By Gerald Klee, MD
[Fall 2007; Vol. 34, No. 1; Pg. 8]
Jerome
Styrt, MD died June 10, 2007 in Baltimore at the age of 87, due to numerous
complications following a hip fracture several months earlier.
Born
and educated in Chicago, he was an outstanding student at the University of
Chicago, where he earned a BS in chemistry in 1941 and an MD in 1945.
He
trained at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, MD and at the Retreat in
York and at Belmont Hospital in Sutton, Surrey.
He
completed his psychiatric training at Johns Hopkins in 1950. During the Korean
War, he served in the United States Public Health Service in Texas.
Dr.
Styrt began psychoanalytic training in 1947 at the Baltimore-Washington
Psychoanalytic Institute and became its eighth graduate in 1957. He joined the
Baltimore-Washington Society for Psychoanalysis in 1960, where he was a Teaching
Analyst for the remainder of his career.
In
1953, he was appointed an Instructor in Psychiatry at the University of Maryland
in Baltimore, where he taught psychiatry under the direction of Department
Chairman, Dr. Jacob Finesinger. I first met Jerry there. His special focus
was the teaching of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. He eventually
became an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Maryland. He also taught at the
Johns Hopkins Medical School and at Sheppard Pratt Hospital, where he won the
Distinguished Teaching Award in Psychiatry in 1989.
Jerry
was a warm, generous person, an excellent clinician, a devoted family man and a
good friend. He is survived by his wife, Mary Onken Styrt of Roland Park Place;
two daughters; Barbara Styrt, MD and Marjorie Goldfarb; a grandson Philip
Goldfarb; a sister, Leatrice Shacht, and many nieces and nephews.