1832 – Wilhelm Wundt, German physician, psychologist, and physiologist (d. 1920).
Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (16 August 1832 to 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founders of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist.
He is widely regarded as the “father of experimental psychology”. In 1879, at University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. By creating this laboratory he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other disciplines. He also formed the first academic journal for psychological research, Philosophische Studien (from 1881 to 1902), set up to publish the Institute’s research.
A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked Wundt’s reputation as first for “all-time eminence” based on ratings provided by 29 American historians of psychology. William James and Sigmund Freud were ranked a distant second and third.
1933 – Stanley Milgram, American social psychologist (d. 1984).
1958 – Simon Baron-Cohen, English-Canadian psychiatrist and author.
Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram (15 August 1933 20 December 1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.
Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing the experiment. After earning a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, he taught at Yale, Harvard, and then for most of his career as a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Centre, until his death in 1984.
His small-world experiment, while at Harvard, led researchers to analyse the degree of connectedness, including the six degrees of separation concept. Later in his career, Milgram developed a technique for creating interactive hybrid social agents (called cyranoids), which has since been used to explore aspects of social- and self-perception.
He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of social psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Milgram as the 46th-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Simon Baron-Cohen
Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen FBA FBPsS FMedSci (born 15 August 1958) is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. He is the director of the university’s Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1985, Baron-Cohen formulated the mind-blindness theory of autism, the evidence for which he collated and published in 1995. In 1997, he formulated the foetal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015.
He has also made major contributions to the fields of typical cognitive sex differences, autism prevalence and screening, autism genetics, autism neuroimaging, autism and technical ability, and synaesthesia. Baron-Cohen was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to autistic people.
1840 – Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German-Austrian psychologist and author (d. 1902).
Richard von Krafft-Ebing
Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (full name Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing; 1840-1902) was an Austro-German psychiatrist and author of the foundational work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).
Life
Krafft-Ebing was born in 1840 in Mannheim, Germany, studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where he specialized in psychiatry. He later practiced in psychiatric asylums. After leaving his work in asylums, he pursued a career in psychiatry, forensics, and hypnosis.
He died in Graz in 1902. He was recognized as an authority on deviant sexual behaviour and its medicolegal aspects.
Principal Work
Krafft-Ebing’s principal work is Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (Sexual Psychopathy: A Clinical-Forensic Study), which was first published in 1886 and expanded in subsequent editions. The last edition from the hand of the author (the twelfth) contained a total of 238 case histories of human sexual behaviour.
Translations of various editions of this book introduced to English such terms as “sadist” (derived from the brutal sexual practices depicted in the novels of the Marquis de Sade), “masochist”, (derived from the name of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch), “homosexuality”, “bisexuality”, “necrophilia”, and “anilingus”.
Psychopathia Sexualis is a forensic reference book for psychiatrists, physicians, and judges. Written in an academic style, its introduction noted that, to discourage lay readers, the author had deliberately chosen a scientific term for the title of the book and that he had written parts of it in Latin for the same purpose.
Psychopathia Sexualis was one of the first books about sexual practices that studied homosexuality/bisexuality. It proposed consideration of the mental state of sex criminals in legal judgements of their crimes. During its time, it became the leading medico-legal textual authority on sexual pathology.
The twelfth and final edition of Psychopathia Sexualis presented four categories of what Krafft-Ebing called “cerebral neuroses”:
Paradoxia, sexual excitement occurring independently of the period of the physiological processes in the generative organs.
Anaesthesia, absence of sexual instinct.
Hyperaesthesia, increased desire, satyriasis.
Paraesthesia, perversion of the sexual instinct, i.e., excitability of the sexual functions to inadequate stimuli.
The term “hetero-sexual” is used, but not in chapter or section headings. The term “bi-sexuality” appears twice in the 7th edition, and more frequently in the 12th.
There is no mention of sexual activity with children in Chapter III, General Pathology, where the “cerebral neuroses” (including sexuality the paraesthesias) are covered. Various sexual acts with children are mentioned in Chapter IV, Special Pathology, but always in the context of specific mental disorders, such as dementia, epilepsy, and paranoia, never as resulting from its own disorder. However, Chapter V on sexual crimes has a section on sexual crimes with children. This section is brief in the 7th edition, but is expanded in the 12th to cover Non-Psychopathological Cases and Psychopathological Cases, in which latter subsection the term paedophilia erotica is used.
