Adelaide McFadyen Johnson—1905-1960

Those who knew Adelaide McFadyen Johnson, learning with sadness that she died on November 20, 1960, will recall their experience with her vitally vibrant, intellectually vigorous, and warmhearted way of living. In this sorrowful pause, it will indeed be a rare memory of the way she touched their lives which may seem less than cheerfully encouraging and deeply facilitating to their own growth and development. Much more frequently there will return the sense of her great capacity for lifelong considerate friendship, for finely sensitive responsiveness, for eager pursuit of truth, and for straight thinking in every aspect of human knowledge and experience in which she had any interest. Such memories of her comradely creativeness, expanding the self, and reinvigorating such attitudes in one's own living, will commemorate her life.

For those who knew her less than thirty some years, a few highlights of her career may be of interest. Her enthusiastic curiosity about ideas and the facts upon which ideas rested were already evident when she came to the Department of Physiology at the University of Chicago. Here, with nourishment from that master teacher of master teachers, 'Ajax' Carlson—as he was affectionately and proudly known to his students—the roots of her scientific development grew deeper. Together with her colleague, later her husband, Victor Johnson, she pursued with tremendous persistence and great vigor of thought pioneer problems in adrenal physiology which led to the doctorate of philosophy. Thereafter followed completion of her medical studies and, in Baltimore, training in basic psychiatry with another master, Adolf Meyer. Back in Chicago, during training in psychoanalysis, the Institute for Juvenile Research and the Children's Ward at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute felt the stimulus of her eager and indefatigably inquiring mind. There followed some years of productive work on the staff of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, on the fac