Menninger's long history began with a small idea

Charles Frederick Menninger, MD

Late in life, well into a long career as a general medical practitioner, C.F. Menninger, MD, decided to experience the thing that had so embraced his psychiatrist sons Karl and Will.

Dr C.F. sought to undergo psychoanalysis in order to improve himself as a physician. He approached psychiatrist Dr. Smith Ely Jeliffe, at the time one of the best-known analysts in America. Dr. Jeliffe told Dr. Menninger, "I could not undertake to analyze you and I doubt if you can find a good analyst in America who will. You are that rare thing, a truly mature man. I would feel like a fool with you on the couch.'' He tried elsewhere, with other analysts, but was met with essentially the same reply. Dr. C.F. was then 70 years old and still passionate for knowledge. He would live for another 21 years.

What was it about this man that made him so unique?

A marked appetite for learning had been a hallmark of his whole life, something he and his wife, Flo, passed onto their sons Karl and Will, with whom they built The Menninger Foundation, and which was to become a center of excellence in psychiatric care and training. Edwin, the middle son, bypassed a medical career for one in the newspaper business, although he became prominent for the study and proliferation of flowering trees.

Born in Tell City, Indiana, in 1862, the sixth of 10 children, by 13 years old "Charley" already had mastered the business of operating his father's modest saw mill, though he was more interested in learning how to read the age of a tree than in reading accounting sheets. He was sent to live with a married sister in a nearby town where he worked in a courthouse as a clerk, while receiving pre-college tutoring in algebra, geometry, trigonometry, general science, Greek and Latin.

After graduating from college in 1882, an "attractive, but scrawny" Charles Frederick became a college instructor in Holton, Kansas, where he met an intense, plainly-dressed 20-year-old student named Flo Knisely, who he would marry, but not before the relationship between teacher and student scandalized the school.

The oldest of five children, Flo helped her widowed mother support the family. Transplanted from Pennsylvania, the Kniselys battled drought, insects, stubborn land, and an assortment of prairie critters, to survive an inhospitable and untamed Kansas. Flo faced life with a quiet stoicism and a deep belief in fundamentalist Christian principles that stressed the ills of vice and the glories of work.

C.F.'s capacity for learning and teaching was clear by then. He taught his students algebra, bookkeeping, botany, chemistry, geography, geology, German history, mineralogy, music, natural philosophy, penmanship, physiology, and physics. And because students wanted it, he taught himself and them Morse code in order to use the telegraph. He also taught himself engineering and he became so proficient, Holton officials hired him to survey the city.

But it was nature that embraced his interests.

Kansas was especially intriguing for someone with C.F.'s hunger for knowledge of natural science, offering him the opportunity to study the vast landscapes of the Plains with their tall grasses and wildlife, bountiful bird migrations, weather extremes, and flat views of the Earth to the horizon in all four directions.

"He used the environment as his chalkboard,'' said Dr. Roy Menninger, C.F.'s grandson and Chairman of Menninger Trustees. "Grandfather's view of nature was very broad. He was interested in flowers and trees and rocks and minerals, the whole range of flora. If it was natural phenomena, grandfather was interested.''

Concerned over his weight loss and chronic cough, an exhausted C.F. took a doctor's advice and left teaching to rest, but not before he had taught himself enough medical knowledge to instruct three pre-Med students who had arrived in Holton.

He decided to pursue a career in medicine and found his first year's course of study inadequate compared with the one he had designed himself in Holton. Undeterred, he went on to study homeopathy, a natural pharmaceutical science that uses various plants, minerals, or animals in very small doses to stimulate the sick person's natural defense; the more conventional medical practice of the day used bleeding and the bombardment of patients with generous quantities of medicines.

A lonely life
Dr. C.F. found fellow physicians unfriendly and reluctant to share medical innovations, especially with a homeopath, which was considered a suspect medical practice. The inexperienced young doctor was troubled by his lack of professional mentors, believing that physicians had an obligation to share what they knew with others.

He continued reading about medical illnesses as he confronted them, teaching himself how to treat his sick patients and learning as he went. Meanwhile, he eased away from a strict adherence to homeopathy.

He was seized with the idea of a group practice, in which various conventional medical specialists exchanged knowledge and worked together.

