Elliot D. Weitzman MD and early sleep research and sleep medicine in New York

Elliot Weitzman, past Professor of Neurology and Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, NY, USA, had an illustrious career and was a true pioneer of sleep research and sleep medicine in New York in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. He created the clinical sleep center at MontefioreMedical Center in New York on 27 April 1977, which was the first sleep center in the United States to be accredited by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) (formerly the Association of Sleep Disorders Centers (ASDC)). The center was modeled in part on the first sleep clinic in the country, a clinic dedicated to the diagnosis, research, and treatment of narcolepsy that was developed by William Dement at Stanford University in California in 1964. Weitzman, who was born in Newark, NJ, USA, in 1929, was originally interested in journalism and joined Iowa State University, but soon transferred to, and graduated from, the University of Iowa with a BA in zoology in 1950. He then went to medical school at the University of Chicago and was in the same class as William Dement. At that time, Weitzman already had an interest in neurology and in 1951 he became an instructor in neuroanatomy (Fig. 1). Weitzman and Dement stayed in contact after their graduation with an MD degree from the University of Chicago in 1955. Dement studied sleep and dreams in Chicago under the mentorship of Nathaniel Kleitman and moved to New York in 1957 as an intern at the Mount Sinai Hospital, which, at that time, was not yet a medical school, and he worked on sleep with Charles Fisher in the Department of Psychiatry who was performing research on dreams. “I had a sleep laboratory (in my apartment on the West Side!), rent paid for by the NIH. Many of my sleep subjects were recruited from the Radio City Hall dancing Rockettes,” said Bill Dement. Sleep deprivation received a lot of publicity in New York in the 1950s, because of Peter Tripp. He was a Top 40 countdown radio personality from Port Chester, New York. His career peaked with his 1959 record-breaking 201-h wakeathon (working on the radio nonstop without sleep to benefit the March of Dimes). For much of the stunt, he sat in a glass booth in Times Square. After a few days, he began to hallucinate and, for the last 66 h, Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a NY psychiatrist who had received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to study sleep deprivation, gave him medication to help him stay awake [1]. Weitzman initially did his internship at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, and then his neurology residency from 1956 to 1959 at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He was in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, Department of Neurophysiology, at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington DC from 1959 to 1961, where he performed pain research on rhesus monkeys that was published in the journal Science in 1961 [2]. After that, he joined Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1961 and continued his pain research on monkeys. Peter MacGregor, BSc, went with With contributions from Roger Broughton Charles CzeislerWilliam Dement Christian Guilleminault Daniel Kripke Wallace Mendelson Merrill Mitler Mark Pressman Howard Roffwarg Thomas Roth and Jon Sassin. However any factual errors are solely the responsibility of the author. * Sleep-Wake Disorders Center, Montefiore Medical Center, 111 East 210th Street, The Bronx, NY 10467, USA. Tel.: +1 718 920 4841; fax: 718 798 4352. E-mail address: thorpy@aecom.yu.edu.