ABSTRACT
Martin Walter Hathaway and Bertha Belle Rosecrans married in the Shaker Settlement in Union Village, Darby County, Ohio in 1900. While Hathaway had unfettered access to abnormal populations, normal participants were more problematic, until he had the idea to use the families of the patients attending the psychiatric clinic. J. Charnley McKinley and Hathaway were required to find a sponsor to provide 50 per cent of the funds. Hathaway and McKinley had an agreement that if anything happened to either of them, they would facilitate each other’s suicide. The test continued to gather momentum with a new population. Before McKinley’s death, he and Hathaway had already begun discussing the social applications of the test. Hathaway actively discouraged the use of his test in such contexts, calling it a personality cult. Criticisms about the blind empiricism behind the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory are difficult to counter, but Hathaway was a pioneer and a visionary.
