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This is the first of a two-part series on the life and work of Dr. John Whitehorn.
By Jerome D. Frank, M.D., Ph.D.
John Clare Whitehorn, M.D., second director of the department of psychiatry and the Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School from 1941 to 1961, transcended his origins to become a leading figure in American psychiatry. The last child in a poor Nebraska farm family, he once commented wryly that he was the worst calamity to hit his family after the drought.
The family lived in a sod house during his childhood. Early he showed leadership qualities, such as being captain of his high school football team. He earned a scholarship to Harvard Medical School and obtained a position as a biochemist at a psychiatric hospital, which led him to develop an interest in the biochemistry of emotions.
Although he became a leader in academic and scientific circles, he remained a farm boy in many respects. He found it virtually impossible to make small talk. He preferred barnyard humor and had no interest in cultural pursuits. His small talk, such as it was, consisted of exchanging brain-teasing puzzles at departmental social receptions. He retained the conservative values of his upbringing. For example, in his early days as departmental chief, he accepted the existing Hopkins policies of racially segregated wards and of not admitting African-American patients to the Phipps Clinic.
One of Whitehorn's leadership talents was the ability to foresee the implications of policy decisions. He resigned before taking office as president of the American Psychosomatic Association when he realized it stressed proselytizing rather than research, a decision vindicated by subsequent developments. His research emphasized the enumeration of hard facts in the search for a firm quantitative base for meanings and emotions. To this end he continued the researches of George Zipf on the relative frequencies of parts of speech in formal versus informal documents. Using a similar approach, he measured intervals between heartbeats under various emotional states. Without modern equipment, these were enormously laborious undertakings. An analogous hobby on which he spent endless time was searching for new relations among the atomic weights of elements in the periodic table.
Whitehorn was especially influential in his two primary areas of interest. The first was psychiatric education. His Guide to Interviewing and Personality Study was the basic source for several generations of psychiatric students. He also wrote brief, cogent theoretical papers such as "Meaning and Cause in Psychiatry." As a longtime chair of the Johns Hopkins Medical School Curriculum Committee, he exerted a powerful influence on the entire field of medical education.
His other interest was exploring the process of psychotherapy, specifically with schizophrenic patients. He came to Hopkins with an established reputation in biochemistry, but turned to clinical research because at that time it was not possible to explore the workings of the central nervous system with precision. Working with a junior colleague, Barbara Betz, he sought to characterize the ways in which the interacting personalities of therapists and patients affect the course of treatment. His only data were from residents' and nurses' records of their hospitalized schizophrenic patients. Without the benefit of computers or modern research technology, Whitehorn's work involved detailed content analyses of therapeutic sessions, all done at length and by hand. Whitehorn and Betz described these studies in a book, Effective Psychotherapy With the Schizophrenic Patient.
The integrity embodied in Whitehorn's research also characterized his work as a national leader in psychiatry. He exerted more influence on the field than he was given credit for by name. Unassuming but decisive, he chaired many committees, shaping mental health policy at national as well as local levels and contributed substantially to their reports. In addition to being president of the American Psychiatric Association, twice he was chair of the National Advisory Mental Health Council of the National Institute of Mental Health, and he was the only person elected to three terms as chair of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.
Whitehorn was highly valued by his subordinates and colleagues for his integrity and judgment. Though not considered a great innovator, he will be remembered as an outstanding leader, mentor, and guide for generations of American psychiatrists.
The second and concluding part of this article will appear in the next issue of Psychiatric News.
(Psychiatric News, May 16, 1997)