Abraham Wikler

Abraham Wikler (October 12, 1910 – March 7, 1981) was an American psychiatrist and neurologist who made important discoveries in drug addiction. He was one of the first to promote a view of addiction as conditioned behavior, His research on conditioning and relapse played a pioneering role in the neuroscientific study of addiction.

Biography Wikler was born and grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of a Jewish butcher who had immigrated from the Probuzhna shtetl in Ukraine. He earned an M.D. from the Long Island College of Medicine in 1935.

He joined the Lexington Narcotic Hospital, a prison farm run by the United States Public Health Service for drug addicts in Lexington, Kentucky, as an intern in 1940. There, he ran the narcotic-withdrawal ward In 1967, the alumni association of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center (to which the Long Island College of Medicine had been renamed) gave him their Alumni Achievement Medallion for Distinguished Service to American Medicine. He had four children; the oldest, Marjorie Senechal, became a mathematician and historian of science at Smith College. A son, Daniel Wikler, is a bioethicist with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He died on March 7, 1981, in Lexington, Kentucky.