Krafft-Ebing considered procreation the purpose of sexual desire and that any form of recreational sex was a perversion of the sex drive. “With opportunity for the natural satisfaction of the sexual instinct, every expression of it that does not correspond with the purpose of nature—i.e., propagation,—must be regarded as perverse.” Hence, he concluded that homosexuals suffered a degree of sexual perversion because homosexual practices could not result in procreation. In some cases, homosexual libido was classified as a moral vice induced by the early practice of masturbation. Krafft-Ebing proposed a theory of homosexuality as biologically anomalous and originating in the embryonic and fetal stages of gestation, which evolved into a “sexual inversion” of the brain. In 1901, in an article in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types), he changed the biological term from anomaly to differentiation.
Although the primary focus is on sexual behaviour in men, there are sections on Sadism in Woman, Masochism in Woman, and Lesbian Love. Several of the cases of sexual activity with children were committed by women.
Krafft-Ebing’s conclusions about homosexuality are now largely forgotten, partly because Sigmund Freud’s theories were more interesting to physicians (who considered homosexuality to be a psychological problem) and partly because he incurred the enmity of the Austrian Catholic Church when he psychologically associated martyrdom (a desire for sanctity) with hysteria and masochism.
Works
A bibliography of von Krafft-Ebing’s writings can be found in A. Kreuter, Deutschsprachige Neurologen und Psychiater, München 1996, Band 2, pp.767-774.
Die Melancholie: Eine klinische Studie (1874) OCLC 180728044.
Grundzüge der Kriminalpsychologie für Juristen (second edition, 1882) OCLC 27460358.
Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie (first edition, 1886).
Die progressive allgemeine Paralyse (1894) OCLC 65980497.
Nervosität und neurasthenische Zustände (1895) OCLC 9633149.
Translations
Domino Falls translated and edited Psychopathia Sexualis:The Case Histories (1997) ISBN 978-0-9820464-7-0.
Charles Gilbert Chaddock translated four of Krafft-Ebing’s books into English:
An Experimental Study in the Domain of Hypnotism (New York and London, 1889).
1995 – Jan Křesadlo, Czech-English psychologist and author (b. 1926).
Jan Kresadlo
Václav Jaroslav Karel Pinkava (09 December 1926 to 13 August 1995), better known by his pen name Jan Křesadlo, was a Czech psychologist who was also a prizewinning novelist and poet.
An anti-communist, Pinkava emigrated to Britain with his wife and four children following the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet-led armies of the Warsaw pact. He worked as a clinical psychologist until his early retirement in 1982, when he turned to full-time writing. His first novel “Mrchopěvci” (GraveLarks) was published by Josef Škvorecký’s emigre publishing house 68 Publishers, and earned the 1984 Egon Hostovský prize.
1890 – Eino Kaila, Finnish philosopher and psychologist, attendant of the Vienna circle (d. 1958).
1896 – Jean Piaget, Swiss psychologist and philosopher (d. 1980).
1949 – Jonathan Kellerman, American psychologist and author.
People (Deaths)
1949 – Edward Thorndike, American psychologist and academic (b. 1874).
Eino Kaila
Eino Sakari Kaila (August 9, 1890 – July 31, 1958[1]) was a Finnish philosopher, critic and teacher. He worked in numerous fields including psychology (sometimes considered to be the founder of Finnish psychology), physics and theater, and attempted to find unifying principles behind various branches of human and natural sciences.
Life
Eino Kaila was born in Alajärvi, Finland. Kaila’s father, Erkki Kaila was a Protestant minister and later archbishop. He graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1910. In the 1920s he worked in the field of literary criticism and psychology as a professor at the University of Turku and is said to have been the first to introduce gestalt psychology to Finland. He was a part of the cultural circles of the time with the likes of Jean Sibelius and Frans Eemil Sillanpää. In 1916 he married the painter Anna Lovisa Snellman, who was granddaughter of Johan Vilhelm Snellman. He had University positions as lecturer in Helsinki and professor in Turku, and in 1930 he was appointed professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. In the 1930s, Kaila was closely associated with the Vienna Circle.
