ABSTRACT
Although the term ‘psychological medicine’ is widely used in Britain to label academic titles, hospital departments, textbooks, and examination diplomas, it does not appear in most dictionaries and is rarely defined. The ambiguity can be traced to its origins. From the time of its inception the term would appear to have carried two distinct meanings. One of these was well enough established by the middle of the nineteenth century to have been employed by Sir John Bucknill and Daniel Tuke to designate their influential Manual of Psychological Medicine 1 , which incorporated ‘the lunacy laws, the nosology, aetiology, statistics, description, diagnosis, pathology and treatment of INSANITY’. A fitting title too, one might think, for the official organ of the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane, which had appeared five years earlier and of which Bucknill was the founder editor. In the event, however, this was called the Asylum Journal of Mental Sciences and Bucknill gave his reasons for this choice:
Our journal does not contain a single article which can be truly called psychological. Its character is strictly psychiatric, and the matters discussed in its pages are restricted to such as have immediate reference to the pathology and therapeutics of insanity, to the construction and management of asylums and to the diseases, accidents and difficulties likely to arise therein. We aim not at the discussion of those higher branches of metaphysical science, the able and learned treatment of which has so long distinguished the pages of our contemporary. Our desire is to be collectors of facts, the active practical pioneers in the march of mental science. 2
