When Did Neurology Emerge in America?

Andrew Scull says neurology emerged in America after the Civil War. The war gave specialists a run of naturalistic experiments in what happens to the human brain and the nervous system when bullets blow holes in the brain. A new group claimed expertise in the brain and the nervous system. Insanity was one side of that specialty, because insanity was also seen as a brain disease.

Religious groups were already treating many milder mental disorders. Christian Science gathered a considerable number of followers, disproportionately women, and began to treat people suffering from milder mental disorders. It drew both adherents and severe critics. Mark Twain was thoroughly dismissive of Mary Baker Eddy. Christian Science was very successful for a time. In New England, the most important related effort was the Emanuel Movement, centered around the Church of the Emanuel in Boston. It started as an attempt to bring medical and religious approaches together for the mentally troubled. The doctors involved quickly decided the work was veering too much toward medically based therapeutics and withdrew. Talk therapies with a strong religious component remained. At the same time, some of the people called psychiatrists, often neurologists, were beginning to get lots of patients with difficult-to-treat disorders.