Joel Elkes was a leading medical researcher specialising in the chemistry of the brain.
24 Facts About Joel Elkes
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Joel Elkes is regarded as the father of modern neuropsychopharmacology and directed the first experimental psychiatric Uffculme Clinic in Birmingham, UK.
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Joel Elkes was responsible for the setting up of international organisations and university departments to further the investigation of the effects of psychopharmacy.
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Joel Elkes spent the latter part of his career endeavouring to bring higher levels of humanity, compassion and ethics to medical training.
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Joel Elkes's father served in the Russian Army as a medical officer during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War I The family fled to Kovno in the newly formed Lithuanian Republic.
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Joel Elkes attended Schwabe's Gymnasium, a Hebrew Jewish high school, with a Zionist orientation.
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Joel Elkes was an outstanding student graduating with honours and developing an interest in chemistry.
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In 2011 in a talk to the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology Joel Elkes identified three people who had inspired him: Einstein in physics, Erlich for his work on neuro-receptors, and Goethe for his rare combination of humanism, scientific creativity and spirit.
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In 1930 Joel Elkes enrolled in the St Mary's Hospital Medical School, Paddington in London where he was tutored by such medical luminaries as Charles Wilson, 1st Baron Moran, Almroth Wright, Alexander Fleming and Aleck Bourne, whose daughter Joel Elkes would later marry.
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Joel Elkes found it difficult to support himself and his sister Sara but was offered a post by Alistair Frazer in the newly formed Transfusion Service where he met Charmian Bourne.
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Joel Elkes graduated in 1941 and was invited by Frazer to join him as a research fellow in pharmacology at Birmingham University.
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In 1950 Joel Elkes was awarded a Fulbright Travelling Fellowship in America where he worked at the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston and at Norwich State Hospital, Connecticut.
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Joel Elkes continued his work on anticholinesterase, acetylcholine blockers and amphetamines and their action on the activity of the brain and thus behaviour.
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Joel Elkes regarded the centre as an academic "greenhouse" in which he toiled as "a good gardener".
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In 1963 Joel Elkes took a post as chairman of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Joel Elkes renamed his department the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences and worked toward integrating psychiatry with the physical medicine disciplines.
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Joel Elkes was the founder and first Chairman of the Board of Fellowship House, a residential intermediate-care rehabilitation facility for people with mental illness which still exists in a developed form to the modern day.
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Joel Elkes left Johns Hopkins in 1974 and took a named professorship in McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where he developed ideas about the need for self-awareness in physicians and the necessity to humanise medical education and training.
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Joel Elkes was Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, where he continued to develop his ideas of incorporating social, ethical and psychological dimensions with the biological foundation he had already created.
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Joel Elkes married Josephine Rhodes, and while living in Canada he returned to painting, a long-standing hobby.
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Joel Elkes' mother survived the Landsberg-Dachau concentration camp and came to London.
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Joel Elkes later emigrated to Israel with her daughter, Sara, where she died in the 70s.
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Joel Elkes married his second wife Josephine Rhodes in December 1975, she died in 1999 During his time in Ontario Elkes wrote a memoir about his father.
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Joel Elkes was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and chair of the Israeli Centre for Psychobiology.