Dean Winternitz: Yale Medical School's Passionate Humanist

by Priscilla Waters Norton, Howard M. Spiro

MILTON WINTERNITZ Dr. Milton Winternitz, Dean of Yale Medical School from 1920 -1935, was confident of his own wisdom and right-thinking. He hoped to turn that New Haven school from a local medical training center to the national and international reasearch institution it has become. He simplified the educational program, certain that graduate students, freed from compulsory attendance at lectures, would learn for themselves. "Winter", as he liked to be called, strengthen the requirement that students carry out a research project before graduation. He established the nursing school, the psychiatry department, supported the epidemiology and public health activities. Most important, he brought about a full-time salaried academic faculty. But his real love, his enthusiasm, lay in humanizing the medical curriculum, in the 1920s beginning to verge on the purely scientific. In his short-lived Institute for Human Relations, he hoped to bring Yale Law and Divinity schools down to the medical area, and to encourage a far more humanuistic approach to medical training. If he had succeeded, medical students would become science-based but fully aware of the psychological and social origin of much of their complaints. But Winternitz was a Jew in a Christian society. In order to fulfill his ambitions and remain at his post, he yielded to the prejudices of the time in limiting the admission of Jews, Italian Catholics, and Afro- Americans to the medical school. For that he has been vilified, and only in this 200th Anniversary celebration, are his contributions finally getting the recognition they have long deserved. Here we present a bio-memoir of this remarkable man.

502 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 6, 2011