During World War II, Kaila lectured in Germany. In 1948 Kaila became a member of the Finnish Academy. He died in Kirkkonummi on 31 July 1958.
Ideas
Despite being greatly influenced by the logical positivists and critical of unempirical speculation, an aspect common to all of Kaila’s work was in strive for a holistic, almost pantheistic understanding of things. He also maintained a more naturalist approach to psychology. His book Persoonallisuus (1934, Personality) was a psychological study with philosophical dimensions, in which emphasized the biological nature of psychological phenomena. During the last years of his life he attempted to construct a theory of everything in Terminalkausalität Als Die Grundlage Eines Unitarischen Naturbegriffs, but this, what was meant to be the first installment in a more extensive study, was not met with much enthusiasm outside of Finland.
Though he withdrew his support of the National Socialists before the end of the Second World War, he wrote about the differences between “western” and “eastern” thought and claimed that the homogeneity of the people was a necessity for a functioning democracy. After the war his close friendships with Edwin Linkomies and Veikko Antero Koskenniemi put a political shadow even over Kaila.
Influence
Kaila’s most famous pupil was Georg Henrik von Wright, who was the successor of Ludwig Wittgenstein at the University of Cambridge. The tradition of highly German-influenced analytical-idealist philosophy which Kaila championed remained unchallenged in Finnish philosophy until the appearance of continental influences in the 1980s.
Kaila founded the psychological laboratory at the University of Helsinki, and educated the next generation of psychologists. He contributed to founding professorship in psychology, and to establishment of the Faculty of Political Science together with Edwin Linkomies.
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget (09 August 1896 to 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called “genetic epistemology”.
Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.” His theory of child development is studied in pre-service education programs. Educators continue to incorporate constructivist-based strategies.
Piaget created the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 while on the faculty of the University of Geneva and directed the Centre until his death in 1980. The number of collaborations that its founding made possible, and their impact, ultimately led to the Centre being referred to in the scholarly literature as “Piaget’s factory”.
According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget was “the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing.” However, his ideas did not become widely popularised until the 1960s. This then led to the emergence of the study of development as a major sub-discipline in psychology. By the end of the 20th century, Piaget was second only to B.F. Skinner as the most cited psychologist of that era.
Jonathan Kellerman
Jonathan Seth Kellerman (born 09 August 1949) is an American novelist, psychologist, and Edgar- and Anthony Award–winning author best known for his popular mystery novels featuring the character Alex Delaware, a child psychologist who consults for the Los Angeles Police Department.
Born on the Lower East Side of New York City, his family relocated to Los Angeles when Jonathan was nine years old.
Kellerman graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) with a doctor of philosophy degree in psychology in 1974, and began working as a staff psychologist at the USC School of Medicine, where he eventually became a full clinical professor of paediatrics. He opened a private practice in the early 1980s while writing novels in his garage at night.
His first published novel, When the Bough Breaks, appeared in 1985, many years after writing and having works rejected. He then wrote five best-selling novels while still a practicing psychologist. In 1990, he quit his private practice to write full-time. He has written more than 40 crime novels, as well as nonfiction works and children’s books.
Edward Thorndike
Edward Lee Thorndike (31 August 1874 to 09 August 1949) was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for educational psychology. He also worked on solving industrial problems, such as employee exams and testing. He was a member of the board of the Psychological Corporation and served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1912.
A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thorndike as the ninth-most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Edward Thorndike had a powerful impact on reinforcement theory and behaviour analysis, providing the basic framework for empirical laws in behaviour psychology with his law of effect. Through his contributions to the behavioural psychology field came his major impacts on education, where the law of effect has great influence in the classroom.
1879 – Bob Smith, American physician and surgeon, co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous (d. 1950).
Bob Smith
Robert Holbrook Smith (08 August 1879 to 16 November 1950), also known as Dr. Bob, was an American physician and surgeon who founded Alcoholics Anonymous with Bill Wilson (more commonly known as Bill W.).
