George Miller Beard


George Miller Beard was an American neurologist who popularized the term neurasthenia, starting around 1869.
Beard is remembered best for having defined neurasthenia as a medical condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, impotence, neuralgia and depression, as a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves, which Beard attributed to civilization. Physicians who agreed with Beard associated neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and the increasingly competitive business environment. Stated simply, people were attempting to achieve more than their constitution could cope with. Typically this followed a short illness from which the patient was thought to have recovered. In his 1884 book on Sexual Neurasthenia, he linked this disease to what he called "sexual perversion," but included masturbation, non-heterosexuality, and sexual dysfunction.
Beard was a champion of many reforms of psychiatry, and was a founder of the National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity. He also took an unpopular stance against the death penalty for persons with mental illness, going so far as to campaign for leniency for Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President of [the United States|President] James Garfield on the basis that the man was not guilty because of insanity.

Biography

Beard was born in Montville, Connecticut, on May 8, 1839, to Reverend Spencer F. Beard, a Congregational minister, and Lucy A. Leonard. Beard's mother died in 1842, and his father remarried the following year: to Mary Ann Fellowes. After attending Phillips-Andover Academy, Beard graduated from Yale College in 1862, and received his medical degree from the Columbia University [College of Physicians and Surgeons|College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York] in 1866.
While still in medical school during the American Civil War, he served as an assistant surgeon in the West Gulf squadron of the Union Navy aboard the gunboat New London. After the war, and upon his graduation from medical school, he married Elizabeth Ann Alden of Westville, Connecticut on December 25, 1866. Beard died in New York City on January 23, 1883.

Startle reflex

One of the more unusual disorders he studied from 1878 onwards was the exaggerated startle reflex among French-Canadian lumbermen from the Moosehead Lake region of Maine, that came to be known as the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine. If they were startled by a short verbal command, they would carry out the instruction without hesitation, irrespective of the consequences. The studies stimulated further research by the military and Georges Gilles de la Tourette.

Electro-therapeutics

Beard was also involved extensively with electricity as a medical treatment, and published extensively on the subject.

Etheric force

Beard became involved with Thomas Edison's claim to be able to project electrical influence without current through etheric force. As explained in a biography of Edison:
He described the force as "somewhere between light and heat on the one hand and magnetism and electricity on the other, with some features of all these forces."

Skepticism

Beard was a critic of claims of the paranormal and spiritualism which he wrote was one of history's greatest delusions. He published articles on anomalistic psychology such as The Psychology of Spiritism exposing the fraud of mediumship and describing its psychological basis.
The term "muscle reading" was coined in the 1870s by Beard to describe the methods of the mentalist J. Randall Brown.

Publications

  • The Medical Use of Electricity
  • Stimulants and Narcotics: Medically, Philosophically, and Morally Considered
  • Medical and Surgical Cases Treated by Electricity
  • via HathiTrust
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  • A Practical Treatise on Sea-Sickness
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