Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/970

NAME PUTNAM 948 PUTNAM ings and discussions. From its beginning he was a particularly active member of the Boston Society of Psychiatry and Neurology and was one of the leaders in its delibera- tions. At the last meeting of the Massachu- setts Medical Benevolent Society, held a few days before his death, he was made one of its trustees. His eagnerness to serve was exemplified in his unwavering interest in social and civic organizations — the Associated Chari- ties, especially its committee on the alcoholic problem, and the social service movement, to all of which he gave much time and thought. To be a leader in an untried field demands exceptional qualifications. When Dr. Putnam returned from Europe to this country in the early seventies, he had the conviction firmly fixed that the time had come for America to do her part toward developing the practical study of the nervous system. He had few sympathizers and fewer followers, but to a man of his type this was a stimulant rather than a deterrent, and he forthwith started the neurological clinic at the Massachusetts Gen- eral Hospital, to which was assigned one small room, and began to teach and to investigate. By degrees the clinic grew, an occasional assistant appeared, and a department which has since attained goodly proportions was perma- nently established. To a man of less persist- ence and determination the difficulties would have seemed too great and the road too hard. He lived to see this department of the hos- pital work, so humbly inaugurated, transferred finally to adequate quarters, with an increas- ingly large staff, but his ardent hope that sufficient beds to serve as a complement to the out-patient department be provided had not been realized. During these earlier years, in lieu of other facilities, he maintained a neuro- pathological laboratory in his house, the fore- runner of the department of neuropathology at the Harvard Aledical School. In this lab- oratory was done much of his pioneer path- ological work. As a teacher of elementary students he was perhaps not so successful as in his other activi- ties. The very profundity of the teacher's knowledge stood in the way of its transmis- sion to the somewhat unwilling student of the earlier days. A certain difficulty in clear expo- sition of fundamental principles, induced by a conscientious desire to state all the facts of a complex subject, rendered his clinical lec- tures often hard to follow. To the mcu'e advanced students this very thoroughness was a decided help and inspiration; as a teacher of those already somewhat conversant with the subject he succeeded better in imparting his really extraordinary knowledge. Dr. Putnam was a master of good English. He wrote extensively and always with pains- taking care. His published work of approxi- mately one hundred titles covered a wide range of topics, to all of which he brought origi- nality of thought and expression. Among the most notable of his earlier contributions were an investigation on lead and arsenic poison- ing, a study of paresthesia, of the hands and a paper on ''.A. Group of Cases of System Sclerosis of the Spinal Cord." The two latter papers, published respectively in 1880 and 1891, were pioneer contributions of great significance which, owing presumably to the somewhat involved wording of their titles and consequent difficulty in indexing, have not re- ceived the full recognition which is their due. In 1898 he published papers on internal secre- tions and splanchnoptosis, and again he antici- pated our more recent views in an article on the "Psychical Treatment of Neurasthenia." His first interest was mainly with the problems of organic neurology, but during his later years his attention was turned rather toward the functional aspects of nervous disease, an interest which was greatly intensified by the advent of the psychoanalytic movement. The practical application of psychological methods to the problem of behavior in the large sense, as elaborated by Freud and his followers, made an immediate and insistent appeal, and there- after up to the time of his death he was constantly at work in the attempt to elucidate the deeper significance of the mental life on the basis of the psychoanalytic method. Dur- ing this period many papers appeared from his pen ; his mind was never more active and he bore for the most part with equanimity, but with an occasional burst of indignation, the cynical and often abusive criticism aimed not so much at him personally as at the prin- ciples in which he believed. It is not to be questioned that when the heat of discussion over the newer psychological theories has sub- sided his thoughtful and searching papers will come to be regarded as contributions of perma- nent value in relation to this turbulent phase of medical research. Antedating somewhat this more recent and polemic period his Shat- tuck lecture before the Massachusetts Medical Society, delivered in 1899, with the original and suggestive title, "Not the Disease Only, but also the Man," revealed in striking fashion his catholicity of view, his belief in the sig- nificance of the mental life in the considera- tion of disease and his conception of the