Infectious insanities, surgical solutions: Bayard Taylor Holmes, dementia praecox and laboratory science in early 20th-century America. Part 1

Richard Noll (1)

1 Psychology Department

After his 17-year-old son suddenly developed a chronic psychotic illness in 1905, Bayard Taylor Holmes (1852–1924), a Chicago physician and surgeon with no psychiatric training, conducted both library and laboratory research on dementia praecox, as described in Part 1 of this two-part study. By late 1915 he believed he had found support for a focal infection theory of its aetiology – an ergot-like toxaemia caused by faecal stasis in the caecum. Holmes was also the editor of what is believed to be the first medical journal named after a psychiatric disorder: Dementia Praecox Studies. Part 2 will describe Holmes' adoption of a rational therapy (using it first on his son, who died), and his founding of a Psychiatric Research Laboratory.

Mots clés: autointoxication theory in psychiatry; Bayard Taylor Holmes; dementia praecox; focal infection theory in psychiatry; surgical treatments in psychiatry

Richard Noll. Infectious insanities, surgical solutions: Bayard Taylor Holmes, dementia praecox and laboratory science in early 20th-century America. Part 1. History of Psychiatry, 2006, 17 (2), pp.183-204. ⟨10.1177/0957154X06059456⟩. ⟨hal-00570845⟩