The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Jelliffe, Smith Ely

JELLIFFE, jĕl'ĭf, Smith Ely, American physician: b. Brooklyn, N. Y., 27 Oct 1866. He was graduated from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1886 and in 1889 the degree of M.D. was conferred upon him at Columbia University. In 1900 he received the degree of Ph.D. from the same university. He was instructor in materia medica in Columbia University and professor of pharmacognosy in the same university. Later professor of psychiatry in Fordham University, New York, and later adjunct professor of diseases of the mind and nervous system in the Post Graduate Hospital and Medical School, New York. In his earlier academic work he was active in botany, chemistry, pharmacognosy and materia medica. Of later years he has specialized more particularly in diseases of the nervous system. Some of his earlier published works included a &lsquo;Flora&rsquo; of Long Island, his Ph.D. thesis; &lsquo;A text book on botany,&rsquo; another on medical chemistry, another on pharmacognosy and a revision of Butler's &lsquo;Materia Medica&rsquo;; a number of translations from French, German and Italian on paranoia; the Wasserman Reaction in Psychiatry, Psychic Treatment of Nervous Diseases; the Semi-Insane, Psychoneuroses and their Treatment; Vagotonia; Dream Problem; the Myth of the Birth of the Hero and numerous minor papers. From 1900-05 he was editor of the Medical News, 1905-07, associate editor of the New York Medical Journal. In 1913 with D. W. A. White he published a &lsquo;Modern Treatment of Nervous and Mental Disease,&rsquo; in 1915 with the same author a &lsquo;Textbook on Diseases of the Nervous System.&rsquo; In 1907 these two authors founded the &lsquo;Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series,&rsquo; of which 22 volumes have appeared, and in 1913 they also founded a new journal, the Psychoanalytic Review, a journal devoted to an understanding of human conduct.

Since 1900 he has been the managing editor of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. In 1915 he edited &lsquo;Appleton's Medical Dictionary,&rsquo; was a contributor to the &lsquo;Standard Dictionary&rsquo;; to Osler's &lsquo;Modern Medicine&rsquo;; Forscheimer's &lsquo;Modern Therapeutics,&rsquo; and has contributed largely to the &lsquo;Encyclopedia Americana.&rsquo; Dr. Jelliffe is active in practice, limiting his medical work to diseases of the nervous system, to which he has contributed a large number of smaller and larger studies, the larger of which are here briefly mentioned.