Leon Eisenberg

Leon Eisenberg (August 8, 1922 – September 15, 2009) was an American child psychiatrist, social psychiatrist and medical educator who "transformed child psychiatry by advocating research into developmental problems".

He is credited with several "firsts" in medicine and psychiatry – in child psychiatry, autism, and the controversies around autism, randomized clinical trials (RCTs), social medicine, global health, affirmative action, and evidence-based psychiatry.

Of the two first studies of the outcome of infantile autism, he reported the American study in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1956, and the UK study was reported in JCPP shortly afterward by Victor Lotter and Sir Michael Rutter.

Eisenberg also studied and identified the use of rapid rea turn to school as the key treatment in the management of the separation anxiety in an underlying school phobia.

He was principal investigator (PI) on the first grant from the Psychopharmacology Branch of NIMH for RCTs in child psychopharmacology.

From a concern for evidence-based care, well before the phrase was coined, he introduced randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in psychopharmacology and showed that "tranquillizing drugs were inferior to placebo in the treatment of anxiety disorders, whereas stimulant drugs were effective in controlling hyperactivity."

Eisenberg completed the first RCTs of psychiatric consultation to social agencies and the utility of brief psychotherapy in anxiety disorders.

He published a forceful critique of Konrad Lorenz's instinct theory and established the usefulness of distinguishing "disease" from "illness".

Former president of Case Institute of Technology (then Case-Western Reserve), Edward M. Hundert, while he was a medical student (class of 1984) at Harvard Medical School, played the part of Leon Eisenberg in the HMS Class Folies, in which (as his character) he sang the supposedly satirical but actually complimentary tune, "I feel witty!"

He served as Chairperson of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Department of Child and adolescent psychiatry and Harvard Medical School until his retirement in 1988.

He has highlighted the environmental context as a determinant of the phenotype emerging from a given genotype, and from the late 1990s through 2006, he had been involved with developing conferences and resources for medical educators in various specialties that would help them incorporate into courses with their current and future students, the tidal wave of new information in genomics yet to puzzle future clinicians.

This interest may have been encouraged by his stepson, Alan Guttmacher, then acting head of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

For many decades, Leon Eisenberg had criticized psychoanalysis from several platforms.

The scientific contributions of Eisenberg include:

He and his wife, Carola B. Eisenberg, former dean of students, first at MIT, then at Harvard Medical School, had been active with Physicians for Human Rights, which as an organization received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

Leon Eisenberg was proudest of the Diversity Lifetime Achievement Award he received in 2001 for his role in inaugurating affirmative action at HMS in 1968 and sustaining it as chairman of the Admissions Committee from 1969 to 1974.

He regards that as his most important contribution to Harvard Medical School.

After retirement, he continued as The Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine, Psychiatry Emeritus, and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of the Harvard Medical School in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, until a few months before his death in 2009.

He received both his BA and MD degrees from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

He taught previously at both the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University.

He was chief of psychiatry at both Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston during formative periods in psychiatry for each institution.

Leon Eisenberg completed the first outcome study of autistic children in adolescence and recognized patterns of language use as the best predictor of prognosis.

In mid-2009 (June 22, 2009), a Leon Eisenberg Chair in Child Psychiatry was named at Children's Hospital Boston.

The first chairholder of the Leon Eisenberg Professorship in Child Psychiatry is David R. DeMaso, MD, HMS Professor of Psychiatry and Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Children's Hospital Boston.

His autographical memoir was published posthumously by Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica.

Among his friends and professional colleagues, Leon Eisenberg was known for his humor and wit, which he shared in lectures, publications, and even as Recording Secretary for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (sometimes in the form of haiku).

Attendees at the Annual Leon Eisenberg Award at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, end the evening – after the Awardee's lecture – with informal sharing of "Leon's jokes to the best of our memories".

While it is often assumed that these quips and stories were Eisenberg originals, research shows that many if not most – or even all – "had a prior history".

Leon Eisenberg died of prostate cancer at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 15, 2009.

Leon Eisenberg served on seemingly countless academic and other committees at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Children's Hospital Boston.

He was typically among the first thought and invited to such committees because of his breadth.

Attempts to identify a full set of such committees are proceeding.

Leon Eisenberg is credited by numerous colleagues with "simple and direct" prose (Arthur Kleinman, Norma Ware, etc.).

He will be remembered most for his writings in these areas, though his encyclopedic comprehension reached much more broadly:

Leon Eisenberg had written from his home a 'mini-autobiography' which he named

"Were We Asleep at the Switch?".

Eisenberg suggested that a switch from 'mind' to 'body' has taken place in psychiatry as a discipline, which led to overuse of medication.

He also argued that, while medical scientists were worrying about the tedious science at the base of medical practice and healthcare decisions for the general public, "money" and monied interests had been making de facto decisions for the populace about how things that affected them deeply were going to be done.

In this view, the overwhelming impact of economic considerations over emerging bodies of expert knowledge may have rendered and might continue to render futile the professional contributions of many brilliant, timely, and concerned working scientists.

A 2012 article in the German weekly publication Der Spiegel gives an account of an interview Eisenberg gave in 2009, seven months before his death.