Adolf Meyer

Adolf Meyer (Niederweningen, 1866 – Baltimore, 1950) was a psychiatrist of Swiss birth who worked mainly in the United States, where he shaped American psychiatry in the first half of the twentieth century. He is remembered for proposing that mental illness should be understood through the whole of a patient's life, weighing biological, social and psychological factors together.

He studied medicine in Zurich and broadened his training in Paris, London and Edinburgh. He emigrated to the United States in 1892 and worked in state hospitals and at the University of Chicago. Around 1902 he took charge of the pathological institute of the New York State hospital system, where he introduced detailed patient records and both Kraepelin's classification and some of Freud's ideas, without accepting psychoanalysis as a complete explanation of mental disorders. From 1910 he was the first psychiatrist-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he oversaw the Phipps Clinic, which joined clinical work with laboratory research.

His central theory, psychobiology, held that a dysfunctional personality, rather than a brain pathology, lay behind many disorders. To describe this approach he coined the term ergasiology, from Greek roots meaning working and doing. He was also among the first to support occupational therapy as part of treatment. His legacy lives on in the idea of mental hygiene and in the practice of detailed case histories.