Esther Loring Richards

Richards was born in Holliston, Massachusetts,[1] the daughter of David Jay Richards and Esther (Etta) Coffin Loring Richards.[2][3] Her father was a Harvard-educated teacher and farmer.[4][5] She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1910, and completed her medical degree at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1915.[6]

Richards was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and psychiatrist-in-charge of the outpatient department at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic from 1920 until 1951. Much of her work focused on child psychiatry, and on studies of mental hygiene.[7] She was also consulting physician for the Baltimore City Hospitals.[8]

Richards presented at the First International Congress on Mental Hygiene in 1930, in Washington, D.C.[9] She opposed the Eighteenth Amendment, and joined the Woman's Organization for National Prohibition Reform in 1931,[10] saying "prohibition, whether of the use of alcohol or anything else we may want or wish to do, will never develop in us or any people self control, a sense of social responsibility, or the ability to make wise choices for ourselves."[11]

In 1946, Richards and ten other women, including Lise Meitner, Virginia Gildersleeve, and Agnes de Mille, were honored by the National Press Club as the outstanding women of 1945.[12]

Richards published several books, and her work appeared in academic journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine,[13] Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry,[14] The Journal of Pediatrics,[15] The American Journal of Nursing,[16] American Physical Education Review,[17] The Pacific Coast Journal of Nursing,[18] The Public Health Nurse,[19] and American Journal of Public Health.[20]

• "A Study of the Invalid Reaction" (1919)[21]
• "Psychopathological Observations in a Group of Feeble-Minded" (1919)[22]
• "Some adaptive difficulties found in school children" (1920)[23]
• "Mental Hygiene Problems of Normal Childhood and Youth" (1921)[24]
• "The role of situation in psychopathological conditions" (1921)[25]
• The elementary school and the individual child (1923)[26]
• "The Trail of Mental Hygiene in Public Health Nursing" (1924)[19]
• "Conservation of Social Energy" (1924)[27]
• "The Interdependence of Body and Mind in Health and Sickness" (1926)[18]
• "Mental Hygiene and the Student Nurse" (1928)[28]
• "Mental Aspects of Play" (1929)[17]
• Behaviour aspects of child conduct (1932)[29]
• "All Men are Not Equal" (1934)
• "Practical Features in the Study and Treatment of Anxiety States" (1934)[13]
• "Nursing: A Profession or a Technic?" (1935)[16]
• "Relationship of Declining Intelligence Quotients to Maladjustments in School Children" (1937)[14]
• "Following the hypochondriacal child for a decade" (1941)[15]
• Introduction to psychobiology and psychiatry, a textbook for nurses (1941, 1946)[30]
• "Psychological Aspects of the Menopause" (1941)
• "A History of Medical Psychology" (1942)[31]

Richards died in 1956, at the age of 71, at her Baltimore home.[20] Her papers are in the Chesney Archives at Johns Hopkins.[6] Her personal letters to zoologist Abby Howe Turner are in the collection of Mount Holyoke College.[32] The Esther Loring Richards Children's Center in Owings Mills, Maryland, was opened in 1958, and named in her memory.[33]