"Over and over I thought," Dr. C.F. said, "I wish I could talk to some other doctor about this (disease or illness). I wish I knew where to go for help.''

It wouldn't be until 1908-18 years after settling in Topeka-that he saw his idea of a group practice at work, and when he did, it would prove to be an epiphany.

Seeing the light
While attending the Interstate Medical Society at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., Dr. C.F. was dazzled by what he saw and said so. His enthusiasm was rewarded when he was invited to stay for three days to visit with the Mayos and their staff.

The Clinic was structured so doctors did not rush diagnoses; instead, patient problems were thoroughly identified and when a physician needed advice from another specialist, he merely sought out a colleague.

"Here was the thing I had been looking for, the answer to the need I had felt for consultation and sharing of insight," he said.

When he returned to Topeka he had a revelation at breakfast with his family-Flo and their sons Karl, 14, Edwin, 11, and William, 8.

"The boys around that breakfast table gave me an idea,'' Dr. C.F. said years later. "They already were well on the way to finding out about things. They were used to trips to the woods, the creeks, and the country, and to (learning) as much as we could tell them about the plants and animals and rocks and fossils they saw.

"I said to the family, 'I know what we will do with our boys. It will take some time, but these boys will be doctors and we will have a clinic here.' " Dr. C.F. was 46 years old.

It was more a spoken wish than a direct order, said Dr. Roy. "I'm quite sure he never told his kids to go to school to be doctors. Grandfather was a kindly, gentle soul, who, if he ever raised his voice, I never knew it."

Best in the West
By 1925, his dream came true. Together, with sons Will and Karl, whose interest in psychiatry inspired the direction for the group practice, the C.F. Menninger family opened a 13-bed Sanitarium and Psychopathic Hospital.

The treatment environment included a family atmosphere, physical exercise, a multidisciplinary team of physicians for each patient and a mix of Freud and friendliness.

The beginning was a rough go. Patients were often brought into the clinic under the guise of being in need of medical treatment to avoid their neighbors thinking of them as lunatics, madmen, or maniacs.

"We had the vision of a better kind of medicine and a better kind of world," Dr. C.F. said, believing that no patient was untreatable.

"My father had an idea and an ideal,'' Dr. Karl once wrote. "My brother and I worked at it, but everybody helped develop it. We're all proud, together. I couldn't begin to tell you how many people helped. Still do."

Among the best
Dr. C.F. was active all of his life. At 79, he collected minerals, supervised three rose gardens, grew lilacs, grapes, irises, peonies, taught numerology to nurses at the graduate school, lectured to the Garden Club, worked to bring the American Peony Society to Topeka.

He loved flowers and cited peonies as a very "healthy" variety.

"They have no aches and pains, they make no outcry, and there are no anxious and troubled faces to comfort. They just grow and bloom."

Dr. C.F. said they had curative qualities, enabling him to keep his "physical and emotional equilibrium" until his death at 91.

Within 10 years of opening its doors, the Menninger Sanitarium was one of only five psychiatric institutions in the United States deemed worthy of praise by Fortune magazine-and the only one west of the Alleghenies. Things were rapidly changing.

The nation was just beginning to learn of a place called Menninger, the site of a revolution in the world of psychiatry. And Americans had not yet heard of the names Will or Karl, the sons of a man defined by his intelligence, generosity and a love of humankind.

And although he worked beside them, Dr. C.F., who was 91 when he died in 1953, preceded by Flo eight years earlier, quietly observed his psychiatrist sons and their collective dream come to fruition.

Dr. Roy said his grandfather was a "great and special kind of a man" who was "singularly unselfish so that he saw himself as endlessly able to give and seldom ever one to take for himself."

Those were virtuous qualities that did not go unnoticed.

"My father crystallized the spirit of working together in a group," Dr. Karl said, "by the most magnificent and eloquent self-effacement. He stepped quietly into the background.''

