Social Skills: Adolf Meyer’s Revision of Clinical Skill for the New Psychiatry of the Twentieth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adolf Meyer (1866-1950) exercised considerable influence over the development of Anglo-American psychiatry during the first half of the twentieth century. The concepts and techniques he implemented at his prominent Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins remain important to psychiatric practice and neuro-scientific research today. In the 1890s, Meyer revised scientific medicine's traditional notion of clinical skill to serve what he called the 'New Psychiatry', a clinical discipline that embodied social and scientific ideals shared with other 'new' progressive reform movements in the United States. This revision conformed to his concept of psychobiology - his biological theory of mind and mental disorders - and accorded with his definition of scientific medicine as a unity of clinical-pathological methods and therapeutics. Combining insights from evolutionary biology, neuron theory and American pragmatist philosophy, Meyer concluded that subjective experience and social behaviour were functions of human biology. In addition to the time-honoured techniques devised to exploit the material data of the diseased body - observing and recording in the clinic, dissecting in the morgue and conducting histological experiments in the laboratory - he insisted that psychiatrists must also be skilled at wielding social interaction and interpersonal relationships as investigative and therapeutic tools in order to conceptualise, collect, analyse and apply the ephemeral data of 'social adaptation'. An examination of his clinical practices and teaching at Johns Hopkins between 1913 and 1917 shows how particular historical and intellectual contexts shaped Meyer's conceptualisation of social behaviour as a biological function and, subsequently, his new vision of clinical skill for twentieth-century psychiatry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".