* Samuel B. Guze; Influenced Psychiatric Diagnoses

Samuel B. Guze, 76, Washington University psychiatry professor who wrote an influential diagnostic manual. Guze shook up the psychiatric community in the 1950s when he urged that mental illness be diagnosed like physical illness, using a scientific medical model. Guze’s advocacy of clinical psychiatry as a scientific endeavor stemmed from his background as an internist who switched to the study and treatment of mental illness. He became one of the first clinicians to use twin studies to examine the role of heredity in psychiatric illness. He and his colleagues produced important findings about genetic vulnerability to alcoholism and other conditions such as schizophrenia. In 1980 he helped create the American Psychiatric Assn.’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is still widely used. He was also the co-author of an influential textbook, “Psychiatric Diagnosis.” The New York native earned his medical degree in 1945 at St. Louis’ Washington University. He headed its psychiatry department from 1975 to 1989 and again from 1993 to 1997 and was a former vice chancellor for medical affairs. On Wednesday at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis of a fall complicated by bone marrow disease.