1935 Manuscript Note and Autograph of Canadian Psychiatrist Dr. George Adler Blumer

On offer is a manuscript letter, written and signed on the reverse of a postcard by Dr. George Alder Blumer (1857-1940), Canadian psychiatrist who initially worked under Toronto's C.K. Clarke. 

Dated Providence, Rhode Island, 24 [March] 1935, Dr. Blumer writes to his colleague, Clarence R. Farrar, Head of the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital. Dr. Farrar was also a colleague of C.K. Clarke. In this note, Blumer tells Farrar that he is sending along a photograph he had taken (no photo included here). 

BIO NOTES: Alder Blumer, was a Canadian psychiatrist who worked mainly in the United States. He was a prominent psychiatrist who was widely published on the topics of dementia, eugenics, and other psychiatric topics. Blumer's career in the world of the asylum moved from state-run progressivism in Toronto under C. K. Clarke (mid-1880s- 1899), to custodial care of poor patients in a large public asylum in Utica, New York (1899-1902), to Butler Hospital in Rhode Island (1902-21), which dealt with a selected population of "curable" affluent patients. His interest in eugenics, that is, in negative eugenics, with its emphasis on the incurable nature of mental disease and defect, especially among the poor was at its peak during his Utica years, and faded when his patient population altered.

Overall VG.