John Case Nemiah

Biography

Nemiah was born on November 30, 1918 in Cheshire, Connecticut and later on moved with his family to Hanover, New Hampshire when he was a little kid. During his childhood he received a self-discipline and education in Greek and Latin at Hotchkiss School and because of it, decided to pursue a career in psychiatry while reading Sigmund Freud. He attended Yale University, where he served on the business staff of The Yale Record, the campus humor magazine. After Yale, he graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1943 and later on got an internship at Boston City Hospital, and got residence in both Yale and Massachusetts General Hospitals. His residence in those places was interrupted as he got drafted into the armed service for two years where he kept his neuropsychiatrist position.

He held the same position at the Tufts University to which he came in 1952 and became a member of a faculty there along with Stanley Cobb and served there as chief of Inpatient Psychiatry Unit for 16 years. During the same years he, along with Peter Sifneos, began psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute where he also did psychiatry and psychosomatic researches. Every Saturday morning he will held lectures on psychopathology and psychodynamics at his alma mater and did the same thing for future surgeons at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

From 1968 to 1973 he was appointed as a secretary to the faculty of medicine and from 1968 to 1985 he became Psychiatrist-in-Chief at the Beth Israel Hospital. By 1985 he retired from there, but continued lecturing at the Dartmouth Medical School and two years later was awarded with the Outstanding Psychiatric Educator Award from the Association for Academic Psychiatry. Prior to it, in 1978 he became the 10th editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry and due to his reviews made it number one choice for psychiatric authors and readers. He died at 90 years of age on May 11, 2009 in Nashua, New Hampshire.