Robert Bruce Sloane and the mid-twentieth-century struggles of academic psychiatry

Abstract

In 1957, British-born R Bruce Sloane became the founding head of a Canadian academic department of psychiatry in a city that had already been served by a busy asylum for more than a century. He plunged into the work with enthusiasm, but encountered blatant opposition and skepticism, prompting his departure. He went on to conduct research in the United States. Archives and oral testimony reveal the attitudes thwarting Sloane’s plans to improve teaching, research, and service—attitudes that may typify a general hostility toward psychiatry in other centers at that time.