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In the early years of this century there flashed across the horizon a bright star in the field of psychiatry, a star that blazed brilliantly, briefly, and disappeared as suddenly as it had come. The light of the star went out in 1920 when Elmer Ernest Southard, one of the youngest professors in the three hundred years of Harvard history, died at the age of forty-three.
It was a brave and ambitious task that Professor Frederick Gay of Columbia set himself when he essayed to write the life of his friend. Yet he has done it faithfully and accurately. If his compilation of facts lacks something of the scintillating spirit or the warmth of feeling characteristic of the man whose life is recorded, this must be charged up to the inevitable difficulties of describing the soul of a genius.
There can be no doubt of Southard's greatness measured by his breadth of vision, by his capacity for stimulating and inspiring his students and colleagues, and by the amazing fertility of his investigatory curiosity. The man who was not only a pathologist, a psychiatrist, a hospital executive, a teaching professor,