Karl Menninger, MD
As a college student, Karl Menninger was young, smart, and perplexed. The direction of his life lay ahead of him, a mystery waiting to unfold. His mother, Flo, a deeply spiritual woman, saw in him what so many mothers see in their sons-a potential for greatness. She had already discussed with Karl the possibilities of a literary life or one in banking or perhaps an evangelical calling by which the nation's collective soul would fall into sure and righteous hands. His father, C.F., by then a respected medical doctor in Topeka, Kansas, was far less vocal about Karl's future, except for a vociferous expectation-clearly stated-that he would excel in his academic studies, wherever they might lead him.

A glimpse of the young man's future would emerge at an unlikely moment, as he was receiving relief from pain through medical treatment, an affirming metaphor for the rest of Karl Menninger's life.

It was in a dentist's chair suffering from a toothache that young Karl saw the light. Discussing what Karl might do with his life, the dentist, Dr. Fred Koester, said most young men would consider it a great opportunity and an honor to go into medical practice with Karl's father. A moment's thought transformed into a jarring revelation and Karl's epiphany was complete. He loved the sciences, did well in them, and the very idea of working beside his father emerged in him like a lost ship finally sighting land.

Before leaving the office, Karl announced, "I am going to be a doctor."

"Of course you are," Dr. Koester agreed.

Hearing the news, Dr. C.F. hugged his son, his eyes tearfully welling up in joy. It was a harbinger of things to come. Now that the oldest of his three sons had committed to a life in medicine, Dr. C.F.'s wish that his boys would be doctors was beginning to coalesce.

Turning point
When Karl returned from his medical internship at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, Dr. C.F. recalled in an interview, "He told me that he had been greatly inspired and moved by what he had learned about mental illness and the need for a better understanding of the great number of forgotten, neglected, and suffering people outside the fold of general medicine."

But Dr. Karl voiced doubts whether he could follow in the footsteps of his great teacher, E.E. Southard, chief of psychiatry at Harvard, and actually have an opportunity to practice such an unconventional medical discipline as psychiatry while remaining in his native Kansas.

His father-ever the optimist-encouraged him to stay in Kansas, where father and son could work together.

"I told him that, far from considering his new interest in psychiatry bizarre and foolhardy, I thought it the most interesting field he could enter."

Though psychiatry was then something practiced quietly, the Menninger's opened a clinic in the practice of neurology and psychiatry, and sought out other physicians to join them in a cooperative practice, a novel concept with a unique application. Patients would receive conventional medical examinations, but their psychological status would also be explored and recorded. Now, anxieties and sadness would be examined with the same scrutiny given tumors and infections.

Getting organized
The Menninger Diagnostic Clinic was formed in 1919 and suffered several false starts. Doctors didn't readily flock to the Menninger idea of a medical cooperative. Dr. Karl's enthusiasm for the little known field of psychiatry was meeting some resistance. Alarmed citizens went to court to stop him from operating a "maniac ward" at the local hospital, and thereafter he had to smuggle his patients surreptitiously, disguising them under erroneous diagnoses.

But gradually, physicians and patients were attracted to the clinic and by 1925 local investors helped found the Menninger Sanitarium on a 20-acre site.

"I am not looking at this just with the idea of seeing how many patients I can see or how many dollars I can drag in," Dr. Karl wrote to his younger brother Will, who would join the sanitarium after graduating from medical school the same year. "... The joy you're going to get out of your work is not directly related to the amount of money you make.''

A year later saw the formation of the Southard School for mentally retarded children, which eventually embraced treatment of all psychiatric conditions. The facility was named after Dr. Karl's mentor, Dr. Southard, who told him, "... go back to Kansas, but don't forget the children. ..."

New facilities continued to be constructed, although the operation did not necessarily turn a profit. In fact, Southard School, a ripe environment for research into children's personality disorders, was expected to operate at a loss simply because families were apt not to pay as much for a child's care as they might for an adult's.

Milieu therapy replaced the popular "rest cure" of the times, and embraced the concept of combining activities like farm work or landscaping with treatment that fit an individual's needs, the entire day scheduled.

With the specialists of the Menninger medical cooperative working together so well, it became apparent that specialized psychiatric training for nurses was necessary and a formal course of instruction was created. Soon, Menninger received approval to offer training to physicians in the specialty of psychiatry and in 1933 three residents began training, doubling the psychiatric staff treating 30 patients.

