ABSTRACT
I first met Eli some thirty years ago; by then he had already written some thirty books. Of these, I was most familiar with his three-volume study of the ineffective soldier (Ginzberg 1959), a resource I depended on when writing my first book on mental health policy (Mechanic 1969). Eli, an expert on manpower, was one of the first to recognize the devastating effects of psychiatric disorder on effective performance and to understand the many failures of selective service screening during World War II. Despite the fact that almost two million men were rejected for service because of alleged psychiatric disorders, such conditions were a major cause of separation from the services. I suspect that Eli’s long involvement with, and his understanding of, human resources issues made him particularly sensitive to the importance of chronic disease much earlier than most other social and economic scientists—a theme that has continued to interest him over his career.
