Samuel Barry Guze was a psychiatrist

Psychiatrist

A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...

, medical educator, and researcher

Researcher

A researcher is somebody who performs research, the search for knowledge or in general any systematic investigation to establish facts. Researchers can work in academic, industrial, government, or private institutions.-Examples of research institutions:...

. He was one of the most influential psychiatrists in the contemporary world. He was on faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. Along with Eli Robins, Guze advanced psychiatry by establishing criteria for diagnosis. While previously two psychiatrists might interview the same patient and propose differing diagnoses, the Guze system lead to great leaps in diagnostic "reliability", that is, different physicians would agree more often on what the diagnosis really was. This diagnostic reliability is an essential component to modern versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). However, the initial impetus of Guze's work had far fewer diagnoses. Controversy exists as to whether the many new disorders added to the DSM are really variants of the initial diagnoses that Guze formulated.

Feighner, JP, Robins, E, Guze, SB, Woodruff, RA Jr, Winokur, G, Munoz, R. Diagnostic criteria for use in psychiatric research. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1972; 26:57-63

Robins, E and Guze, SB. Establishment of diagnostic validity in psychiatric illness: its application to schizophrenia. Am J Psychiatry 1970; 126:983-987