A burgeoning fame
Dr. Karl specialized in neurology and psychiatry, but his writing brought him fame. His first book, The Human Mind, attempted to educate the public in psychiatry. Writing the book was not an easy task for a busy psychiatrist, and Dr. Karl alluded to this in his preface: "One can't stop living to write a book and I've had to put together this manuscript under difficulties.''

He says he wrote it "aboard trains, in depots, in cabooses, in hospital wards, and under the light of a farmer's coal-lamp, all the while coping with the important and mundane interruptions that will come into a human life."

Despite his hard work, the 37-year-old psychiatrist didn't have much faith in the success of his self-imposed project, writing to a friend, "(the book) will probably not set the world by the ears." He was very wrong.

The Human Mind was published in 1930 and immediately became a Literary Guild selection and sold 200,000 copies. It was one of the first books in which a psychiatrist explained the everyday workings that went on in his office, and showed the world as it is seen through the eyes of a psychiatrist.

Freud's influence
It was once said of Dr. Karl that in using his skill for imagery and clear, vivid writing, he had translated Sigmund Freud, the world's first psychoanalyst, into American literature. Many of Freud's insights into the human mind, which seemed so revolutionary at the turn of the 20th century, are now widely accepted by schools of psychological thought. The Human Mind's unraveling of Freud was the key to Dr. Karl's initial fame and popularized his name with a public hungry to learn more about its inner self.

"Freud's great courage," Dr. Karl would say years later, "led him to look honestly at the evil in man's nature. But he persisted in his researches to the bottom of the chest and he discerned that potentially love is stronger than hate, that for all its core of malignancy, the nature of men can be transformed with the nurture and dispersion of love.

"This was the hope that Freud's discoveries gave us. This was the spirit of the new psychiatry. It enabled us to replace therapeutic nihilism with constructive effort, to replace unsound expectations, first with hope, and then with sound expectations.''

Battling stigmas
Dr. Karl was a lifelong crusader against the stigma surrounding mental illness, and brought mental disorders out of the dark through teaching, letters, lectures, magazine articles, newspaper columns and more than a dozen books. It was a battle he and his brother, Dr. Will, waged throughout their lives. Dr. Karl also spoke out against social injustice and for nuclear disarmament. He supported the rights of neglected and abused children and Native Americans, and counseled understanding for inmates while raging against the system that imprisoned them.

"I sometimes feel as if I would like to scream out to the American public that they are squirting gasoline on the fire," Dr. Karl told a congressional hearing in 1971. "The prison system is now manufacturing offenders, it is increasing the amount of transgression, it is multiplying crimes, it is compounding evil."

The personal Karl
In his senior years, Karl Menninger could be contrary, swaying between moods both kind and brusque. Those who knew him say he was loving and mercurial, embracing a host of emotions at any given time as only a great man can.

This was the same charismatic man who told the world, "Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarely taken." And the man who insisted that "love is the touchstone of psychiatric treatment ... to our patient who cannot love, we must say by our actions that we do love him."

At 82, Dr. Karl was to have said that he spent the first 50 years of his life in treating people, and he was going to spend the last 50 years in prevention.

And he kept his eye the horizon:

"Anybody as old as I am is thinking about dying-thinking about it quite often. You want to get as much done as you can before you die." He did that and more.

At 96, he complained of rusty knees, bad hearing and forgetfulness, but he felt as though he were still plugging along: "I've tried to make life easier for people," he said. "You hold a coat when you can and tie a man's shoe when you can. You try to do what you can."

Honors and awards
During his lifetime he toured Europe to assess the need for psychiatric care among returning military personnel, established the Menninger School of Psychiatry, the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis, then the only training facility west of the Mississippi, testified before Congress and elsewhere on mental health issues, was a vigorous participant in the formation of psychiatric organizations, and of course, ran Menninger wearing a variety of executive hats.

He received numerous honors and awards from his professional peers, from government, and from national groups. In 1981 he became the only psychiatrist ever to receive the Medal of Freedom-the highest civilian honor the country can bestow-from then-President Jimmy Carter, whose wife Rosalynn has been a Menninger Trustee since 1986.

After a career whose span embraced so many roles-teacher, orator, first-rate writer, administrator, activist, philosopher, psychiatrist, and more-Dr. Karl died four days short of his 97th birthday.

