, he was asked to discover why patients with epilepsy had improved when they were starved. He recruited William Lennox as an assistant. The ketogenic diet had been proposed as being as effective as starvation, and so Cobb and Lennox investigated it. This was the beginning of Lennox's career in epilepsy research.^[3]

In 1930, he was appointed director of the newly opened Harvard Neurological Unit at Boston City Hospital. When Cobb moved to the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1934, he was succeeded by Tracey Putnam. Cobb built the department of psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He championed psychoanalysis, giving it respectability when others in that conservative hospital disapproved. He published an annual review of neuropsychiatry in the Archive of Internal Medicine from 1935 to 1959.

When Carl Jung was invited in 1936 to receive an honorary degree by Harvard, he stayed with Cobb. Jung "put his shoes outside his bedroom door to have them shined. Cobb polished them".^[4]

When he retired in 1954, Cobb directed his interest towards the study of avian neurology. He was passionately opposed to the widespread spraying of DDT. After his favourite pond was sprayed, he was angered to write "Death of a Salt Pond," a difficult task, since he was virtually blind by then. This was first published in a local paper but interest gathered and it achieved widespread circulation after being republished in the Audubon Magazine in May, 1963.

"It is enough immortality for me if I may become even a very small part of advancing wisdom, hoping that I have done my bit to make the world a better place." — Stanley Cobb.

Mind and Body

Throughout his professional career, Cobb was troubled by the attempts of medical scientists to draw hard-and-fast distinctions between mental and physical symptoms, between psychic and somatic causes, between functional and organic diseases, and even between psychology and physiology. He wrote:

I solve the mind-body problem by stating that there is no such problem. There are, of course, plenty of problems concerning the "mind", and the "body", and all intermediate levels of integration of the nervous system. What I wish to emphasize is that there is no problem of "mind" versus "body", because biologically no such dichotomy can be made. The dichotomy is an artefact; there is no truth in it, and the discussion has no place in science in 1943...

The difference between psychology and physiology is merely one of complexity. The simpler bodily processes are studied in physiological departments; the more complex ones that entail the highest levels of neural integration are studied in psychological departments. There is no biological significance to this division; it is simply an administrative affair, so the the university president will know what salary goes to which professor. — Stanley Cobb, Borderlands of Psychiatry, pp.19–21.

Further reading

• White, Benjamin V. (January 1984). Stanley Cobb, A Builder of the Modern Neurosciences. University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-1057-9. 
• Kubie LS (1969). "Stanley Cobb, M.D. 1887-1968". Psychosom Med 31 (2): 97-106. PubMed.
• Cobb, Stanley (January 1943). Borderlands of psychiatry. Harvard University Press. 
• Cobb, Stanley (January 1952). Foundations of Neuropsychiatry. Williams & Wilkins. OCLC 536824.