Stanley Cobb (December 10, 1887 – February 25, 1968) was a neurologist and could be considered "the founder of biological psychiatry in the United States".
Early life
Cobb was born on December 10, 1887, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to John Candler Cobb.
His great-grandmother, Augusta Adams Cobb, abandoned her husband and married Mormon prophet
Brigham Young as his third wife (out of some 56 wives) in 1843. Cobb's childhood and education were affected by his
stammer, which it is suggested led him to study the neurosciences in an attempt to understand its cause. He married Elizabeth Mason Almy in 1915.
As early as 1910, Cobb was published in ornithological journals and he continued to publish natural history articles throughout his life.
Career
In 1930, he was appointed director of the newly opened Harvard Neurological Unit at Boston City Hospital. When Cobb moved to the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1934, he was succeeded by Tracey Putnam. Cobb built the department of psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He championed psychoanalysis, giving it respectability when others in that conservative hospital disapproved. He published an annual review of neuropsychiatry in the
Archive of Internal Medicine from 1935 to 1959.
When Carl Jung was invited in 1936 to receive an honorary degree by Harvard, he stayed with Cobb. Jung "put his shoes outside his bedroom door to have them shined. Cobb polished them".
Retirement
When he retired in 1954, Cobb directed his interest towards the study of
bird neurology. He was passionately opposed to the widespread spraying of
DDT. After his favourite pond was sprayed, he was angered to write "Death of a Salt Pond," a difficult task, since he was virtually blind by then. This was first published in a local paper but interest gathered and it achieved widespread circulation after being republished in the
Audubon Magazine in May, 1963.
Cobb died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 25, 1968, at the age of 80.
Mind-body problem
Throughout his professional career, Cobb was troubled by the attempts of medical scientists to draw hard-and-fast distinctions between
mental and
physical symptoms, between
psychic and
somatic causes, between
functional and
organic diseases, and even between
psychology and
physiology. Cobb addressed the mind-body problem in
Borderlands of Psychiatry (1943):
Awards and recognition
In 1956, Cobb received the George M. Kober Medal for his contributions to medicine.
["Harvard Psychiatrist Honored". The New York Times, p. 21. 1956-03-16. Stanley Cobb, "Acceptance of the Kober Medal," Trans. Assoc. Am. Phys. 69 (1956)] In 1960, Harvard Medical School established the Stanley Cobb Chair in his honor. In 1967, Cobb received a Distinguished Service Award from the New York Academy of Medicine.
[ Cobb, Stanley, 1887-1968. Papers, 1898-1982 (inclusive), 1901-1968 (bulk): Finding Aid. (H MS c53) Persistent. Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. Center for the History of Medicine.]
Selected works
Further reading
External links
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The Stanley Cobb papers can be found at The Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway Library, Harvard Medical School.
