Jerome Frank, 95, Psychiatrist, Nuclear Foe
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Dr. Jerome Frank, a retired Johns Hopkins professor of psychiatry and an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons, died Monday at age 95.
A New York City native educated at Harvard University, Frank came to Johns Hopkins in 1940 and studied under Dr. Adolf Meyer, founder of the university’s department of psychiatry. He later served as an Army psychiatrist in the Pacific, where he saw the psychological effects of war on soldiers.
In the Philippines, he learned of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and by the 1950s he was speaking out against nuclear arms, one of the first to do so.
Frank, who was named professor of psychiatry at the Hopkins School of Medicine in 1959 and professor emeritus in 1974, was also active in the civil rights movement.
He wrote the 1961 book “Persuasion and Healing, a Comparative Study of Psychotherapy.” In the book, Frank examined competing approaches to psychotherapy and found common ground, and also warned that the placebo effect may underlie most psychiatric healing.
He once wrote, “Psychotherapy is the only form of treatment which, to some extent, appears to create the illness it treats.”
