Infectious insanities,surgical solutions: Bayard Taylor Holmes,dementia praecox and laboratory science in early 20th-century America. Part 2

Abstract

Part I of this article on Bayard Taylor Holmes (1852–1924), a Chicago physician and surgeon, detailed his laboratory research on dementia praecox and his presumed discovery in 1915 of evidence in support of a focal infection theory of its aetiology. In May 1916 he began to experiment with a rational therapy based on this theory: abdominal surgery and daily irrigations of the colon. He operated first on his own son, who had been afflicted with dementia praecox since 1905, but he died four days later. Part II deals with Holmes' continued surgical treatment of dementia praecox patients and the outcomes of the operations. It also describes how Holmes set up the short-lived Psychiatric Research Laboratory of the Psychopathic Hospital at Cook County Hospital in 1917, and discusses the dismissal of a key research colleague, H. M. Jones, whose experimental results directly contradicted those of Holmes.