Free Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant Page A

young men. Bock believed that health should be as much a central focus of medicine as pathology. As his proposal gained ground, he became more explicit about the kinds of issues he had in mind: the problem of nature vs. nurture; connections between personality and health; whether mental and physical illnesses can be predicted; how constitutional considerations might influence career choice. But his primary interest was: What is health? That question (and others that grew out of it) inspired the Grant Study for seventy-five years, and in this book I will start to answer it.
    In his report to Conant, Bock cited “the stress of modern pressures” which, he felt, “the current generation of students had to face largely unprepared.” 1 And he thought that Harvard should be addressing these pressures.
    As time passes, it seems logical to expect a different emphasis on the work of the Department of Hygiene than has been customary because of the growing complexity of human relations and the need to turn men out of the University better qualified to take their places in the affairs of life. 2
    To further this goal, Bock enlisted the support of his friend and patient William T. Grant, owner of the chain of stores bearing his name. Funding began on November 1, 1937, with the arrival of the first check from what would soon become the Grant Foundation, in the amount of $60,000 ($900,000 in 2009 dollars), and President Conant and the Harvard faculty approved Bock’s project.
    Originally called the Harvard Longitudinal Study, it soon became known as the Harvard Grant Study of Social Adjustments. (This name reflected a major business preoccupation of Grant’s—namely, what makes a good store manager.) After Grant withdrew funding in 1947 the name was changed again, this time to the Harvard Study of Adult Development. But colloquially it has always been the Grant Study, and I will follow that convention here. (In 1967, when I was new to the Study, I naively asked why it was called this. A more senior investigator replied with a straight face, “Because it took an awful lot of grants to keep it going.”)
    The Grant Study got under way in the fall of 1938, in a squat redbrick building on Holyoke Street in Cambridge, next to the Department of Hygiene. Its multidisciplinary aims were reflected in the composition of the original staff: an internist, a psychologist, a physical anthropologist, a psychiatrist, a physiologist, a caseworker, and two secretaries. Dan Fenn, Jr., editor of the Harvard
Crimson
at the time, said of the eight pioneers that they were “working on what might one day be one of Harvard’s important contributions to society, the analysis of the ‘normal’ person. . . . They may be able to draw up a formula which will easily and correctly guide a man to his proper place in the world’s society.” 3
    In 1939, Harvard celebrated the opening of the Grant Study with a conference. Alas, I can find no record of what was discussed under its aegis, but it brought together a group of scientists of international distinction, who in their own ways shaped the Study profoundly. One was Adolf Meyer, who was the founding chairman of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and the new Study’s patron saint. Meyer was perhaps the greatest advocate in America of a long-range view in psychiatry. He had come to this country in 1892 to look at the way the brain changes after death. Ten years later his interest had shifted from the neuropathology of the dead to the adaptive neurophysiology of the living. Meyer insisted that the study of psychiatry was the study of lives, and published a famous, if rarely read, paper on the value of the “life chart.” 4 In this he pleaded with his fellow psychiatrists for “a conscientious study of the mental life of patients,” insisting that “we need less discussion of generalities and more records of well observed cases—especially records of lifetimes—not merely snatches of