Spreading the light
Late in his life, Karl Menninger, cane in hand, posed before the Menninger Tower, the most recognizable symbol of Menninger itself. Reminiscent of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Tower was erected for the Security Benefit Association and taken over by Menninger in 1954. Erected in 1930, the same year The Human Mind was published, the Tower and the man share similarities.

The landmark can be seen from a far distance, its four-sided clock face illuminating the night like a lighthouse beacon, much as Karl Menninger towered over psychiatry for a lifetime, directing light into the shadows of the human condition.

Wit and wisdom from Dr. Karl
Karl Menninger, MD, co-founded The Menninger Clinic in 1925. During his long career in medicine, he was known as the "dean of American psychiatry." A prolific writer and a dynamic speaker, Dr. Karl's ability to capture a thought with a pithy comment or render an insight in a few brief words, reflected a sharp, and often witty, mind. Before he died in 1990, Dr. Karl had expressed opinions across a range of subjects. Some are presented here:

On prevention
Dr. Karl was asked what a person should do if he felt a "nervous breakdown" coming on. He said: "Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for them."  

On facts
"One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways."

On ignorance
"The voice of intelligence...is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance."

On unrest
"Unrest of the spirit is a mark of life; one problem after another presents itself and in the solving of them we can find our greatest pleasure."

On hope
"Man can't help hoping even if he is a scientist. He can only hope more accurately."

On living
"...Our conception of psychiatric hospitals here is not confinement; we think they are places in which to be treated, places in which to learn to understand one's self, to learn how to live."

On soothing
"It is doubtless true that religion has been the world's psychiatrist throughout the centuries."

On self
"To 'know thyself' must mean to know the malignancy of one's own instincts and to know, as well, one's power to deflect it."

On love
"Love cures people-both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it."

On love II
"Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarely taken."  

On love III
"One does not fall into love; one grows into love, and love grows in him."

On life's mission
"The central purpose of each life should be to dilute the misery in the world."

On retribution
"What's done to children, they will do to society." 

On generosity
"Money giving is a very good criterion, in a way, of a person's mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally ill people."

On hope
"Hope is an adventure, a going forward, a confident search for a rewarding life."

On guilt
Someone once asked Dr. Karl to name the mistake most common to all humankind. "Feeling guilty," he replied.

On mental health
"The ones to worry about are those who don't ever suspect themselves of any mental infirmity but are always sure that it is all the other people in the world who are crazy or wicked or disloyal."

On psychiatrists
"The psychiatrist as a person is more important than the psychiatrist as a technician or scientist. What he is has more effect upon his patients than anything he does."

On changing
"Every once in a while someone speaks to me about 'mellowing.' I never know whether this is a compliment or an insult."

On tolerance
"I can't prove it, but I am pretty sure that when people overcome their fear and prejudice against mental illness, they become healthier-minded, and hence, more tolerant in other ways"

On a busy life
"No one but doctors and mothers know what it means to have interruptions."

On giving
"Some don't dare give, they might run out. My dear friends, of course you are going to run out. You can't take it with you. I don't know how many hundreds of my patients are now asleep in their graveyard, leaving behind far more money than they could handle, far more money than their children could peacefully divide. The ill individual narrows his vision until he ceases to see the multiplicity of opportunity."

Weller than well
"Not infrequently we observe that a patient who is in a phase of recovery from what may have been a rather long illness shows continued improvement, past the point of his former 'normal' state of existence. He not only gets well, to use the vernacular; he gets as well as he was, and then continues to improve still further. He increases his productivity, he expands his life and its horizons. He develops new talents, new powers, new effectiveness. He becomes, one might say, 'weller than well.' ...Every experienced psychiatrist has seen it.... What could it mean? It violates our conventional medical expectations, so perhaps it is often overlooked and occurs more often than we know. It may contain a clue for better prevention and better treatment.  ...Transcendence does occur. And perhaps it is not an exception but a natural consequence of new insights and new concepts of treatment."

The Vital Balance
The Viking Press, 1963

On listening
"Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand."

On searching
"...Peace or something near it is often achieved by those who do not seek it, who, seeking truth, forget themselves."

