George Miller Beard
American neurologist (1839-1883)
George Miller Beard (May 8, 1839 – January 23, 1883) was an American neurologist who popularized the term neurasthenia, starting around 1869.
Beard is remembered best for having defined neurasthenia as a medical condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, impotence, neuralgia and depression, as a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves, which Beard attributed to civilization. Physicians who agreed with Beard associated neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and the increasingly competitive business environment. Stated simply, people were attempting to achieve more than their constitution could cope with. Typically this followed a short illness from which the patient was thought to have recovered. In his 1884 book on Sexual Neurasthenia, he linked this disease to what he called "sexual perversion," but included masturbation, non-heterosexuality, and sexual dysfunction.
Beard was a champion of many reforms of psychiatry, and was a founder of the National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Prevention of Insanity. He also took an unpopular stance against the death penalty for persons with mental illness, going so far as to campaign for leniency for Charles J. Guiteau, the assassin of President James Garfield on the basis that the man was not guilty because of insanity.
Biography
Beard was born in Montville, Connecticut, on May 8, 1839, to Reverend Spencer F. Beard, a Congregational minister, and Lucy A. Leonard. Beard's mother died in 1842, and his father remarried the following year: to Mary Ann Fellowes.
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