Psychiatry in American Medical Education: The Case of Harvard's Medical School, 1900-1945.

As American psychiatrists moved from the asylum to the private clinic during the early twentieth century, psychiatry acquired a growing presence within medical school curricula. This shift in disciplinary status took place at a time when medical education itself was experiencing a period of reform. By examining medical school registers at Harvard University, records from the Dean's office of Harvard's medical school, and oral histories, this paper examines the rise in prominence of psychiatry in medical education.

Between the Mind Twist and the Brain Spot. The Material Dimensions of Psychopathology in the Work of Elmer Ernest Southard .

This paper explores the material and visual practices that defined studies of psychopathology in early twentieth-century American medicine, through a close look at the work of neuropathologist Elmer E. Southard (1876–1920). As a discipline sitting at the intersection between laboratory and clinical practice, neuropathology has received little attention from historians of the brain sciences.

Transcending disciplines: Scientific styles in studies of the brain in mid-twentieth century America.

Much scholarship in the history of cybernetics has focused on the far-reaching cultural dimensions of the movement. What has garnered less attention are efforts by cyberneticians such as Warren McCulloch and Norbert Wiener to transform scientific practice in an array of disciplines in the biomedical sciences, and the complex ways these efforts were received by members of traditional disciplines. In a quest for scientific unity that had a decidedly imperialistic flavour, cyberneticians sought to apply practices common in the exact sciences-mainly theoretical modeling-to problems in disciplines that were traditionally defined by highly empirical practices, such as neurophysiology and neuroanatomy.

Integrating mind and brain: Warren S. McCulloch, cerebral localization, and experimental epistemology.

Recently, historians have focused on Warren S. McCulloch's role in the cybernetics movement during the 1940s and 1950s, and his contributions to the development of computer science and communication theory. What has received less attention is McCulloch's early work in neurophysiology, and its relationship to his philosophical quest for an 'experimental epistemology' - a physiological theory of knowledge.

(Physio)logical circuits: the intellectual origins of the McCulloch-Pitts neural networks.

This article examines the intellectual and institutional factors that contributed to the collaboration of neuropsychiatrist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts on the logic of neural networks, which culminated in their 1943 publication, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." Historians and scientists alike often refer to the McCulloch-Pitts paper as a landmark event in the history of cybernetics, and fundamental to the development of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. This article seeks to bring some historical context to the McCulloch-Pitts collaboration itself, namely, their intellectual and scientific orientations and backgrounds, the key concepts that contributed to their paper, and the institutional context in which their collaboration was made.