ABSTRACT
The rise of family therapy has occurred during a period that has seen the demise of the traditional family doctor. The family physician, in addition to providing for the physical health care of the family, often making visits to the home, also functioned as a major provider of family counseling, especially at times of crisis. Indeed, it was a general physician, Henry Richardson, who first expounded the concept of families as homeostatic systems, akin to those operating in the body’s physiology (Richardson, 1948). In a volume entitled Patients Have Families, he entreated his fellow physicians to pay greater attention to the family-wide stress factors that he believed often underlay somatic illness in vulnerable family members. He described several intractable cases that he successfully treated by defining family stresses and counseling family members to resolve these stress factors effectively. Richardson drew the analogy between the reciprocity of family members’ responses to stress and the physiological mechanisms of homeostasis that control neuroendocrine functions in the body. This analogy was adopted and further expounded by Don Jackson (1959) as one of the earliest conceptual frameworks upon which family therapy developed.
