Bender, Lauretta.

Lauretta Bender (1897-1987) was born in Butte, Montana, the oldest of five children and the only daughter in a family of old American stock. In an updated autobiographical account (Box 15), Bender reveals her admiration for her mother who disapproved of her non-traditional careerism.To a great degree, her life was characterized by a value she imbibled from her father, the "strong confidence in the value of the indivdual who is invincible against the difficulties in his life as long as he strives" (Box 3). By Bender's own account, she overcame the formidable handicap of dyslexia in her early school years to graduate as valedictorian of her high school class, a B.A. (1922) and M.A. (1923) from the University of Chicago, and a M.D.from the State of Iowa (1926). She soon distinguished herself in her work, developing the Bender-Gestalt Motor Test in 1923. Bender held internships and residences at the Billings Hospital of the University of Chicago, the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, the University of Amsterdam, and the Johns Hopkins University Hospital. She became associated with Dr. Samuel T. Orton, and, in 1926-1927, held a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship that took her to Holland. Following her return to the States she worked at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital with C. Marfie Campbell and Karl M. Bowman. At this time Bender first learned of the work of Paul Schilder (1886-1940) who would become the single most important figure in her life. A Viennese psychiatrist of Jewish extraction, Schilder had received hs M.D. a the University of Halle in 1911, and was already a recognized figure in psychiatry. A sometime associate of Freud, he had served as a physician in the Austrian army during World War I and had taught and practiced at the University Hospital of Vienna from 1918 to 1928. In 1929/30, when Bender worked at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital under Adolf Meyer, she first met Schilder, who had recently emigrated to the States. That meeting took place, in her words, "on January 2, 1930, in Phipps Clinic at a regualr morning staff conference in the University library. I knew immediately that this was the man I had been looking for" (Box 21). In April, when Schilder left Maryland for work at Bellevue Hospital, she "resolved to follow him. I therefore took the civil service examination for a Bellevue position that summer and started my work as a psychiatrist in the hospital in the fall of 1930 and where I have stayed until today, although many things have intervened" (Box 22). "... In the seventh year of our acquaintance, in the Fall of 1936, we were married" (Boxes 37-38). But this new marriage was not fated to last long. Schilder was killed in an automobile accident just four years later, leaving Bender with three infant children to raise. Among the important effects of her years of interaction with Schilder at Bellevue was her development of important holistic theories concerning child psychiatry, the field of psychiatry in which she was to play a shaping role in later years. She particulary singles out the importnace of art therapy and the innovative work of many colleagues at Bellevue, discussing particularly a recognition of the need to treat young children who had been deprived socially and emotionally. In addition to her energentic full-time service at Bellevue and Creedmoor, Bender wrote prolifically, participated in a broad range of professional activities, served as advisor to governmental committees, and supported many organizations devoted to mentally-ill children. In 1956, after 26 years of distinguished service at Bellevue, where she became Senior Psychiatrist in charge of the children's ward, Bender was appointed Director of Research of the new Children's Unit at Creedmoor State Hospital, and thereby, was provided with an opportunity to embark on what she described "as my life's work" (letter of 6/6/58 to John A. Stamper, Box 15, file 2). She retired from Creedmoor in 1968, but continued working for New York State until 1973. In 1965, she married Henry Benford Parkes, a professor of History at New York University. After Parkes' death in 1973, she moved to Annapolis, home of her son Peter Schilder, and died there in a nursing home in 1987.