Leon Eisenberg
When Leon Eisenberg came to Harvard Medical School in 1967 as Professor of Psychiatry and Chief of the Department of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, he was 45 years of age and already had behind him a pathbreaking career in child psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Indeed, the New York Times obituary for Leon, who died in 2009, after 42 distinguished years at Harvard, primarily covered the achievements of his 15 years at Hopkins. And those were impressive years indeed. Leon worked with his mentor, Leo Kanner, to study autism. He completed the first long-term study of autistic children—a study that was a model for its time because of the use of empirical measures that could be replicated and its longitudinal design. He pioneered the study of school phobia, conducted the first rigorous examination of stimulants in the treatment of attention deficit disorder, and completed one of the...