Who developed bibliotherapy?
Bibliotherapy
Samuel Crothers
After the term bibliotherapy was coined by Samuel Crothers in an August 1916 Atlantic Monthly article, it eventually found its way into the medical lexicon.[7]  During World War I, the Library War Service stationed librarians in military hospitals, where they dispensed books to patients and developed the emerging "science" of bibliotherapy with hospital physicians. When they returned from the war, they tried to implement these ideas in hospital libraries.[8] E. Kathleen Jones, the editor of the book series Hospital Libraries, was the library administrator for the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts.  This influential work was first published in 1923, and then updated in 1939, and then 1953.  Pioneer librarian Sadie Peterson Delaney used bibliotherapy in her work at the VA Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama from 1924 to her death in 1958.  Elizabeth Pomeroy, director of the Veterans Administration Library Service, published the results of her research in 1937 on the efficacy of bibliotherapy at VA hospitals.[6]  The United Kingdom, beginning in the 1930s, also began to show growth in the use in of reading therapy in hospital libraries.  Charles Hagberg-Wright, librarian of the London Library, speaking at the 1930 British Empire Red Cross Conference, spoke about the importance of bibliotherapy as part of "curative medicine" in hospitals.  In addition, reports from the 1930 Public Health Conference about bibliotherapy were included in the British journal Lancet.[9] By the 1920s, there were also training programs in bibliotherapy.  One of the first to offer such training was the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University followed by a program at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine.[6]