Harold Wolff, MD Papers

One of the leading neurologists of his time, Dr. Harold G. Wolff is generally considered "the father of modern headache research" as well as being a pioneer in the study of psychosomatic illness. He spent most of his career at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center.

Dr. Wolff was born on May 26, 1898, in New York City the only child of Louis Wolff, an illustrator of Alsatian descent, and Emma Recknagel Wolff. He was educated at City College of New York and Harvard Medical School, from which he graduated in 1923. After clinical training at Roosevelt and Bellevue Hospitals, Dr. Wolff returned in 1926 to Harvard to work with Dr. Stanley Cobb and H. F. Forbes in their Neuropathology Laboratory. He spent 1928-29 in the laboratory of Otto Loewi at Graz, Austria, and while in Europe worked briefly under Ivan Pavlov in Leningrad. Upon his return to the U.S., Dr. Wolff studied with the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins's Phipps Psychiatric Clinic between 1930-1931.

Dr. Wolff had been in contact with G. Canby Robinson, Director of the newly-established New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center (NYH-CMC), since 1928. He seems to have been offered the position of Chief Neurologist in the spring of 1931, and, after several months in Europe studying hospitals, clinics, and medical schools, took up his duties at the Medical Center upon its opening in September 1932. He remained at NYH-CMC until his death, eventually taking charge of the neurology service at Bellevue's Second (Cornell) Medical Division; he was named the first occupant of the Anne Parish Titzell Chair in Medicine (Neurology) in 1958.

Dr. Wolff's findings on the mechanism of headaches, especially migraine headaches, dominated thinking on the subject for a generation. His "Headache and Other Head Pain," first published in 1948, became the authoritative text on the subject and has gone through several editions since.

Perhaps more lasting than his headache research, however, are Dr. Wolff's studies on psychosomatic illness. He saw disease in the framework of human ecology and drew upon the insights of anthropology and religion as well as of neurology and psychiatry to explore it. During his last years he devoted much of his energy to the work of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health and, after life-long agnosticism, became a member of St. John's Episcopal Church in Riverdale, New York.

Dr. Wolff married the well-known painter Isabel Bishop in 1934; their Riverdale home became a gathering place for members of New York's scientific and artistic worlds. Dr. Wolff died on February 21, 1962, in Washington, D.C. after suffering a stroke several days earlier at a conference. His memory is perpetuated at the medical center in the Harold G. Wolff Neurology Laboratory and in the research prize awarded to the CUMC student who "has completed the most outstanding piece of original research in the neurological or behavioral sciences."

Sources: Harold Wolff, M.D. Papers, Biographical Files, CUMC Announcements