Joseph Collins

Joseph Collins was elected to the Century in 1901. He died on June 11, 1950.

He was a physician, and he was also a neurologist, psychiatrist, psychologist and author of many books. He took his medical degree at New York University in 1888, and after that he studied in Germany.

From 1897 to 1909 Dr. Collins was Professor of Neurology at the New York Post-Graduate Medical School. He also served on the staff of the City Hospital.

His important work in life was the organizing and making a reality of the Neurological Institute, now part of the Presbyterian Hospital Medical Center. His best-known book is probably “The Doctor Looks at Love and Life,” published in 1926, in which he described America as suffering from “adult infantilism.”

He was a witty man, with a sharp Irish tongue, witty rather than humorous as the Celt so often is. Once, on the witness stand, a lawyer was trying to show that Collins was not a psychiatrist, but was a neurologist, i.e., concerned only with nerve structure. He asked Collins if it was not true that he was merely a neurologist, pure and simple. Collins answered drily: “Always pure, but rarely simple.”

Remembering his own early struggles to get an education, Dr. Collins, in his will, left the bulk of his very considerable property in trust, the income to be used to “enable students and cultured young men and women, who are ambitious and determined and who are without sufficient means, to study medicine.”

George W. MartinMember profile currently not available; contact Archivist for information on this Centurion
1951/1952 Century Association Yearbook