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It was with profound sorrow that those associated with psychoanalysis in America learned of the death on April 18, 1936, at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, of Dr. Horace Westlake Frink. Dr. Frink was one of the first physicians in America to engage in psychoanalysis as a specialty and from the time when he first became interested until he was forced to relinquish practice through illness, he was one of its most effective and ardent supporters.
Horace Westlake Frink was born on February 7, 1883, at Millerton, New York, the son of George Sherman and Henrietta Foster Frink. His family on both sides had resided in this beautiful territory at the foothills of the Berkshires since prerevolutionary days. As a child he went to live with his uncle, Dr. Horace Goodwin Westlake, of Hillsdale, New York, for whom he was a namesake, and grew up in this medical atmosphere. Dr. Westlake was widely known as a practitioner in the Hillsdale district where he practiced for sixty years after his graduation from New York University in 1850.
Dr. Frink received his early education in the common schools of Hillsdale but later transferred to the Norfolk, Connecticut, school which he attended from 1899 to 1901 to prepare for college. In 1901 he entered Cornell Medical School from which he graduated in 1905 and thereupon served an interneship on the Second Surgical Division of Bellevue Hospital from 1906 to 1908. Although he showed considerable promise as a surgeon, this specialty never attracted him and during the two years in which he was in general practice after leaving Bellevue Hospital, he devoted himself to extensive reading and to the study of neurotic conditions. This work led him to the investigation of hypnosis which in turn accounted for his drift to psychoanalysis which in 1909 was beginning to make itself known in American psychiatry. In that year he became an