Our sincerest condolences to our colleague, Debra S. Cohen -- and her entire family -- on the loss of her Dad, Dr. Sanford Cohen.
His obit, as released by the Boston Globe, follows:
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Dr. Sanford Cohen, 85; former BU psychiatry chairman
By Bryan Marquard | Globe Staff
Courtesy of Cohen family
Sanford Cohen led the psychiatry department at the BU School of Medicine.
A psychologist who studied the impact of mental illness on physical maladies, and vice versa, Dr. Sanford Cohen looked everywhere, from the laboratory to literature to Scripture, to understand why the body and mind at times ache in tandem.
“People have been wondering about this connection for centuries,” he told the Globe in 1981.
“Observations go back to the biblical period,” he added. “In the Book of Proverbs, there’s a statement, ‘A merry heart doeth good like medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.’ And there’s the story from the Book of Acts about Ananias, who fell down and died after he was accused of lying to God. We’ve known about the effects of sadness and separation for thousands of years, but we’ve had only 25 years of study of the connection with biological changes.”
Dr. Cohen, who chaired the psychiatry department at the Boston University School of Medicine from 1970 to 1988, died of cancer Sept. 18 in the Laurel Lake retirement community in Hudson, Ohio, where he had moved to live closer to one of his children. He was 85.
“In a sense he was before his time, because we’re now seeing the effects of stress on combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Mirsky, who assists in research on veterans who suffer traumatic brain injuries.
Dr. Cohen’s insights, he added, would be just as welcome now. “Sandy would have been a terrific research director for programs evaluating stress,” Mirsky said.
In January 1972, when BU broke ground for a community mental health center in the South End, Dr. Cohen told the Globe the facility’s staff would study how the mental state of patients affects illnesses such as hypertension and coronary disease.
“The evidence has been known for 15 years,” he said, “but nobody has pulled it together and tried to provide systemic care on an extensive basis as it could and should have been done.”
A champion of biological psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine, he frequently reminded colleagues “that psychiatrists have to remember that they’re also physicians,” said his son Dr. Jeffrey Cohen, a neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.
The younger of two children, Sanford Irwin Cohen was born in New York City and grew up in an apartment that also was home to his grandparents, aunts, and uncles. His parents were often away. His father was a salesman in the garment business, and his mother frequently traveled with him.
On weekends, the family’s housekeeper sometimes took Dr. Cohen home with her to Harlem and to services at a Baptist church. His presence as a Jewish boy from New York also was incongruous when his family sent him to Riverside Military Academy in Georgia, from which he graduated at 15.
By his own account, he then flunked out of the University of Pennsylvania, only to return to academia after a summer traveling with his father taught him he was not cut out for the garment business.
He graduated from New York University in 1948 and from Chicago Medical School in 1952, when he was 23.
That same year he married Jean Steinbruecker of Sheboygan, Wis. They had met when she was a nurse in Chicago who “noticed him one day, thought he was cute, and invited him to a dance,” said their daughter Debra Cohen, a civil rights lawyer who lives in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
After psychiatric and psychoanalytic training at the University of Colorado and Duke University, Dr. Cohen served in the US Air Force and was one of the psychiatrists who evaluated the first Mercury astronauts to determine if they were fit for space flight.
Mirsky was at Duke when he met Dr. Cohen, who had returned to North Carolina after Air Force service to direct Duke’s division of psychosomatic medicine. Dr. Cohen left Duke to chair the psychiatry department at Louisiana State University. Mirsky, meanwhile, went to Boston University, where he encouraged officials to hire his friend when the psychiatry department chairman left.
“I remember calling him and speaking to his wife and saying, ‘Don’t unpack; you’re coming to Boston,’ ” Mirsky recalled.
Dr. Cohen arrived in 1970 and during his Boston years also served as superintendent of the Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Center. Concerns about the impact of race and racism on mental health helped guide him as he oversaw BU programs that offered services in the South End, Roxbury, and Dorchester, his daughter said.
“He believed that to provide the kinds of mental health services those communities needed, you had to rely on people within the communities who truly understood the needs of the people,” she said. “It couldn’t be driven from the top down, from academics in the ivory tower.”
Although Dr. Cohen “was a man of extraordinary intelligence and accomplishment in his field, you never got the sense that he was driven by ego,” his daughter said. “What always seemed to motivate him was his pursuit of knowledge, to gain knowledge, to impart knowledge through teaching. He recognized that one could find knowledge from all sorts of different sources.”
Dr. Cohen, who also had served as a senior visiting scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, was a professor and administrator at the University of Miami’s medical school after leaving Boston. While there he helped launch programs and initiate research on mental health issues for those with HIV and AIDS.
A service has been held for Dr. Cohen, who in addition to his wife, daughter, and son leaves two other sons, John of Darnestown, Md., and Robert of Darien, Conn.; and 10 grandchildren.
Honored for his work by the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Cohen devoted so much time to his profession that “work was almost his hobby,” Jeffrey said. “He was usually the first person to get up in the morning, the last to go to bed at night, and worked on weekends.”
Still, he added, Dr. Cohen was a presence in the lives of his four children, and he was a model for what they could accomplish. “He was a great inspiration to a lot of people, certainly for me as a daughter both personally and professionally,” Debra said.
“He was universally liked,” Jeffrey said, “and I think people professionally experienced the same person.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard @globe.com.
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In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, or the Laurel Lake Foundation Tranquility Garden Fund, 200 Laurel Lake Drive, Hudson, Ohio 44236.