Social, Motivational, and Symptomatic Diversity: An Analysis of the Patient Population of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1913–1917

In the five years after the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic opened in 1913 at Johns Hopkins, its 88 beds were consistently in high demand. Exploiting the biographical information and the particularly descriptive medical narratives in the hospital records of Phipps patients, this study explores the social composition of the patient population, the various avenues by which patients were admitted, and the decision-making processes of families and communities confronting the vicissitudes of mental illness. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of all admissions between 1913 and 1917 reveal that, contrary to scholarly myth, this population was highly diverse socially, motivationally, and symptomatically.