19 Facts About Fredric Wertham

Besides Seduction of the Innocent, Fredric Wertham wrote articles and testified before government inquiries into comic books, most notably as part of a US Congressional inquiry into the comic book industry.

Fredric Wertham was born Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer on March 20,1895, in Nuremberg to the middle-class Jewish family of Sigmund and Mathilde Wertheimer.

Fredric Wertham did not change his name legally to Fredric Wertham until 1927.

Fredric Wertham was very much influenced by Dr Emil Kraepelin, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Munich, and worked briefly at the Kraepelin Clinic in Munich in 1922.

Around this time Fredric Wertham corresponded and visited with Sigmund Freud, who influenced him in his choice of psychiatry as his specialty.

Fredric Wertham became a United States citizen and married the sculptor Florence Hesketh in 1927.

Fredric Wertham moved to New York City in 1932 to accept a senior staff position at the Bellevue Mental Hygiene Clinic, the psychiatric clinic connected with the New York Court of General Sessions in which all convicted felons received a psychiatric examination that was used in court.

In 1946, Fredric Wertham opened the Lafargue Clinic in the basement of St Philip's Church in Harlem, a low-cost psychiatric clinic specializing in the treatment of Black teenagers.

In extensive testimony before the committee, Fredric Wertham restated arguments from his book and pointed to comics as a major cause of juvenile crime.

Fredric Wertham objected to not only the violence in the stories but the fact that air rifles and knives were advertised alongside them.

Fredric Wertham claimed that retailers who did not want to sell material with which they were uncomfortable, such as horror comics, were essentially held to ransom by the distributors.

Also in 1954, Fredric Wertham was the Court's appointed psychiatric expert in the trial of the Brooklyn Thrill Killers.

Fredric Wertham always denied that he favored censorship or had anything against comic books in principle, and in the 1970s he focused his interest on the benign aspects of the comic fandom subculture; in his last book, The World of Fanzines, he concluded that fanzines were "a constructive and healthy exercise of creative drives".

Still infamous to most comics fans of the time, Fredric Wertham encountered suspicion and heckling at the convention, and stopped writing about comics thereafter.

Fredric Wertham died on November 18,1981, at his retirement home in Kempton, Pennsylvania, at age 86.

Fredric Wertham's papers were donated to the Library of Congress and are held by the Manuscript Division.

Fredric Wertham's activism was cited in the 2011 US supreme court decision Brown v Entertainment Merchants Association.

Fredric Wertham was satirized as a Dr Bertham who was kidnapped and turned into a monster by a mad scientist in Seaboard's Brute No 2.

Wertham makes an appearance in the fifth book of Dav Pilkey's Cat Kid Comic Club series in the short comic book I Am Dr Fredric Wertham written by the character Melvin.