Bennett, A. E. (Abram Elting), 1898-1985

Biography

A.E. Bennett was born on 12 January 1898 in Alliance, Nebraska. He graduated from the University of Nebraska with a bachelor's of science degree in 1919, and from the former University of Nebraska College of Medicine in 1921. He interned from 1920-1921 at the University of Nebraska Hospital, and from 1922-1923 at the Philadelphia General Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His residency was at the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital and Nervous Infirmary and at Johns Hopkins' Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore, Maryland.

Bennett practiced medicine at Clarkson Memorial Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska from 1924-1948, specializing in neurology and psychiatry. He was also on the University of Nebraska College of Medicine faculty from 1928-1947. In 1945, he began the A.E. Bennett Neuropsychiatric Research Foundation. When Clarkson's psychiatry department closed, Bennett moved to Berkeley, California, working at the Herrick Memorial Hospital and as a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Berkeley. The tragic death of Foster Bennett, one of Bennett's three children, inspired the Foster Bennett Memorial Lecture Series.

A.E. Bennett was a member of the American Psychiatrists Association (APA), American Medical Association (AMA), American Neurological Association, and was an AMA National Board Medical Examiner. He received AMA awards for science exhibits in 1940, 1946, and 1958, and developed medical uses of curare, a tribal poison and curative. Bennett pioneered modern therapy for the mentally ill and researched effects of alchoholism on the brain.

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