1923

Abraham Flexner provides GED funding for Stanley Cobb’s two-year trip to Europe, where he was to learn French and German and acquire culture. He began in London with Henry Head and S.A. Kinnier Wilson (from NJ), then Paris with L’Hermitte, Berlin (with Vogt and Bielschowsky at Univ. Berlin’s Neurobiological Institute (White, 101ff). “One night the Cobbs went to Bielschowsky’s home for a musical evening. Bielschowsky and three other violinists played as a quartet. The playing was good . . .” (116). During his European trip, his stammering became worse and after his return he resumed treatment with speech therapist Samuel Robbins, whose approach was not helpful (154-55). He was helped by the Adlerian Seif, both in Boston and then in Munich, during his second European trip of 1928 (155-56). He thought Seif “a better man than Adler.” (156). After Cobb’s return in 1925, Flexner engineered a $350K grant from GED to Harvard to establish academic dept of neurology, based at Boston City Hospital, headed by Cobb, and with Cobb and Abraham Myerson joint heads of the neurological service (138-39). Cobb was to be full-time and was promoted to Bullard Professor of Neuropathology and senior in charge of neurology (140). New building at BCH, housing the neurology facilities, only completed in 1930 (142). Tracy Putnam and Houston Merritt came to the City Hospital service in 1928 (143). In 1934, by then involved in Freudian psychoanalysis (176) and having begun his own analysis with Hanns Sachs (173), Cobb left BCH to set up a new psychiatric liaison service at MGH; his collaborator Jacob Finesinger was Sach’s first analysand in Boston in 1933 (169).