Donald Ewen Cameron - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Donald Ewen Cameron was born in Bridge of Allan, Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His Scottish education culminated in 1925 when he received his diploma in psychological medicine from the University of Glasgow. That same year, at the Royal Mental Hospital in Glasgow, he became influenced by Sir David Henderson, who had been taught by Adolf Meyer, a psychiatrist whose broadened perspective on psychiatry was to influence Cameron for the rest of his life. In 1919, Henderson had become the director-general of the Red Cross in Geneva. In 1926, Cameron left for America to work with Meyer at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital. At the Phipps Clinic he held the Henderson research scholarship in psychiatry for two years. In 1938 he left Phipps for the famous Burghoelzi Clinic in Switzerland, where he studied under Hans W. Meier, the successor of Eugen Bleuler, another man who had significantly influenced psychiatric thinking.

In Switzerland, Cameron met the principal psychiatrist of the province of Manitoba, A.T. Mathers, who convinced the young Cameron to come to Manitoba, a place not at the forefront of psychiatry in the 1920s, but Cameron managed to have a successful career. Cameron was in charge of the admissions unit in Brandon, Manitoba and he organized the structure of mental health services in the western half of the Canadian province. In the city of Brandon and surrounding area, Cameron established 10 functioning clinics and this model was used as the forerunner of 1960s community health models.

In 1926 he was serving as Assistant Medical Officer, Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital. In 1933 he married Jean Rankine, a competitive tennis player and Lecturer in Mathematics at Glasgow, and together they would have three sons and one daughter.

In 1936, he moved to Massachusetts to become director of the research division at Worcester State Hospital, and from 1939 to 1943 he was professor of neurology and psychiatry at Albany Medical College in Albany, New York, and at the Russell Sage School of Nursing, also in the Albany area. During those years, Cameron began to expand on his thoughts about the interrelationships of mind and body, and developed a reputation as a psychiatrist who could bridge the gap between the organic, structural neurologists, and the psychiatrists whose knowledge of anatomy was limited to maps of the mind as opposed to maps of the brain. Through his instruction of nurses and psychiatrists he became known as an authority in his areas of concentration.

Cameron focused primarily on biological descriptive psychiatry and applied the British and European schools and models of the practice. Cameron followed these schools of psychiatry in demanding that mental disturbances were diseases and are somatic in nature. All psychological illness were thus hardwired and a product of the body and the direct result of the patients biological structure rather than caused by social, societal or family relationships. The characteristics were thus diagnosed as syndromes, emerging from the brain. It is at this juncture that Cameron began to become more and more interested with how he could effectively manipulate the brain to control and understand the processes of memory. Cameron furthermore, wanted to understand the problems of memory caused by aging. He believed that the aged brain suffered from psychosis and thus would need to prematurely age brains to observe the effect.

In 1936, Cameron published his first book, Objective and Experimental Psychiatry. It introduced his lifelong belief that psychiatry should strive to approach the study of human behavior in a rigorous, scientific fashion. Clearly rooted in biology, his theories of behavior stressed the unity of the organism with the environment. He outlines the experimental method and the research design. Cameron believed firmly in clinical psychiatry and a strict scientific method.