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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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were overflowing with 120,000 patients. This includes the state schools at this time. They were 25 percent overcrowded which seemed to me to be scandalous. I urged him not to reappoint Dr. Bigelow, who was then the State Mental Health Commissioner, who had been extremely difficult to meet with and who was also a Dewey appointee. I met with Mike Gorman, Anna Rosenberg and Dr. Tomkins, the psychiatrist in charge of the psychiatric division of the Veterans Administration to call on Governor Harriman shortly after his election. He asked us for suggestions, after first suggesting that perhaps I might take the job himself. Naturally, it was ludicrous to suggest that I would take the job because I'm totally unqualified to be an administrator of this kind. Tomkins finally refused, although he probably would have been fairly good, after the thought the matter over for several weeks.

Mike and I were suddenly at a loss as to whom to recommend. Just about this time, Lester Markel, the Sunday editor of the New York Times phoned me and asked me if I knew Dr. Paul Hoch, who was in charge of research at the New York Psychiatric Institute at the Columbia Medical Center. I told him that I didn't know Dr. Hoch but was eager to meet him. Within 24 hours Hoch came to call on me. He is an Hungarian who has lived in the United States for about 22 years. He's been trained as a psychoanalyst but has been deeply interested in the medical aspects of mental illness, an interest very rare among people who are psychoanalytically oriented, I've





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