Felix Deutsch—1884-1964

Felix Deutsch lavished riches on his colleagues and students of three continents, Europe, America, and Asia. He distributed his unique possessions with an uncommon generosity. His resources were his broad learning, the results of his original and deep research, and his devotion to teaching.

As a professor of medicine while still a young internist, his pioneering research even now finds its way into current use. Present-day psychosomatic medicine rests substantially on concepts which were originally his. Our universities, colleges, hospitals, and clinics know him well, and their debt to him has accumulated through the last twenty-five years of his teaching.

To know Felix Deutsch meant to be taught. There was no escaping his inventive ideas and his discoveries. He showered them on his friends, associates, and his pupils. As scientists refine their knowledge and burrow deeper into their investigations and get buried in their work, they often become removed from others while lost in the labyrinths of their studies. Only later one learns what the man was immersed in and to what he was committed. Felix Deutsch was not such a person. It would not suit him. Despite encompassing wider fields over the years, he deepened his research, goaded by an inner excitement. The lines of communication between himself, his colleagues, and students paradoxically seemed shortened rather than extended, while the circle of people broadened rather than narrowed. I believe he never gave up anything he learned. He seemed to master the bewildering complexities of the advances in medicine with the same naturalness and care with which he probably acquired Latin and Greek as a youth. He could quote from either period of his life to make a point. This was no vain exhibition of scholarship but rather a characteristic of his discourse with himself and to those outside. It was simply his unself-conscious elegant style.

Felix Deutsch was more than just curious. His mind was on a perpetual