In Remembrance: Arthur Harry Chapman ’45, ’47MD Died on September 16 2017

Dr. Harry Chapman passed away peacefully on September 16, 2017, in Vitoria da Conquista, Bahia, Brazil, at the age of 93.  He was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas, and enjoyed a brilliant career at Yale. In 1942 Harry won the New York Yale Club award as the top student in his freshman class.  He graduated from Yale Medical School in 1947 and did his internship and residency in St. Louis, where he met the love of his life, Elza Mendes de Almeida, who was studying at the Washington University School of Nursing.  Elza, who is now deceased, was born and raised in a  prominent ranching family from Vitoria da Conquista.  

Harry and Elza first settled in Kansas City where he practiced psychiatry in private and hospital settings, and she worked as a nurse-anesthetist.  Harry published his first of two dozen books while practicing full-time as a psychiatrist. In 1965 Harry and Elza moved to Conquista to help manage the Almeida family ranches. He took with him over 700 patient files, which provided raw material for his professional books like his Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry: An Interpersonal Approach,  as well as Harry Stack Sullivan: The Man and His Work and Harry Stack Sullivan’s Concepts of Personality Development and Psychiatry. 

In Conquista he learned how to ride horseback and made a point of visiting the family’s ranches at least one a month, to keep track of the herds and grass they fed on and to make sure the cowboys weren’t butchering his cattle on the sly.  When ranching failed to pay the bills, Harry started a new career as a popular psychiatry writer, with titles like Put-Offs and Come-Ons; Gromchick, and Other Tales From a Psychiatrist’s Casebook; Sexual Maneuvers and Strategems; and The Games Children Play.  The Yale Library collection owns ten of Harry’s books and the Library of Congress has 22 in its collection.

About 20 years ago Harry founded the first electroencephalography (EEG) clinic in SW Bahia, which drew patients from a radius of a hundred kilometers, reaching down into the neighboring state of Minas Gerais, and in 2015 he began work on his first Portuguese-language  book, a guide to reading EEGs.

—Submitted by the family.