Joel Elkes

Early life Elkes was born of Jewish parents Elkhanan and Miriam in the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). His father served in the Russian Army as a medical officer during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War I. The family fled to Kovno (now Kaunas) in the newly formed Lithuanian Republic. Elkes attended Schwabe's Gymnasium, a Hebrew Jewish high school, with a Zionist orientation. Elkes was an outstanding student graduating with honours and developing an interest in chemistry. He hoped to become a "scientist serving medicine". This was born from the fact that he had a close relationship with his father whom he viewed as a great example of physicianship and a good person.

Career In 1930 Elkes enrolled in the St Mary's Hospital Medical School, Paddington in London where he was tutored by such medical luminaries as Charles Wilson, 1st Baron Moran, Almroth Wright, Alexander Fleming and Aleck Bourne, whose daughter Elkes would later marry. Here he met Professor Alistair Frazer and in 1939 he, Frazer and Steward (a student colleague) had a paper on fat absorption published in The Journal of Physiology.

In 1950 Elkes was awarded a Fulbright Travelling Fellowship in America where he worked at the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston and at Norwich State Hospital, Connecticut. On his return to Birmingham he was appointed chairman and professor of a new mental health department which he called The Department for Experimental Psychiatry. Elkes continued his work on anticholinesterase, acetylcholine blockers and amphetamines and their action on the activity of the brain and thus behaviour. At this time there was a chance discovery in France of a drug called chlorpromazine and in a double blind trial Elkes demonstrated the efficacy of this drug in controlling the symptoms of schizophrenia. He renamed his department the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences and worked toward integrating psychiatry with the physical medicine disciplines. His educational innovations attracted a number of other medical luminaries to his department. Among them were Sol Snyder, Joseph Coyle, Ross Baldessarini and Joseph V. Brady. Elkes was the founder and first Chairman of the Board of Fellowship House, a residential intermediate-care rehabilitation facility for people with mental illness which still exists in a developed form to the modern day. Recipient of the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology Pfizer Pioneer Award at the CINP XXI Congress in Glasgow in 1998. In 1944 the ghetto was attacked and the occupants shipped to concentration camps where Elkhanan, three uncles, an aunt and nieces and nephews all died. she died in 1999

In 1991 Elkes's sister, Sara, initiated a series of holocaust lectures in memory of their parents and using his memoir of his father Elkes delivered the inaugural address at the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies in Leicester, England and in 1999 published the material.