Eisenberg, Leon, 1922-2009

Leon Eisenberg (August 8, 1922 – September 15, 2009) was an American child psychiatrist, social psychiatrist and medical educator who "transformed child psychiatry by advocating research into developmental problems". He received both his BA and MD degrees from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is credited with several "firsts" in medicine and psychiatry – in child psychiatry, autism, and the controversies around autism, randomized clinical trials (RCTs), social medicine, global health, affirmative action, and evidence-based psychiatry. He served as Chairperson of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Department of Child and adolescent psychiatry and Harvard Medical School until his retirement in 1988. After retirement, he continued as The Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine, Psychiatry Emeritus, and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of the Harvard Medical School in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, until a few months before his death in 2009. Previously, he had taught at both the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University. He was chief of psychiatry at both Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston during formative periods in psychiatry for each institution.