KOHN 259in Washington, D.C., and in my case, being shipped off to Hagerstown,
Maryland. My experience provides a glimpse of the ad hoc way that the
NIMH operated in those early days. The founding director of the insti
tute, Robert H. Felix, was put on the griddle at a meeting of the Appro
priations Committee (or some subcommittee thereof ) of the House of
Representatives, for having closed a research clinic in Phoenix, Arizona.
It had been a huge success as a clinic, for which one of the appropriators
praised it whole-heartedly, but a failure in terms of doing any research.
Felix, no scientist but a skilled administrator and politician, assuaged
the Committee by telling them that the NIMH was about to open a re
search field station in Hagerstown, a city well known to the Committee
as the site of past PHS triumphs, and that the NIMH had already hired
an expert in community studies to set up that field station.
That purported expert was me–a 23-year old who had done participant-
observation research on race and ethnic relations in the Jewish community
and what was then called the Negro community of Elmira, New York,
as a Cornell graduate-student research assistant and as part of his Ph.D.
thesis. That experience was of no possible relevance to a community study
of mental disorder, even assuming that a community study was appro
priate to the study of mental disorder. Dispatching me to Hagerstown
served Felix’s political purposes, and it turned out to serve my research
purposes as well.
I was assigned, as my office, the storeroom of an existing PHS unit.
After I swept out the coal soot deposited by three nearby railroads, I
realized that the records of Antonio Ciocco’s morbidity studies of
Washington County’s school children, which filled the many filing
cabinets in that storeroom, were a gold mine. From those records, I was
able to design a comparison-group study, in which I matched everyone
from Washington County who had been hospitalized for schizophrenia
in any public or private hospital in the state of Maryland during a 13-year
period with a former classmate of the same age and gender, who had
lived in the same neighborhood and whose parents had similar socio
economic status, long before the patient’s hospitalization. It was a fluke
that Felix’s political gambit had scientific payoff, but we had to use what
opportunities presented themselves. It took all the political ingenuity
at Felix’s command, and all the research ingenuity at his staff ’s command,