The influence of Morton Kramer in research on mental health and aging.

Professor Morton Kramer, age 84, died on August 17,1998, in Pikesville, Maryland, USA, near Baltimore. He is survived by three children and their families. He is remembered by hundreds of students, friends, and colleagues around the globe. As a young man, Mort was an enthusiastic scholar and student-athlete at Baltimore City College and Johns Hopkins University. While studying undergraduate chemistry, Mort met statistician Jacob Yerushalmy, who encouraged him to pursue doctoral studies with Professors Lowell Reed and Carroll Palmer in the Hopkins Department of Biostatistics. Graduating with a Doctor of Science degree in 1940, Mort first gained practical experience in various public health and census posts before he joined James Doull at Case Western Reserve University in a program of applied public health research on poliomyelitis and other infectious diseases. By 1946, Doull had recruited Mort to be Chief of Research and Information for the Office of International Health Relations, a newly formed unit of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Through Doull and Reed, Mort could trace his biostatistical lineage back 150 years to the numerate clinician Pierre Charles Alexander Louis of France and, through Louis, to William Farr of Great Britain. If Mort modeled his scientific work on predecessors, they were William Farr, widely recognized as founding father of ”vital statistics,” and Farr’s contemporary in America, Edward Jarvis, best known for Jarvis’s Law, a thesis that links home-to-hospital proximity with the probability of mental hospitalization. Farr took life table methods crafted by Edmund Halley of comet fame, and applied these methods to the study of birth and death records of his time. Mort took the same life table methods and used them to bring a more numerate approach to psychiatry. Farr was the 19th-century master of vital statistics in general. Kramer became the 20th-century master of vital statistics as applied to psychiatry and the first biostatistician to devote essentially all of his professional life to psychiatric statistics and epidemiology. Like Jarvis before him, Mort was fascinated by the information to be extracted from routinely gathered mental hospital and census records. Mort’s first contributions to research on mental health and aging involved careful life table analyses of mental hospital admissions, discharges, and deaths during the era prior to mass deinstitutionalization of patients