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When Robert Galbraith Heath retired from the Chairmanship of the Tulane University Department of Psychiatry and Neurology in July 1980, he had served for an unprecedented 31 years, longer than any other Chairman of Psychiatry in continuous tenure in the country.
During those 31 years, his Department of Psychiatry and Neurology maintained a unique fusion of those two disciplines which Bob Heath envisioned as the only accurate foundation for the understanding of human behavior and human psychopathology. In the early years of his Chairmanship, many saw his vision as a curiosity, but the passing years have vindicated his position that the key to understanding serious "mental illness" would be found in the chemical composition and the physiologic function of the brain.
A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bob Heath received both his baccalaureate and medical degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, subsequently serving his internship at Mercy Hospital in that city. During the early years of the second World War, he trained in neurology at the Neurological Institute in New York, after which he was appointed Fellow in Psychiatry at the Department for Mental and Nervous Diseases at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. The war interrupted his training, and for three years he served in the United States Public Health Service, assigned to the United States Navy as Chief Psychiatrist at the United States Marine Hospital in New York. During these years he was married and began his family, which would eventually include five children. Following the war. Heath continued his studies, having been awarded a Fellowship...