Yale's current department of psychiatry was created by Dean Milton C. Winternitz in the 1920s as part of a broader effort to combine mental and physical components of medical care. This effort, which spurred the founding of Yale's institute of Human Relations, was the basis of Winternitz' interest in mental health. Although the institute soon closed because of interdisciplinary squabbling, this brief chapter in Yale's history illustrates the progressive thinking of the Dean and the pre-War place of psychiatry in medicine.