Smith began drinking at college attending Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Early on he noticed that he could recover from drinking bouts quicker and easier than his classmates and that he never had headaches, which caused him to believe he was an alcoholic from the time he began drinking. Smith was a member of Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity at Dartmouth. After graduation in 1902, he worked for three years selling hardware in Boston, Chicago, and Montreal and continued drinking heavily. He then returned to school to study medicine at the University of Michigan. By this time drinking had begun to affect him to the point where he began missing classes. His drinking caused him to leave school, but he returned and passed his examinations for his sophomore year. He transferred to Rush Medical College, but his alcoholism worsened to the point that his father was summoned to try to halt his downward trajectory. But his drinking increased and after a dismal showing during final examinations, the university required that he remain for two extra quarters and remain sober during that time as a condition of graduating.
After graduation, Smith became a hospital intern, and for two years he was able to stay busy enough to refrain from heavy drinking. He married Anne Robinson Ripley on 25 January 1915, and opened up his own office in Akron, Ohio, specialising in colorectal surgery and returned to heavy drinking. Recognising his problem, he checked himself into more than a dozen hospitals and sanitariums in an effort to stop his drinking. He was encouraged by the passage of Prohibition in 1919, but soon discovered that the exemption for medicinal alcohol, and bootleggers, could supply more than enough to continue his excessive drinking. For the next 17 years his life revolved around how to subvert his wife’s efforts to stop his drinking and obtain the alcohol he craved while trying to hold together a medical practice in order to support his family and his drinking.
Meeting Bill Wilson
In January 1933, Anne Smith attended a lecture by Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group. For the next two years he and Smith attended local meetings of the group in an effort to solve his alcoholism, but recovery eluded him until he met Bill Wilson on 12 May 1935. Wilson was an alcoholic who had learned how to stay sober, thus far only for some limited amounts of time, through the Oxford Group in New York, and was close to discovering long-term sobriety by helping other alcoholics. Wilson was in Akron on business that had proven unsuccessful and he was in fear of relapsing. Recognising the danger, he made inquiries about any local alcoholics he could talk to and was referred to Smith by Henrietta Seiberling, one of the leaders of the Akron Oxford Group. After talking to Wilson, Smith stopped drinking and invited Wilson to stay at his home. He relapsed almost a month later while attending a professional convention in Atlantic City. Returning to Akron on 09 June, he was given a few drinks by Wilson to avoid delirium tremens. He drank one beer the next morning to settle his nerves so he could perform an operation, which proved to be the last alcoholic drink he would ever have. The date, 10 June 1935, is celebrated as the anniversary of the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Final Years
Smith was called the “Prince of Twelfth Steppers” by Wilson because he helped more than 5000 alcoholics before his death. He was able to stay sober from 10 June 1935, until his death in 1950 from colon cancer. He is buried at the Mount Peace Cemetery in Akron, Ohio.
1941 – Ted Strickland, American psychologist and politician, 68th Governor of Ohio.
Ted Strickland
Theodore Strickland (born 04 August 1941) is an American politician who was the 68th Governor of Ohio, serving from 2007 to 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served in the United States House of Representatives, representing Ohio’s 6th congressional district (1993-1995, 1997-2007).
A 1959 graduate of Northwest High School, Strickland went on to be the first member of his family to attend college. Strickland received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history with a minor in psychology from Asbury College in 1963. In 1966, he received a Master of Arts degree in guidance counselling from the University of Kentucky and a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) from the Asbury Theological Seminary in 1967. He then returned to the University of Kentucky to earn his Ph.D. in counselling psychology in 1980. He is married to Frances Strickland, an educational psychologist.
Strickland worked as a counselling psychologist at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. He was an administrator at a Methodist children’s home and was a professor of psychology at Shawnee State University. Strickland is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church. He was a minister at a Methodist church in Portsmouth, Ohio.
In the 2006 gubernatorial election, Strickland was elected to succeed term-limited Republican incumbent Bob Taft, receiving 60% of the vote and defeating Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. He was narrowly defeated for re-election in the 2010 gubernatorial election by former US Representative John Kasich.
In April 2014, Strickland became president of the Centre for American Progress Action Fund, a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization. Strickland left that position in February 2015, and on 25 February 2015, he announced his intention to run for the United States Senate against incumbent Rob Portman. Strickland lost by 20 points. As of 2021, he is the last Democrat to serve as Governor of Ohio.
