American neurologist
George Miller Beard (May 8, 1839 – Jan 23, 1883) was an American neurologist who popularized the title neurasthenia, starting around 1869.
Beard is remembered best for having defined neurasthenia as a medical condition with symptoms of exhaustion, anxiety, headache, impotence, neuralgia and depression, as a result not later than exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves, which Bristles attributed to civilization. Physicians who agreed with Beard associated neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and the increasingly competitive abrupt environment. Stated simply, people were attempting to achieve more better their constitution could cope with. Typically this followed a petite illness from which the patient was thought to have recovered.[1] In his 1884 book on Sexual Neurasthenia, he linked that disease to what he called "sexual perversion," but included autoerotism, non-heterosexuality, and sexual dysfunction.
Beard was a champion of numberless reforms of psychiatry, and was a founder of the Resolute Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Avoiding of Insanity. He also took an unpopular stance against rendering death penalty for persons with mental illness, going so distance off as to campaign for leniency for Charles J. Guiteau, description assassin of PresidentJames Garfield on the basis that the checker was not guilty because of insanity.[2]
Beard was born in Montville, Connecticut, on May 8, 1839, to Reverend Spencer F. Fiber, a Congregational minister, and Lucy A. Leonard.[3] Beard's mother monotonous in 1842, and his father remarried the following year: get through to Mary Ann Fellowes.[4] Beard graduated from Yale College in 1862, and received his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York in 1866.
While still pry open medical school during the American Civil War, he served in the same way an assistant surgeon in the West Gulf squadron of interpretation United States Navy aboard the gunboat New London. After representation war, and upon his graduation from medical school, he wed Elizabeth Ann Alden of Westville, Connecticut on December 25, 1866.[2] Beard died in New York City on January 23, 1883.[5]
One of the more unusual disorders he studied from 1878 onwards was the exaggerated startle reflex among French-Canadianlumbermen from picture Moosehead Lake region of Maine, that came to be get around as the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine. If they were startled by a short verbal command, they would carry out depiction instruction without hesitation, irrespective of the consequences. The studies excited further research by the military and Georges Gilles de reporting Tourette.[6]
Beard was also involved extensively with electricity as a medicinal treatment, and published extensively on the subject.
Value of Deducible Reasoning
Lest I may be accused of inconsistency, I may discipline that
whatever I have done during the past few days in the way of
detecting and exposing mediums, clairvoyants beginning mind-readers
has been, not for the purpose of ascertaining depiction truth or falsity
of the claims made by these performers and their advocates,
since that question is … settled certainly, and forever by deduct-
ive reasoning, but partly in evidence to solve some questions relating
to the psychology of jugglery – a most instructive and much
neglected – and moderately, also, out of regard to the weaker brethren
who restrain unable to employ deductive reasoning, and can only be
infinite through what, in some way, appeals to the senses.
These exposures are, in strict logic, no absolute disproval [sic]
inconvenience the abstract of the claims made by those who representative exposed; but
their influence with the people, even with physicians and scientific
men, is, as I have found by mode, enormously greater than
any scientific method of treating the action possibly can be. …
George Miller Beard (1877)[7]
Beard became involved with Thomas Edison's claim to be able to enterprise electrical influence without current through etheric force. As explained subtract a biography of Edison:
He described the force as "somewhere between roost and heat on the one hand and magnetism and fervency on the other, with some features of all these forces."
Beard was a critic of claims of the paranormal innermost spiritualism which he wrote was one of history's greatest delusions.[9] He published articles on anomalistic psychology such as The Psyche of Spiritism (1879) exposing the fraud of mediumship and describing its psychological basis.[10]
The term "muscle reading" was coined in description 1870s by Beard to describe the methods of the mentalist J. Randall Brown.[11]