Evening star., 1938-05-08
By Mary.Carter Roberts.

0D M0fp'L HfIef HOOefES.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A -PUR-
POSE. BY William Alanson White.
Garden City: Doubleday, Doran g.
Co.
"HIS is the autobiography of the
late Dr. william A. White,
we'll known to Washingtonians
L for his years of service as ad-
ministrator of St Elizabeth's Hospital
for the mentally ILL., 1t is the personal
history of the authors professional
life. His earlier work. Forty Years of
Psychiatry," told the story of the de-
velopments in the treatment of the in
sane which DR.. White has seen take
place. Now, in this book, written
shortly before his death, he gives the
public the record of his own part in
these developments and, equally inter-
esting, the growth of his own phil
osophy toward the practice of the
science of healing. He has made a
wonderfully clear thing of it, book
which any one can read with absorp-
ton and respect.
Beginning in mildly humorous
vein, the work tells of the doctors
early studies and practice, of the ex-
tremely severe conditions under which
medical students lived while getting
their educationS in the 80s and of the
financial hardship which forced him to
stringent economies. He studied in
Cornell University and the Long Is
land Hospital College Medical School;
of his actual medical training he writes
that he belonged to the last class
which. under the Legislature, was per-
mitted to graduate with only two
years training. OF his training in
psychiatry he says that he received one
rather dubious lecture on the subject,
no more.
When the book reaches the story of
the authors practice, however. it has
a graver tone. Working in the city
hospitals of New York. the Eastern
District Hospital of Brooklyn and the
Aims and WorkhouSe Hospital of
Blackwells Island. the young physi-
clan soon acquired a sense of the So
cial nature of illness 1t was not until
pital, however, that he began to work
toward philosophy of his own in re-
lation to those problems of his profess
sion for which his training had given
him no satisfactory answers He did
so then, but only gropingly. 1t was in
1892. psychiatry was not talked about,
and he was only % years of age.
HOWEVER, after II years at Bing-
hamton. he had made so suffi-
cient reputation for himself in the
field of mental illness that he was
given the appointment to ST. Eliza
beth's. not only by the recommended
ton Of the Board of Visitors but also
by executive order of President Roose-
welt He relates that he read and
studied necessarily while at Bing-
hamton. driven to constant activity
not by the stress of his duties but by
the wealth of fascinating and inter-
esting material" which the hospital
offered. 1t was at this time, he tells,
that he began to shape his philosophy
along the lines of determinism, a
process which he was to carry on
through the succeeding years of his
life
The chapters dealing with St. Eliza
beth's are divided to cover the various
duties which an administrator of
great institution has to perform.
These DR.. White sums up as follows:
II made up my mind that my
first objective as an administrative
officer was to secure an adequate per-
sonnet That personnel, roughly speak
ing, might be said to be qualified in
this way-a neuropathologist who
knew more neuropathology than 1
could ever hope to knew; psycholo-
gist who knew more psychology than
I could ever hope to know, and blood
chemists, technicians of all kinds and
description, specialists in various de-
partments of medicine. roentgenology.
internal medicine, surgery, etc, all of
whom knew their separate Speclalties
better than I could possibly know
them. The only thing I could hope to
do in my position was to have gen.
eralized idea of the whole situation as
a result of the survey of the entire
field of medicine. could not hope to
compete with these various specialists
in their particular lines. The only
field in which I might hope with
any degree of success to compete
was in the special field of psychiatry
itself. 3"
Then, after describing the duties
which his position placed upon him,
he closes his book with description
of what he visualized in this special
field of psychiatry." 1t is fine pas
sage. and to read it revives hope for
the eventual triumph of mankind over
its besetting instincts toward folly and
dishonesty.
FOR as DR.. White saw psychiatry, it
L is to become the science OF the
whole individual, not of the indi-
vidual's mind. as separate from the
physique, for he would admit of no
such division. In this, he says, he
turned his back on the complete 18th
century structure of medicine, for that
structure was built upon the analysis
of man into minute separate func-
tions. each of which was seen as a
speciality in science to be treated by a
specialist. But Dr. White rejected
this idea, because, as he writes, 1t
ignores too much. 1t is not the parts
which influence the whole, he writes,
but the whole which gives character
to the parts. At some length he goes
into the scientific basis for this con-
cept and concludes that the field for
the psychiatrist is this whole" finally
drawing an analogy between the psy-
chiatric physician of the future and
the old-time country doctor who knew
his patients as men and women and
had in his mind picture of their
origins and problems, not just card
index of the results of chemical tests,
when he came to give them treat
S,oortc II iS an in, m az, ceJv Interesting