Eric D. Wittkower (1899–1983)

Professor Eric David Wittkower, a pioneer in the application of psychoanalysis to medicine and to the study of culture, died in Montreal, Canada on 6 January 1983, at the age of 83.

Eric Wittkower was born in Berlin, Germany, on 4 April 1899, received his medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1924, and worked at the Medical Department of the Charité from 1925 to 1933. In the late twenties Dr Wittkower was invited to be part of a group of Berlin analysts which included Franz Alexander, Karen Horney, J. H. Shultz and Arthur Kronfeld.

In 1931, after many years of experimental and clinical research, he submitted his Privat-dozent thesis on 'The Influence of Emotions on Bodily Functions' to the University of Berlin. His thesis was later published in the Journal of Mental Science (1935).

When Hitler came into power in 1933, Wittkower's university position and psychoanalytic training came to an end. He then moved to England where he greatly stimulated psychosomatic research. In June of that year, he took up a Research Fellowship at the Central Pathology Laboratory at the Maudsley and two years later joined the Tavistock Clinic where he worked until 1940. While at the Tavistock Clinic, Professor Wittkower held a Halley-Steward Research Fellowship and devised careful studies in the field of cardiac pain, asthma, colitis, skin disorders, dysmenorrhoea, thyrothoxicosis, and rheumatoid arthritis to name just a few. In 1936 he obtained his L.R.C.P., L.R.C.S. and L.R.F.P.S. from the University of Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1947 Professor E. B. Strauss of St. Bartholomew's Medical College compared Wittkower's standing in psychosomatic medicine in England to that of Flanders Dunbar in the United States. J. R. Rees thought he was the most outstanding in the field of psychosomatic medicine in England and probably in Europe. He developed original scientific validation studies of the psychosomatic concepts evolving from the psychoanalytic observations of Groddeck, Ferenc