New York State Department of Health Code, Section 405, also known as the Libby Zion Law, is a regulation that limits the amount of resident physicians’ work in New York State hospitals to roughly 80 hours per week. The law was named after Libby Zion, who died in 1984 at the age of 18 under the care of what her father believed to be overworked resident physicians and intern physicians. In July 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education adopted similar regulations for all accredited medical training institutions in the United States.
Although regulatory and civil proceedings found conflicting evidence about Zion’s death, today her death is widely believed to have been caused by serotonin syndrome from the drug interaction between the phenelzine she was taking prior to her hospital visit, and the pethidine administered by a resident physician. The lawsuits and regulatory investigations following her death, and their implications for working conditions and supervision of interns and residents, were highly publicised in both lay media and medical journals.
Death of Libby Zion
Libby Zion (November 1965 to 05 March 1984) was a freshman at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. She took a prescribed antidepressant, phenelzine, daily. A hospital autopsy revealed traces of cocaine, but other later tests showed no traces. She was the daughter of Sidney Zion, a lawyer who had been a writer for The New York Times. She had two brothers, Adam and Jed. Her obituary in The New York Times, written the day after her death, stated that she had been ill with a “flu-like ailment” for the past several days. The article stated that after being admitted to New York Hospital, she died of cardiac arrest, the cause of which was not known.
Libby Zion had been admitted to the hospital through the emergency room by the resident physician assigned to the ER on the night of 04 March. Raymond Sherman, the Zion family physician, agreed with their plan to hydrate and observe her. Zion was assigned to two residents, Luise Weinstein and Gregg Stone, who both evaluated her. Weinstein, a first-year resident physician (also referred to as intern or PGY-1), and Stone, a PGY-2 resident, were unable to determine the cause of Zion’s illness, though Stone tentatively suggested that her condition might be a simple overreaction to a normal illness. After consulting with Dr. Sherman, the two prescribed pethidine (meperidine) to control the “strange jerking motions” that Zion had been exhibiting when she was admitted.
Weinstein and Stone were both responsible for covering dozens of other patients. After evaluating Zion, they left. Luise Weinstein went to cover other patients, and Stone went to sleep in an on-call room in an adjacent building. Zion, however, did not improve, and continued to become more agitated. After being contacted by nurses by phone, Weinstein ordered medical restraints be placed on Zion. She also prescribed haloperidol by phone to control the agitation.
Zion finally managed to fall asleep, but by 6:30, her temperature was 107 °F (42 °C). Weinstein was once again called, and measures were quickly taken to try to reduce her temperature. However, before this could be done, Zion had a cardiac arrest and could not be resuscitated. Weinstein informed Zion’s parents by telephone.
Several years had gone by before a general agreement was reached regarding the cause of Zion’s death. Zion had been taking a prescribed antidepressant, phenelzine, before she was admitted to the hospital. The combination of that and the pethidine given to her by Stone and Weinstein contributed to the development of serotonin syndrome, a condition which led to increased agitation. This led Zion to pull on her intravenous tubes, causing Weinstein to order physical restraints, which Zion also fought against. By the time she finally fell asleep, her fever had already reached dangerous levels, and she died soon after of cardiac arrest.
Publicity and Trials
Grieving the loss of their child, Zion’s parents became convinced their daughter’s death was due to inadequate staffing at the teaching hospital. Sidney Zion questioned the staff’s competence for two reasons. The first was the administration of pethidine, which can cause fatal interactions with phenelzine, the antidepressant that Zion was taking. Said interaction was known to few clinicians at the time, though because of this case it is now widely known. The second issue was the use of restraints and emergency psychiatric medication. Sidney’s aggrieved words were: “They gave her a drug that was destined to kill her, then ignored her except to tie her down like a dog.” To the distress of the doctors, Sidney referred to his daughter’s death as a “murder”. Sidney also questioned the long hours that residents worked at the time. In a New York Times op-ed piece, he wrote: “You don’t need kindergarten to know that a resident working a 36-hour shift is in no condition to make any kind of judgment call—forget about life-and-death.” The case eventually became a protracted high-profile legal battle, with multiple abrupt reversals; case reports about it appeared in major medical journals.
