Alex Myrick

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Email: alex.myrick@uottawa.ca

Alex Myrick is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Ottawa and is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship Recipient. He is currently studying the history of medicine and psychiatry under the supervision of Dr. Susan Lamb and is a graduate of Saint Mary’s University, the University of King’s College, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. His dissertation research examines the proliferation and impact of new reform ideas in psychiatry that were developed by Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, and the conveyance of a Meyerian discourse by a diaspora of his adherents who implemented those reforms in contexts within and beyond psychiatry throughout the twentieth century in ways that continue to be relevant today. Rather than centring wholly on Meyer, this research shows how a Meyerian reform agenda circulated within a transnational network of psychiatrists whose activities and innovations expanded psychiatry’s influence in medicine, society and culture. Situating Dalhousie University in psychiatry’s reform era is a central to this research because under its first chief of psychiatry, R. O. Jones, who was one of Meyer’s trainees, Dalhousie maintained a Meyerian character over time unlike many other medical school psychiatry programs after the 1960s. Consequently, Dalhousie has a distinctive position within the history of psychiatry, and understanding its development in relation to medical school psychiatry programs elsewhere is integral to this research.