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

the loyalty and gratitude that bonded the men to the Study until death did them part.
    THE PIONEERS
    Clark Heath, M.D., who served as director from 1938 to 1954, was a promising research scientist. He had once worked with Professor William Castle, a co-discoverer of vitamin B-12. He was also the staff internist, but his job description covered far more than that, and it expanded steadily over the years. He was responsible for the budget, for all necessary reports, for planning for the future, and for putting together case summaries of the Grant men. Still, it was not his administrative skills that made him so important to the young Study, but his clinical gifts.
    The files of those early years make clear just how completely Heath epitomized the warm and caring physician. As each man joined the Study, Heath gave him an unusually complete two-hour physical exam. That was part of the Study routine. But until he left Harvard, returning Grant Study alumni came back to him voluntarily, seeking consultation for themselves and their families. When they needed more than mere medical advice, Heath saw a number of these ex-students for psychological counseling.
    Lewise Gregory (later Davies), a perceptive Virginian, was the third member of this key trio. Bock needed a social investigator to interview all the Study members and their families. Gregory’s only professional education was secretarial school, but Bock chose her for her dazzling interpersonal skills and her innate talent as an interviewer. After her death, Charles McArthur, the second director, described her technique for a staff member who was writing a brief (unpublished) history of the Study. “When she would visit a student’s family, she would sit daintily with her legs crossed, affix her large blue eyes on the conversationalist, and the smitten parents would bare their lives to her.” She was an attentive and sympathetic listener, and the loyalty she engendered among the participants and their families would last a lifetime. She also endeared herself to the Study men as a big sister. (A very pretty one. And her sister was Margaret Sullavan, the movie star.) Miss Gregory was invaluable in bringing lost sheep back into the fold, and the Grant Study’s attrition rate—the lowest of any similar study in history—is a tribute to her diligence and her diplomacy.
    In the beginning, Gregory’s job was to take a careful social history from each subject as he entered the Study, and then interview his parents. In those early years she traveled the length and breadth of the country to meet the men’s families in their homes. She obtained from the mother a detailed history of the early development of each Study man. She also took a family history that included descriptions of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and first cousins, and of any mental illnesses in the extended family. I encountered some of these family members many years later, and they still recalled her visit with great pleasure.
    In her family interviews, Gregory accentuated the positive. The usual psychiatric social history with its emphasis upon pathology tends to make all of us look like fugitives from a Tennessee Williams play. Gregory asked about problems in the men’s growing up, but she also wanted to hear about what had gone well. Not only did this foster the alliance between the Study and its members, but it also meant that when pathological details did come up in the social histories, they were usually significant.
    After her great work of 268 family interviews was complete, Gregory remained with the Study part time. Even in the 1980s, at the end of her tenure, she was still the one who could charm nonre sponders back into continued participation—which she did with astonishing success.
    William T. Grant, of course, was an important figure in the founding of the Grant Study. Billy Grant, as his friends called him, was a tenth-grade dropout who founded a store for low-priced household wares in 1906.