Robert Foster Kennedy

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Robert Foster Kennedy (1884-1952) was an Irish-American neurologist.

Foster Kennedy studied medicine at the Royal University of Ireland/Dublin. After graduating in 1906 he worked at the National Hospital, Queen's Square (London) where he was influenced by brilliant neuroscientists such as Sir William Gowers, John Hughlings Jackson, Sir Victor Horsley and Sir Henry Head. In 1910 Foster Kennedy was invited to come to the recently established New York Neurlogical Institute. The outbreak of World War I brought him back to Europe where he served in a French Military Hospital and subsequently with a British unit. Working close to the front line he had several narrow escapes, and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur by France.

After the war he worked in the Bellevue Hospital, New York, where one of his colleagues was Samuel Kinnier Wilson. Foster Kennedy became professor of neurology at Cornell University and in 1940 was elected president of the "American Neurological Association". He was one of the first to use electroconvulsive treatment in the management of psychosis, and was the first to point out that shell shock was hysteria. He believed that this rose from an insoluble conflict between the soldier's instinct for self-preservation and his herd instinct.

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