Preface
Max Fink, June 9, 2017
“On a visit to my home in 2006, Drs. Edward Shorter and David Healy, writing their book Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness suggested that I place my files in the Special Collections at Stony Brook University. They were accepted in 2007 and I am very grateful to Kristen Nyitray, the university archivist, for her enthusiasm and personal interest in developing these archives.”
About
The Max Fink Papers at Special Collections and University Archives, Stony Brook University Libraries document the extraordinary career of psychiatrist and neurologist Max Fink, MD. Dr. Fink is a world leading expert and defender of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). His studies of ECT began in 1952 at Hillside Hospital in New York and he has published prolifically for six decades on the use and effects of ECT. In 1979, he authored Convulsive Therapy: Theory and Practic e, the book medical historian Edward Shorter and internationally recognized psychiatrist David Healy called the “definitive medical text on electroconvulsive shock.”
The collection is comprised of nearly 250 linear feet (475 boxes) of original research materials dating from the 1880s through 2017 and includes Dr. Fink’s notes, manuscripts, publications, correspondence, grant reports, and visual materials on the research and study of convulsive therapy (electroshock), catatonia, melancholia, pharmaco-electroencephalography, and psychopharmacology.
The first release of the Max Fink Digital Collection, a subset of the papers, includes nearly 7,000 items (20,000 pages) of original notes on experimental psychiatry, outgoing letters to colleagues, professional writings, and an autobiographical memoir completed in 2017. More items from the archival collection will be digitized in the future.