Dane Prugh

Dane Gaskill Prugh, MD (3 June 1918 – 6 October 1990), a well-respected child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, with training and experience in pediatrics, who pioneered in demonstrating the necessity of

His research indicated that cheerful and familiar hospital stays for children are shorter and reduce difficulties adapting to the hospital when physical surroundings. Related studies have shown that children who have the support of family members during prolonged hospitalizations are less likely to suffer from learning problems and delinquency later on.

He is sometimes cited as a leader in developing play therapy, and of affirmative action at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, a school which annually names a recipient for the Dane Prugh Teaching Award.

Dane Prugh had done psychiatry in the Children’s Medical Center in Brookline, then ran the inpatient unit at Rochester for a number of years. Dane argued that the problem was not so much the ineffectiveness of treatment but the inability of finding placements for the children back in the community when they were ready to leave so that the gains in mental health they had made during treatment rapidly dissipated when they became chronically hospitalized. Dane later left for Colorado.

Publications

• Dane G. Prugh (1983) The Psychosocial Aspects of Pediatrics, Lea & Febiger, 687 pages.
• Harold C. Stuart and Dane G. Prugh (1960) The Healthy Child: His Physical, Psychological, and Social Development, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 523 pages.

References

• Elizabeth K. Turner (1974) The Effects of Hospitalization on Children: Models for their Care, Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 10(2), 110–111 doi:10.1111/j.1440-1754.1974.tb01101.x
• Stuart A. Kirk, Herb Kutchins (1992) The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry, Aldine Transaction, 270 pages, ISBN 0202304329 (re: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association)
• Winston S. Rickards (1978) Patterns of Collaboration Between Child Psychiatrists and Paediatricians: The Child Psychiatrist's View, Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 14(2), 66–68 doi:10.1111/j.1440-1754.1978.tb02948.x

External links

• Obituary in The New York Times