William Menninger, MD
Before the turn of the century in the Menninger home, Flo and Dr. C.F.'s children were raised napping in a home-made, cotton-filled baby box that was always placed under the sunniest window. Though the box was used for all three sons-Karl, Edwin, and Will-it was Will, by all accounts, who soaked up most of the sunshine and spent the rest of his life radiating warmth everywhere he went.

His older brother, psychiatrist Dr. Karl Menninger, once said: "From boyhood, my brother was a calm, amiable, levelheaded, self-reliant person with a strong sense of mission .... Will was such a sweet man .... I am continually amazed as I go around the country at the great love people had for my brother.''

A different kind of treatment
Dr. Will, as he was popularly known, graduated in 1924 from medical training at Cornell University and shortly thereafter joined his brother Karl, and their father, C.F., all physicians, in operating the newly opened Menninger Clinic, where the pioneering treatment of mental illness was developed, practiced, researched, and taught.

Dr. Will was considered a Master Teacher at the Menninger School of Psychiatry and around the world he emphasized the philosophy of "preventive psychiatry" in schools, churches, and industry. As a psychiatrist, he developed a "milieu treatment" method that provided a rational approach to healing the irrational patient. In addition to engaging patients in such physical activities as gardening or creative arts, the treatment environment was therapeutically influenced by the consistent attitudes and behavior of staff toward patients, based on an understanding of a patients' underlying problems.

Psychiatrists and social workers, as well as housekeepers and gardeners, were involved in a patient's recovery. This all-encompassing method-a drastic change from therapies that relied upon so-called "rest cures"-enabled interaction with patients in a constant and predictable manner. Versions of his treatment approach were adopted and refined in decades to come by more and more mental health centers. Dr. Will's unique method was one of the reasons Fortune magazine in 1935 called Menninger "the best private hospital west of the Alleghenies."

Milieu therapy has evolved into the comprehensive planning by psychiatric staff members of a patient's entire treatment day, which mixes therapies with activities.

War's end sparks changes
During World War II, Dr. Will served in the U.S. Surgeon General's Office, eventually running the Neuropsychiatry Division and rising to the rank of Brigadier General. He was ultimately responsible for the mental health of eight million Americans, among whom, Dr. Will said at the time, "for every four men wounded, one fellow blew his stack." The wartime military faced an enormous problem: one psychiatrist in service to a division of 15,000 men wasn't uncommon.

The military connection would eventually play a pivotal role in the life of the Clinic. The end of the war saw the return home of men emotionally devastated from battle. Their homecoming created a critical and immediate need for trained psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and nurses to care for the veterans. Dr. Will had already experienced the need for more medical help during the war years as 2.5 million military personnel were rejected or discharged based on their mental health. Now the Veterans Administration, influenced by Dr. Will, requested the Menningers create a pilot program that would combine psychiatric training along with the treatment of ex-servicemen. The Menningers moved quickly to comply and over the following months more than 100 young physicians arrived at Menninger and transformed Topeka into the largest psychiatric training center in the nation.

Teaching leadership
Drawing on observations made during his military experience, Dr. Will concluded that leadership was a critical factor in sustaining troop morale. Applying that theory in the 1950s, he pioneered programs and seminars at Menninger for the nation's top-level executives to instruct them about themselves and how to establish and maintain a healthy emotional climate in the workplace. Forty years later, those programs continue today through the Menninger Leadership Center.

Reforms and miracles
In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the Menninger brothers turned their attention to the overcrowded conditions at state hospitals. In their home state of Kansas, the government's hospital system ranked 47 out of 48 states in its treatment of the mentally ill. But after a series of accidents at the state hospital brought about a public clamor for improvements, the Menningers lobbied legislators and the press for support, initiated improved training programs and hiring practices for hospital workers, and established treatment standards aimed at returning formerly warehoused and hopeless patients back into society. The results were dramatic: after five years of reforms, 80 out of every 100 admitted patients were returning home within a year, compared with the previous five years when 70 of 100 patients admitted to the hospital could be expected to remain there for life. But the Menninger philosophy was to put "brains before bricks," preferring to allocate money for a well-trained staff and proper treatment rather than for architecturally impressive buildings in which to warehouse patients.

