NIMH

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which comprise 25 separate institutes and centers organized under the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the preeminent federal agency responsible for conducting medical research. It received its current name in 1948.

One of eight health agencies within the Public Health Services, the NIH conducts basic and applied research, including clinical trials and experimental procedures for treating chronic and infectious diseases. It works to improve the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of a wide variety of medical conditions, and the agency encourages the dissemination of biomedical information to the larger medical community.

The origins of the NIH date to 1887, when a young doctor named Joseph J. Kinyoun set up a laboratory in the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York, in order to treat merchant seamen. In 1902, the Hygienic Laboratory, as Kinyoun’s office was known, moved to Washington, D. C., and took on the authority of testing and regulating biological products mandated by the Biologics Control Act (1902). In 1912, the Marine Health Service was given a new name— Public Health Service (PHS)—and additional responsibilities. The PHS was charged with conducting research on chronic and infectious diseases. Taking shape in its more recognizable form, the service was reorganized under the Ransdell Act (1930) and renamed the National Institutes of Health in 1948. The creation of the National Cancer Institute came one year before the NIH moved, in 1938, to a large, privately donated estate in Bethesda, Maryland.

The post-World War II decades saw substantial support for federal medical research in the United States. An expanded role for science and medicine soon became recognized as serving the national interest. Prior to the 1940s, popular and congressional sentiment was disinclined to support an extensive role for the federal government in support of medical research. Now medical professionals and scientific researchers found the postwar climate highly conducive to expanding both the size and the scope of their work.

The period between 1955 and 1968 was the golden age of expansion for the NIH under the directorship of James A. Shannon. During this time, the level of research and training conducted by the facility (and its budgets) grew at a tremendous pace. So, too, did advances in tests used to screen patients for certain kinds of cancer, as well as the treatment of diabetes. By 1960, the NIH comprised 10 distinct institutes, expanding to 15 by 1970.

Created as a specialized institute within the NIH, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was formally established in 1949, three years after President Harry S. Truman signed the National Mental Health Act. One of the original four research institutes housed within the National Institutes of Health, the NIMH is dedicated to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental illness. Under the rubric of mental health, the NIMH was later responsible for conducting research on child development, alcoholism, and suicide prevention.

Prior to World War II, the consensus among medical professionals held that those who suffered from severe and chronic mental illness required institutionalized care; hospitals, which catered exclusively to those patients and which received public funds, were deemed the most appropriate facilities for such care. Until the 1940s, most professional psychiatrists practiced in these public institutions. As with much else in American society, World War II changed this consensus. A younger generation of psychiatrists, many of whom worked in federal agencies during the war, and sympathetic lay groups, lobbied for changes in the treatment of the mentally ill. In 1955, a report issued by the Joint Commission on Mental Illness, Action for Mental Health, laid the basis for new efforts through the NIMH directed at setting up community-based mental health centers. Beginning in the 1960s, a shift toward community-based outpatient therapy supplanted the earlier emphasis on institutionalized treatment and care for the mentally ill.

By the late 1990s, the NIH supported more than 35,000 researchers at 1,700 universities, medical schools, hospitals, and research centers throughout the United States and in other countries. The organization further advances medical knowledge by administering the National Library of Medicine, the most comprehensive collection of medical information in the world.

Further reading: Gerald N. Grob, From Asylum to Community: Mental Health Policy in Modern America (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Victoria A. Harden, Inventing the NIH: Federal Biomedical Research Policy, 1887-1937 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

—Kirk Tyvela