Robins, Eli

   (1921–1994)

   A pioneer in the United States of rigorous diagnostic thinking, Robins was born in Rosenberg, Texas, into an immigrant family from Russia. He earned his M.D. at Harvard in 1943, then trained in psychiatry and neurology at McLean Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital, coming under the influence of the intensely anti-psychoanalytic Harvard psychiatrist-turned-neurologist Mandel Cohen (1907–2000). Robins initially considered Washington University in St. Louis because he wanted to work there with pharmacologist Oliver Lowry (1910–1996).

   * Davies succeeded Aubrey Lewis as Dean of the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley, holding office from 1950 to 1966.

   † To clarify priorities, in Science on August 12, 1955, Parkhurst Shore, Stanley L. Silver, and Bernard Brodie suggested that "certain actions of reserpine may be mediated through the liberation of serotonin" (p. 285). Yet, the thrust of that article was about the "interaction of reserpine, serotonin and lysergic acid diethylamide in brain." The article on August 26, with Pletscher the chief author, established "by direct analysis that reserpine effects the release of serotonin" (p. 374).

   Robins’ main interest was in establishing psychiatry as a rigorously scientific discipline, supported by work in the basic sciences from genetics to pharmacology. As his obituarist Philip Majerus, a medical student at Washington University in the late 1950s, said, "I didn’t really appreciate, at the time, how revolutionary Eli’s ideas about psychiatry were. His contention that psychiatric illness had an organic basis that was discoverable, and that diagnoses could be made by classical clinical methods, seemed to me . . . obvious and logical" (Annals of Clinical Psychiatry, 1995, p. 6). In 1972, Robins was co-author of what turned out to be one of the most cited papers in the field of psychiatry: "Diagnostic Criteria for Use in Psychiatric Research" in the American Journal of Psychiatry; the main author was John Feighner (1937–), at the time a resident in the department—this was in keeping with a generous policy of giving firstauthor credit to junior clinicians—and the criteria became known as "the St. Louis criteria," or "the Feighner criteria." In establishing objective guidelines for psychiatric diagnoses, the 1972 paper helped pave the way for DSM-III. Robins wrote one of the classics in suicide studies, The Final Months (1981), and was editor of the English translation of the fifth edition of Karl Leonhard’s The Classification of Endogenous Psychoses (1979). (See Wernicke–Kleist–Leonhard Pathway.)