Sanford Gifford, 1918-2013

Sanford Robinson Gifford, Jr. was born in Omaha on June 27, 1918, to Sanford Robinson Gifford and Alice Carter Gifford. His father and grandfather were both ophthalmologists. According to the family lore, Dr. Harold Gifford, Sanford's grandfather, was at one point the only ophthalmologist between Chicago and Denver and had a strong influence on both his son and grandson. Born in Milwaukee, Harold Gifford graduated from Cornell and had some ophthalmological training in Europe, where he met his future wife, a daughter of Omaha bankers. He was one of those nineteenth-century energetic types, a “wealthy socialist” who had wide-ranging knowledge and interests, gave naturalism lessons to his grandson, helped develop downtown Omaha, and was instrumental in creating the Fontenelle Forest state park. The original report of 1919 explains that this land would be preserved in perpetuity from “the dangers of ignorance, avarice and misguided enthusiasm” (Gifford, R. & Gifford, P., 2014, June 6). Harold Gifford's son and grandson both clung to his pattern of commitment to fundamental social principles. When Sanford Gifford, Jr. was nine, his grandfather died, and the family moved to Chicago, where his father became the Head of the Ophthalmology Department at Northwestern University Medical School. He went to New Trier High School, while his younger brother Carter attended Chicago Latin. After graduating from New Trier at the age of sixteen, he went to Harvard University to major in art history, then, having realized he could not make a living as an art historian, gained admission to Northwestern medical school, where he quickly switched his concentration to psychiatry.

Gifford recalled that while still at Harvard from 1934-1938 he became interested in psychoanalysis because one of his