Career
Shepherd began his psychiatric career at The Maudsley Hospital in 1947. In 1954 he obtained his Doctorate in Medicine from Oxford University, his thesis being a study of the pattern of major psychoses in the county of Buckinghamshire during two periods, 1931–33 and 1945-47. In 1956 he joined the staff of the Institute of Psychiatry as a Senior Lecturer, and then in 1961 he was appointed to the Institute's Readership in Psychiatry. In 1967 he had conferred on him a personal chair of epidemiological psychiatry, the first of its kind in the world. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1970 and a Foundation Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1971. He established the General Practice Research Unit at the Institute of Psychiatry in the late 1950s and continued to direct its activities until his retirement in 1988. He was also the founder editor of the journal Psychological Medicine and he was awarded the CBE in 1989. During his career he also became a Fellow of both the American Public Health Association and the American Psychological Association.
Shepherd was heavily influenced during his early years at The Maudsley by Aubrey Lewis, who taught that the precise and well-organised collection of social data should become a new activity for the psychiatrist rather than limiting himself to the clinical study of the individual patient. Shepherd’s close working relationship with Lewis later resulted in a careful documentation of Lewis' legacies to psychiatry in his remarkable biographies. With the exception of one year's attachment to the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in 1955-56, Shepherd remained at The Maudsley for the entire duration of his professional career.
Read more about this topic: Michael Shepherd (psychiatrist)
Famous quotes containing the word career:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)