Meyer Friedman

Meyer Friedman (July 13, 1910–April 27, 2001) was an American cardiologist who developed, with colleague R.H. Rosenman, the theory that the "Type A" behavior of chronically angry and impatient people raises their risk of heart attacks. The cardiologist and researcher worked until his death at 90 as director of a medical institute that bears his name.

Friedman, who often characterized himself as a "recovering Type A," and colleague Dr. Ray Rosenman began to write about the link between behavior and heart disease in scientific papers during the 1950s. They turned their observations into a popular 1974 book, "Type A Behavior and Your Heart." "Type A personality" soon became part of the national vocabulary, shorthand for the sort of driven individual who feels oppressed by time. This is the person who honks and fumes in traffic, barks at sluggish salesclerks, and feels compelled to do several things at once—perhaps shave while paying bills and dialing a phone. The work of Friedman and Rosenman opened up a new field of inquiry into the mind-heart connection, still debated and investigated today. Friedman "put the whole issue on the map and generated a lot of research around it. He was groundbreaking in that sense," said Dr. Stephen Fortmann, a Stanford University professor who directs its Center for Research in Disease Prevention. Friedman and Rosenman shared a cardiology practice in San Francisco in the 1950s, when they began to question the conventional thinking about the major risk factors in heart disease. The classic risk factors, such as diet and cholesterol, "could not explain the relative epidemic of coronary disease in Western countries," said Rosenman, now dead, "because [diet] really hadn't changed. Nor had cholesterol."

Then, there was the furniture. In the waiting room of the practice the two doctors ran, the chairs badly needed reupholstering. What was unusual was that the chairs were worn down on the front edges of the seats and armrests instead of on the back areas, which would have been more typical. The doctors later observed that those chairs were chosen by coronary patients, who tended to sit on the edge of the seat and leaped up frequently, usually to ask how much longer they would have to wait for their appointments to begin. They were as tense as racehorses at the gate. And they had heart problems. Was there a link? After some initial observations, the doctors hypothesized that there was a connection. Friedman began some studies. In one, he observed 40 accountants, to see if their cholesterol levels rose under the stress of tax season. "In March, their cholesterol shot up," said Dr. Gerald W. Friedland, a Stanford University professor emeritus of radiology who collaborated with Friedman on "Medicine's 10 Greatest Discoveries," a 1998 book.

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