Jacob S. Kasanin—1897–1946

Jacob Sergi Kasanin was born in Slavgorod, USSR, on May 11, 1897. He came to the United States in 1915, and received his M.D. from the University of Michigan in 1921 and his M.S. in Public Health in 1926. As Senior Research Associate at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and as Director of the Department of Mental Hygiene of the Federated Jewish Charities in Boston, his interest centered around the study of blood sugar curves in epidemic encephalitis, in mental disease, in emotional states, etc. Then he turned to the study of psychoses in children, which became his favorite topic throughout the years from 1931, when he became Clinical Director of the Rhode Island State Hospital, and later as Director of the Department of Psychiatry at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, from 1936 to 1939. His first papers on Personality Changes in Children Following Cerebral Trauma (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1929), and A Study of the Functional Psychoses in Children (American Journal of Psychiatry, 1929), were followed by a series of others leading to his studies of schizophrenia. While originally he was mainly interested in constitutional factors, on his trip to Russia (1930) he became acquainted with the psychologist Vigotsky and was greatly impressed by his work. He translated into English Vigotsky's Thought in Schizophrenia (Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 1934), and the chapter on Thought and Speech in Vigotsky's monograph on Language and Thought (Psychiatry, 1939). He published several papers on the concept formation in schizophrenia: (Journal of Psychology, 1936; American Journal of Psychiatry, 1938), culminating in his monograph on Conceptual Thinking in Schizophrenia (Nervous and Mental Disease Monographs, 1942), the collected papers entitled