State Investigation
In May 1986, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau agreed to let a grand jury consider murder charges, an unusual decision for a medical malpractice case. Although the jury declined to indict for murder, in 1987 the intern and resident were charged with 38 counts of gross negligence and/or gross incompetence. The grand jury considered that a series of mistakes contributed to Zion’s death, including the improper prescription of drugs and the failure to perform adequate diagnostic tests. Under New York law, the investigative body for these charges was the Hearing Committee of the State Board for Professional Medical Conduct. Between April 1987 and January 1989, the committee conducted 30 hearings at which 33 witnesses testified, including expert witnesses in toxicology, emergency medicine, and chairmen of internal medicine departments at six prominent medical schools, several of whom stated under oath that they had never heard of the interaction between meperidine and phenelzine prior to this case. At the end of these proceedings, the committee unanimously decided that none of the 38 charges against the two residents were supported by evidence. Its findings were accepted by the full board, and by the state’s Health Commissioner, David Axelrod.
Under New York law, however, the final decision in this matter rested with another body, the Board of Regents, which was under no obligation to consider either the Commissioner’s or the Hearing Committee’s recommendations. The Board of Regents, which at the time had only one physician among its 16 members, voted to “censure and reprimand” the resident physicians for acts of gross negligence. This decision did not affect their right to practice. The verdict against the two residents was considered very surprising in medical circles. In no other case had the Board of Regents overruled the Commissioner’s recommendation. The hospital also admitted it had provided inadequate care and paid a $13,000 fine to the state. In 1991, however, the state’s appeals court completely cleared the records of the two doctors of findings that they had provided inadequate care to Zion.
Civil Trial
In parallel with the state investigation, Sidney Zion also filed a separate civil case against the doctors and the hospital. The civil trial came to a close in 1995 when a Manhattan jury found that the two residents and Libby Zion’s primary care doctor contributed to her death by prescribing the wrong drug, and ordered them to pay a total of $375,000 to Zion’s family for her pain and suffering. The jury also found that Raymond Sherman, the primary care physician, had lied on the witness stand in denying he knew that Libby Zion was to be given pethidine. Although the jury found the three doctors negligent, none of them were found guilty of “wanton” negligence, i.e. demonstrating utter disregard for the patient, as opposed to a simple mistake. Payouts for wanton negligence would not have been covered by the doctors’ malpractice insurance.
The emergency room physician, Maurice Leonard, as well as the hospital (as legal persona) were found not responsible for Zion’s death in the civil trial. The jury decided that the hospital was negligent for leaving Weinstein alone in charge of 40 patients that night, but they also concluded that this negligence did not directly contribute to Zion’s death. The trial was shown on Court TV.
Law and Regulations
After the grand jury’s indictment of the two residents, Axelrod decided to address the systemic problems in residency by establishing a blue-ribbon panel of experts headed by Bertrand M. Bell, a primary care physician at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Bell was well known for his critical stance regarding the lack of supervision of physicians-in-training. Formally known as the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Emergency Services, and more commonly known as the Bell Commission, the committee evaluated the training and supervision of doctors in the state, and developed a series of recommendations that addressed several patient-care issues, including restraint usage, medication systems, and resident work hours.
“In 1989, New York state adopted the Bell Commission’s recommendations that residents could not work more than 80 hours a week or more than 24 consecutive hours” and that attending physicians “needed to be physically present in the hospital at all times. Hospitals instituted so-called night floats, doctors who worked overnight to spell their colleagues, allowing them to adhere to the new rules.” Periodic follow-up audits have prompted the New York State Department of Health to crack down on violating hospitals. Similar limits have since been adopted in numerous other states. In July 2003 the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) adopted similar regulations for all accredited medical training institutions in the United States.
1972 – Paul Goodman, American psychotherapist and author (b. 1911).
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was an American author and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York.
As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before attending graduate school in Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, many of which he lost for his outward bisexuality and World War II draft resistance. Goodman discovered anarchism and wrote for libertarian journals. He became one of the founders of gestalt therapy and took patients through the 1950s while continuing to write prolifically.
His 1960 book of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd, established his importance as a mainstream cultural theorist. Goodman became known as “the philosopher of the New Left” and his anarchistic disposition was influential in 1960s counterculture and the free school movement. His celebrity did not endure far beyond his life, but Goodman is remembered for his principles, outré proposals, and vision of human potential.
Mental Health Matters 
You must be logged in to post a comment.