that the organization sponsored were so popular – medical students and others from all over the city attended – that cards of admission were issued. Strecker was fully aware of the change in his discipline. In his presidential address to the American Psychiatric Association in 1944, the organization’s centennial year, he noted that psychiatry had finally been admitted into the medical profession’s “family circle.”
The Avon Lady
Earl D. Bond, M.D., before a bas relief of himself, Edward Strecker, and Kenneth Appel. All had been presidents of the American Psychiatric Association. The bas relief was done by a former patient.
discharged from wartime service because of psychiatric issues. Betty Friedan lumped Strecker among those who wanted to restrict women’s activities to the home, and some historians have said that he helped fuel the consequent “pathologization of motherhood,” attacks on what was disparagingly called “mother love” (for daughters as well as sons). Most recently, however, his reputation has been somewhat restored. In Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (2010), Rebecca Jo Plant, Ph.D., says that Strecker had “a lasting impact” on the question of a woman’s place in the world, although, she adds, he was not strident about domesticity and suggested that women could avoid so-called momism “so long as they enjoyed a healthy marital sex life and cultivated other interests as their children grew older.” To Strecker and Bond, the way to improve the discipline meant not merely to add faculty and teaching hours but, as Pols points out, “to restructure the entire medical curriculum around a psycho-biological conception of patients as integrated per-
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sonalities challenged by the social and cultural environments rather than as containers of more or less diseased organs.” Together, they established Penn’s first credible psychiatry program for medical students: in the first year, lectures on personality development and problems; in the second, lectures on clinical psychiatry; in the third, clinical demonstrations; and then work on the wards of Philadelphia General Hospital and the Institute. As noted by John Paul Brady, M.D., a former chair of psychiatry at Penn, and the other editors of Psychiatry: Areas of Promise and Advancement (1977), the study of psychiatric disorders was finally tied into the preclinical sciences, general medicine, and the practical experience of managing patients. Students became excited about the field even beyond the courses. The campus-based Strecker Psychiatric Society lent books and sponsored guest speakers not only on mental disorders but also on “the ever-widening area of psychiatric influence in general medicine and the specialties,” according to a tribute to Strecker on his retirement. The lectures
Appel succeeded Strecker as chair, and he, too, thought expansively about psychiatry. When earning his advanced degrees at Harvard University, he had assisted in a course on psychopathology in Shakespeare. Early in his career, he collaborated with Strecker on the book Discovering Ourselves (1931), a practical guide for anyone giving or seeking counseling for emotional disturbances. Appel tried to instill practice skills early. He created the “Family Health Advisor Service,” in which medical students were assigned a family and served as its initial medical resource for their student years. It offered the best kind of teaching, “contact with actual situations,” he said. “Thus the student is offered experience in the broad and basic aspects of psychiatry – where medicine, public health, social work, and psychiatry have common ground.” One of the department’s residents, Karl Rickels, M.D., received a lasting lesson from Appel himself. As Rickels recalled in his 2011 memoir, A Serendipitous Life: “I had examined a female patient in her forties for fifty minutes and had gotten nowhere. Dr. Appel came in and joined us and asked the patient not about possible symptoms or why she came to the clinic, but simply about her life. Her face lit up, and she told him that she was a part-time Avon sales lady. Dr. Appel asked her what products she had with her, and on the spot he bought something for Mrs. Appel. Within