author
Harry C. (Harry Caesar) Solomon
1889–1982
A pioneering American psychiatrist and neurologist, he helped push mental health care toward more humane, community-based treatment. His writing and public work connected medicine, public policy, and social reform.
1 Audiobook
Neurosyphilis : Modern systematic diagnosis and treatment presented in one hundred and thirty-seven case histories
by Elmer Ernest Southard, Harry C. (Harry Caesar) Solomon
About the author
Born in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1889 and educated in Los Angeles, he went on to earn his B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.D. from Harvard in 1914. He built a long career as a neurologist, psychiatrist, researcher, clinician, and administrator, and later became president of the American Psychiatric Association.
He is remembered especially for arguing that people with mental illness should not be warehoused in large public institutions. Instead, he supported a shift toward treatment in community settings, an idea that helped shape later mental health reform. Contemporary accounts after his death in 1982 also credited him with promoting more humane care for psychiatric patients.
Solomon also wrote on public health and neuropsychiatry, including work connected to military medicine and the social impact of disease. For listeners interested in medical history, his life offers a window into a period when psychiatry was beginning to rethink both treatment and the place of mental health care in everyday civic life.