Success bred a huge jump in admissions as public confidence in state hospitals rose. Once called "snakepits," the state hospitals were transformed into treatment centers that became the envy of other states. Governors visited Menninger to view the "miracle in Kansas" with their own eyes.

Traveling, fundraising
Dr. Will became the chief fundraiser for the Menninger Foundation, which incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1941. He was also the Foundation's most ardent spokesman, calling for improved treatment of the mentally ill at every opportunity. His brother Karl called him a "psychiatric evangelist."

In his travels, he repeated the same message on which Menninger was built: mental illnesses are treatable. Within the context of Menninger's 1925 beginnings, this was a message considered radical in its day. Much of the change of heart within American society in the intervening years is attributed, in part, to the work of the Menningers-through the efforts of Dr. Karl, who was the author or co-author of 14 books; and through Dr. Will who wrote six books and 400 papers on medical and psychiatric subjects. Dr. Will also gave speeches before every conceivable civic and professional organization, and he appeared before Congress and in 27 state legislatures, clamoring for more states' support for the mentally ill, and urging legislators to duplicate "the miracle in Kansas," and revamp their state hospitals.

By 1948, Dr. Will's work was being widely noticed and TIME magazine featured him on its cover, a forum never before graced by a psychiatrist's portrait. The magazine referred to him as "psychiatry's U.S. sales manager" for his efforts to end the stigma against mental illness and for his unflagging efforts to promote prevention.

A national influence
Years later, Dr. Will advised President John F. Kennedy on mental health matters, especially the nation's neglect of psychiatric patients. Despite attempts by the President's staff to script and temper his comments, Dr. Will pressed his case for the mentally ill and soon afterwards President Kennedy successfully appealed to Congress for improved funding for the treatment of mental illness, a request that resonated with Dr. Will's influence.

In 1992, the late President's brother, Senator Edward Kennedy, was the speaker at the American Psychiatric Association's William C. Menninger Memorial Lecture. He told a packed hall that Dr. Will "educated my brother on the promise of psychiatry. He complained that when it came to government support, psychiatry was the poor cousin of the medical profession." Thereafter, Sen. Kennedy said, the establishment of mental health centers across the nation became a part of President Kennedy's "New Frontier."

Spreading the word
Dr. Will was a force, not only as a figure that could help shape social change, but also in raising funds for Menninger and spreading his message about the pervasiveness of mental illness. "Quite apart from the severe illnesses that take people to hospitals," he once wrote, "there are the fears, anxieties and obsessions which beset a much, much larger group of individuals."

In addition to his speeches, articles, and books, Dr. Will was active in professional organizations as well, helping to found the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry and serving as president of both the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychiatric Association.

A genuine manner
Once he became the chief fundraiser for the Menninger Foundation, his efforts kept him traveling on the road 180 days a year for 15 years. Though initially reluctant to assume the responsibility, he passionately embraced the fundraising mission that would consume the rest of his life. By all accounts, he was well suited for the task.

"Dr. Will can beam at you as if utterly fascinated, then pass on with such finesse, that, instead of feeling brushed off, you're convinced you've just met a wonderful fellow. And you have," a writer said in a 1955 issue of Medical Economics magazine. "If you're about to hear Dr. Will make a speech, you can be sure he'll try to sell you either on a professional idea or on making a contribution to the (Menninger) Foundation. So you can brace yourself for resistance. No matter. Once he begins talking, you're sold."

A lasting legacy
His death in 1966 was an enormous loss. A magical spirit had stilled. Psychiatry's greatest advocate was silent, though his work on behalf of Menninger is carried on by The Menninger Foundation today.

Dr. Will once wrote: "I believe the world can be a better place to live in if people are healthier in their minds."

He went on to define the practice of psychiatry as the re-education of a troubled mind, teaching how to live more effectively by understanding personal problems more clearly. He likened treatment to turning on a light in a darkened room where a person is stumbling and falling into the furniture. Successful treatment shines a light to help that person avoid the "bumps and the hurting."

Dr. Will's contribution to understanding humanity lessened the "bumps and the hurting" of countless people. And today his legacy thrives at Menninger in the hope and warmth that radiates from his fellow psychiatrists, whose lives are dedicated to the art of healing and to the ongoing quest for a brighter and better light.