Who was Arnold Werner

Arnold Werner was a Professor of Psychiatry at Michigan State University for more than thirty years. He was also an accomplished photographer, an avid bicyclist (including once riding 400 miles in 4 days on the DALMAC century ride), a woodworker, and a restorer of old cars. His syndicated column, "The Doctor's Bag," appeared in campus newspapers across the country, and he hosted a public radio show, "Ask the Psychiatrist." Throughout his professional career, Dr Werner was an advocate for community access to health services and for destigmatizing mental health problems. He also strongly believed that cerebral palsy was a dynamic disease and needed to be studied more carefully as such. He was born with cerebral palsy, and although it delayed his learning to walk as a toddler, for most of his life it did not significantly impair his activities. But in the last years of his life, and despite the careful care he had taken of himself, the cerebral palsy rapidly worsened until his death at the age of 68. Although he anticipated that his condition would become more debilitating as he aged, there were no indications in his personal experience or in published research that suggested the degree to which he would suffer. His experience led him to strongly believe that more needed to be done to understand the progression of CP in adults and its effect on aging.

Workshop Details

• The conference will take place in 2008 at Michigan State University
• Please contact Mindy Aisen at maisen@ucpresearch.org or Nigel Paneth
  at paneth@epi.msu.edu with questions and suggestions.