Holistic-medical foundations of American psychiatry: a bicentennial

Abstract

American psychiatry has reached its bicentennial. Holistic-medical foundations have been its hallmark, inspiration, and source of preeminence. Incorporated by psychobiology, the American school, they enabled the growth of psychiatry as a medical specialty and scientific discipline and stimulated unparalleled growth of general hospital psychiatry, psychiatric research and teaching, and psychosomatic medicine and liaison psychiatry. Holistic conceptions, a product of a democratic system and the liberal mind, continue to provide the best framework for psychiatry and an antidote to dogma and fanaticism.