Background
Alejandro Rodriguez was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1918, to a businessman and a homemaker, where he spent his entire youth.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Alejandro Rodriguez
Edit ProfileEducation
Stanford University.
Career
He was the director of the division of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and conducted pivotal studies on autism and other developmental disorders in children. After his graduation from the Saint Ignacio School in Caracas, he entered the Universidad de Venezuela, where he earned his medical degree in 1939. In 1942, he received a private scholarship for pediatrics training at Johns Hopkins.
Upon his pediatrics residency, Rodriguez returned to Venezuela for 13 years to practice pediatrics.
Rodriguez then returned to the United States in 1956 to study psychiatry at Stanford. Kanner mentored both Rodriguez and Doctor Leon Eisenberg, who became Johns Hopkins Division Chief after the retirement of Kanner, who is credited with discovering the syndrome of autism in 1935 and by many is considered to be "the founding parent of child psychiatry", since he coined the term autism in 1935 and authored the first child psychiatry textbook.
In 1959, while Eisenberg, following Kanner, was Division Chief of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and Rodriguez reported to him, they co-authored – with Maria Rodriguez, Alejandro"s wife – a famous paper describing school phobia syndrome as a variant of separation anxiety. When Eisenberg resigned in 1968 to leave for Boston to become Chief of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Rodriguez became the director of the Division of Child Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, a position he kept until he retired in 1978.
Rodriguez authored Handbook of Child Abuse and Neglect in 1977.
Doctor Alejandro Rodriguez died of heart failure complications at his home in Palm City, Florida, on January 20, 2012.
-
Born
-
Died
January 20, 2012 (aged 93) -
Nationality
Venezuelan-American