convalescence, he felt unable to concentrate on research and referred to this period as "the wasted year". Southard led the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, which had opened as a department of Boston State Hospital, from 1912 until his death. He served in a strategic advisory role with the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service during World War I, attaining the rank of major. Southard was a past president of the American Medico-Psychological Association, and was president of the Boston Society of Psychiatry and Neurology at his death. Other professional memberships included the American Genetic Association, the National Epilepsy Association, the American Association of Pathologists, the Massachusetts Medical Society and the Society of Experimental Biology. He served in an editorial capacity for several publications, including the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Southard was a member of the Board of Scientific Directors for the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Led by biologist Charles Davenport, the ERO lobbied for state sterilization laws and restrictions on U.S. immigration. Public approval of the office waned during the 1930s (when eugenics became associated with Nazism), and the ERO closed in 1939. Southard coined the word "cacogenics" for the study of racial decline. Professional contributions Southard studied the organic basis of mental illness at a time when two camps of professionals (known informally as "brain spot men" and "mind twist men") debated the biological and behavioral origins of psychiatric disorders. His neuropathological perspective was eclipsed after his death by the "mind twist" hypothesis of mental illness promoted by the dynamic psychiatry (or psychobiology) of Adolf Meyer and the psychoanalytic perspectives of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. Although physiological theories of "autointoxication" were explored in U.S. psychiatry before 1940, Southard had rejected them many years earlier. During the World War I era, Southard conducted early studies of shell shock. He believed that shell shock resulted from the mind's inability to align the sensory experiences of war with other life events. Southard said that this process, which could also have physical causes, resulted in disorientation and transformed the events of war into a mental condition. In Shell Shock and Other Neuropsychiatric Problems, he called the term "shell shock" advantageous because it "compared with the more acutely terrible and life-in-the-balance thing we know as traumatic or surgical shock." The condition initially captured public interest, at least in part because it was said to be caused by a traumatic force to