Ida Macalpine (formerly Hirschmann, née Wertheimer; 1899–1974) was a German and British psychiatrist. She was born in Germany, where she earned her medical degree and began her career as a physician. She moved to the United Kingdom in 1933 and specialized in psychiatry. She began extensively publishing on psychiatry, especially history of psychiatry, in the 1950s. Particularly fruitful was her collaboration with her son Richard A. Hunter, also a psychiatrist. She was initially strongly influenced by psychoanalysis, but abandoned it by the late 1950s. The first of her and Hunter's major works, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, was published in 1963. In George III and the Mad Business (1969), they identified King George III's apparent mental illness as porphyria. Their final major work, Psychiatry for the Poor: 1851–1973, was published shortly after her death.
Early life and education Ida Wertheimer was born on 19 June 1899 in Nuremberg, Germany, to Matilde (née Lust) and Sigmund Wertheimer. She was of Jewish heritage and the fourth of five children. Sigmund was a successful businessman, sometime head of the Nuremberg city council, and a reserve officer in the Imperial German Army. The Wertheimers valued education and encouraged their two daughters as well as their sons to pursue it. Ida attended to the wounded of the First World War as a schoolgirl and resolved to become a physician. She began medical studies at Erlangen in 1918 and later continued them at Freiburg, Munich, and Berlin. As a student, she supported herself by making anatomical and pathological drawings for her teachers. She paused her training in 1921 to marry. Strongminded and determined, she resumed her medical career while her two children were still young and earned her Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree from Erlangen in 1925. Her older brother Friedrich (Fredric Wertham) also became a physician.
Career
Medical practice After qualifying, Macalpine worked in Berlin with children and held a part-time post at the Pestalozzi-Fröbel Haus. After her MD thesis was published, she coauthored a monograph with her brother addressing the issue of surplus women and the expected fall in birthrates following the deaths of young men in the First World War. In 1933, Macalpine and her three brothers fled Germany to escape Nazi persecution. She took her mother and two young sons to England, where she had a sister. In 1934 she obtained the Scottish Triple Qualification, allowing her to practise in Great Britain, and set up a practice in London. During the Second World War and for several years after, she lived in Lancashire and spent part of that time assisting understaffed mental hospitals. Macalpine returned to London in 1948. She specialized and practised actively in psychiatry. She was appointed assistant psychiatrist to the dermatology department at St Bartholomew's Hospital in October 1949, where she was able to explore her interest in psychodermatology. Around then she became interested in the history of medicine, especially of psychiatry. Macalpine spent part of her time observing a dermatologist. This allowed her to understand the dermatologist's perspective and, in brief discussions after each patient, to indicate whether she considered psychotherapy likely to be beneficial. She authored papers about pruritus ani, syphilophobia, and alopecia areata. She resigned from St Bartholomew's in February 1962.
Research
Development of theoretical influences From the 1950s onward, Macalpine published extensively on psychiatry, often collaborating with her son Richard Hunter on historical studies. Macalpine and Hunter, also a psychiatrist, were in active medical practice and used their spare time to prepare their publications. Though not trained historians, they applied scholarly discipline and uncovered overlooked archival materials. Theirs was the most productive partnership in psychiatric history research and the only one between mother and son. She argued that descriptions of mental symptoms by early physicians could still hold value and that tracing the evolution of psychiatric thought might help solve contemporary psychiatric puzzles. Macalpine's work was initially strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud. She explored the unconscious and psychosomatic roots of skin disorders, praised Freud as "the Harvey of the mind", and, with Hunter, produced overtly Freudian studies of transference and psychohistorical interpretations such as their analysis of Gioachino Rossini's music through Oedipal theory. By the mid-1950s, Macalpine and Hunter's outlook shifted toward object-relations theory and growing dissatisfaction with the divide between psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and general medicine. Macalpine and Hunter reprinted classic psychiatric texts in the "Dawson" series, of which they were sole contributors. In that series, they brought out the first English translation of Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Their translations and commentaries on Schreber's Memoirs and the writings of Christoph Haizmann questioned Freud's interpretations, suggesting instead pre-Oedipal conflicts and gender identity anxieties. From the later 1950s, Macalpine and Hunter abandoned psychoanalysis altogether, embracing an organic and neurological model of mental illness. Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry (1963), a comprehensive and scholarly anthology of psychiatric texts, presented psychiatric history as a record of progress in recognizing the somatic basis of mental disorders.
George III and porphyria controversy
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