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Nedd Willard (born 1926) is an American author and artist living in Thorens-Glières, France, and Geneva, Switzerland.
Born in New York City, Willard was a merchant sailor on the Hudson River and on the Atlantic Ocean during the Second World War, after which he hitchhiked across the United States, doing odd jobs to earn his living. He toured Spain on a motorcycle in the 1960s and earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne with a dissertation on the subject of "Genius and Madness in the 18th Century."[1]
Willard taught at the University of New Hampshire and Columbia University and then began work at international institutions. Willard spent three months of professional activity in Ethiopia and three months in Cameroon. For six years he was chief of public information for the World Health Organization in India and Southeast Asia, followed by an assignment as editor-in-chief of World Health magazine of the same agency. He then became editor of UN Special, a magazine for international civil servants in Geneva. In 1981 he was the information attaché for a world survey in preparation for the organization's fifth World Conference on Smoking and Health.[2]
He is now a free-lance journalist[3][4] and is a member of the Advisory Circle of the Seva Foundation.[5]
Willard diligently analyzes the conception of Man, Genius and Madness such as it appears in the writings of Diderot, in the Encyclopédie, in the Tableau de Paris, by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and in the works of Offray de La Mettrie and the marquis de Sade. It is a pity that Willard omits pointing to the medical works of this era (Pinel, Cabanis, etc.). And, what's more, that he ignores, it seems, several of the most important studies on this subject (Lange-Eichbaum, Semelaigne, etc.). The author does not make the necessary distinction between neuroses, psychoses and troubles of intelligence. Nevertheless, this monograph is a useful contribution to the knowledge about the position taken by the principal French literary and scientific movement in the 18th century concerning the "irrational" behavior of the individual.[7]
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