Frederic Samuel Weil—1900–1959

Frederic Samuel Weil died on 6 November, 1959, at the age of 59. He left us, who knew him only as strong and healthy, without warning, and his sudden departure leaves an unhealed rift in the structure of our Institute.

Frederic Weil came from an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Basel, his grandfather having left Alsace after its surrender to Germany. The aversion to compromise and the insistence on acting in accordance with conviction so characteristic of him was apparently a family pattern. The grandfather's choice of Basel as a new domicile was most fortunate for Frederic Weil's development. Swiss at heart as is no other city, Basel's northerly geographical situation exposes it to French and German influences also. These left their traces on Weil's personality.

Born on 25 September, 1900, Weil reciveed his undergraduate education at the Humanistische Gymnasium at Basel. Turning for a short time to the study of botany and geology, he soon decided to opt for medicine, and from 1919 to 1925 attended the medical schools of the universities of Basel and Vienna. After taking the Swiss Medical State Board Examination in 1926, he obtained his medical degree the following year at the university of his native city.

His doctoral dissertation was devoted to the permeability of the meninges in certain mental disorders. The necessary research had been done from 1926 to 1927 at Bois de Cery, the psychiatric clinic of the University of Lausanne, where he spent his psychiatric internship.

Thence he went to Kreuzlingen, working there for two years as Ludwig Binswanger's Assistent. The responsibilities he had to assume there were, however, far greater than those customarily attached to such an appointment. Binswanger quickly recognized Weil's eminent qualifications, and gave him the direction of two sections of the institution, one of which was considered the most difficult of all to manage. His gift for treating psychotics was acknowledged by his chief, who, when Weil lef