Harry Kozol; exposed dark side of human behavior; 102
Speaking in 1970 to the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Harry L. Kozol mused about the psychology of violence and painted a verbal picture that was many shades of gray.
"The world of persons cannot be divided into the dangerous and the non-dangerous, the bad guys and the good guys," he said, according to a Globe account of the gathering in San Francisco. "The spectrum is wide between extremes."
As a beacon of light illuminating the dark niches of human behavior, Dr. Kozol helped establish the field of forensic psychiatry during a career in which he examined the likes of heiress Patty Hearst, whose kidnapping riveted the nation in the mid-1970s, and Albert DeSalvo, who confessed to the Boston Strangler murders.
Dr. Kozol, who kept a private practice in the Back Bay and directed the treatment center for the sexually dangerous at Bridgewater State Hospital, died of kidney failure Wednesday at Massachusetts General Hospital.
He was 102 and was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease about 14 years ago.
A Harvard Law School student before switching paths and entering Harvard Medical School, Dr. Kozol drew upon his dual training to create a hybrid field that required diagnostic and legal skills.
"Harry never lost the spirit of the law," Dr. Harold W. Williams, then a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, told The New York Times in 1976, when prosecutors asked Dr. Kozol to examine Hearst. "Harry is very much in personality a lawyer."
But he was just as much a physician, even when treating psychiatric patients. Jonathan Kozol of Byfield, an author and education activist, said his father always kept doctor's instruments close at hand, whether he was seeing patients in his Back Bay office or leaving the dinner table to drive off at the request of a hospital.
"I recently came across his old doctor's bag, it was very moving to open it," Kozol said. "It showed all the signs of wear and tear of 30 or 40 years of use. He was a doctor from 1934 and practiced up until about 1984. I don't know if he ever got a new bag, but that one looks as though he carried it for most of those years - the handle is all taped up.
"Here's a man who was known in his later years primarily as a psychiatrist, but inside the bag are all the tools of a medical physician," he said. "I found a dozen wooden throat sticks. I found the old rubber hammer he used to test reflexes."
A son of Russian immigrants, Harry Kozol grew up in South Boston when few Jewish families lived in the neighborhood. He graduated from English High School and tutored wealthy students to help pay his Harvard expenses. Dr. Kozol followed his older brother to Harvard Law School, his son said, but grew intrigued by mental illness and traveled on a fellowship to Switzerland, where he met Eugen Bleuler, the psychiatrist credited with coining the term schizophrenia.
Returning to Cambridge, Dr. Kozol left law school, went back to Harvard College for premed classes, and then attended Harvard Medical School. He graduated in 1934.
"For me, what's so fascinating about my dad's life was the extraordinary journey he took," his son said. "It seems he spent half his youth at Harvard. I think it took a lot of nerve to give up law school and embark on an entirely new career, for a poor Jewish kid whose parents couldn't bail him out if he made a mistake."
Dr. Kozol married Ruth Massell of Boston in 1928. Until the children were grown, the Kozol family lived in Newton, and then Dr. Kozol and his wife moved to the Back Bay where he kept an office for his private practice until he retired. She died two years ago, also at 102.
In the early 1950s, Dr. Kozol treated Eugene O'Neill, the playwright and Nobel Prize recipient who moved to Boston for the last years of his life and lived across the street from Dr. Kozol to be close for daily treatment.
"I got the distinct impression O'Neill developed almost a paternal attachment to my dad," Jonathan Kozol said. "After O'Neill died, there were only three people at the burial: dad, O'Neill's wife, Carlotta, and O'Neill's nurse. My father went into a real depression for quite a long while afterward. He had grown tremendously attached to him."
Such a connection, Dr. Kozol's son said, was not uncommon between the doctor and those he treated.
"He was not impersonal at all," his son said. "Despite his long years of scholarly preparation, he did not talk to his patients like a grand professor or a sage. He would joke with his patients, even when they were in the most extreme desperation, and had a real gift for bringing a smile to their eyes."
There were exceptions, of course, among them Hearst, who said Dr. Kozol was harsh while examining her when he was hired by the prosecution for her bank robbery trial. Hearst had been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a revolutionary group, and later took part in a bank robbery with SLA members.
She told a judge Dr. Kozol had reduced her to tears, but according to an Associated Press account from 1976, he testified: "I treated her with gentle inquiries. How she interpreted them is a different story."
After Hearst was convicted, Dr. Kozol told the Globe that "she was a rebel in search of, in need of, a cause, and that cause found her."
Upon being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Dr. Kozol was gentle, but no less inquisitive, when he turned his diagnostic skills on himself.
"He had a marvelous charm and congeniality, and he was simply the most wonderful father a child could ever pray for," his son said.
"Even after the onset of Alzheimer's, he would still, at least for the first few years, describe to me the symptoms he was developing and explain to me, without self- pity but almost with the fascination of a scientist, exactly what was wrong."
In addition to his son, Dr. Kozol leaves a daughter, Barbara Reckseit of Cincinnati; two granddaughters; and four great-grandsons.
A service has been held. 