Mortimer Sackler

Mortimer David Sackler (7 December 1916 – 24 March 2010) was an American physician and entrepreneur. With his brothers, Arthur and Raymond, he used his fortune from the pharmaceutical industry to become a prominent philanthropist.

The son of Isaac and Sophie (née Greenberg) sackler Polish Jewish immigrant Brooklyn grocer, Mortimer attended Erasmus Hall High School in his native Brooklyn. Failing to get a Jewish-allotted place in any New York medical school, he sailed steerage to the UK in 1937 and, with the help of Glasgow's Jewish community, enrolled at Glasgow University Anderson College of Medicine. After World War II began, he completed his degree at the Middlesex Hospital School of Medicine in London.

During the Korean war, he was an army psychiatrist in Denver, Colorado, before joining his brothers, both newly graduated doctors, at the Creedmoor psychiatric hospital in New York City. The three became a moving force in the research and clinical outpatient department at Creedmore, which would become the Creedmore Institute for Psychobiologic Studies. During the 1950s the brothers undertook pioneering research into how alterations in bodily function can affect mental illness. This work contributed to a move away from treatments such as electric shock and lobotomy towards pharmaceutical solutions or psychoanalysis. The brothers acquired small pharmaceutical companies and worked on reviving them. From 1952 they turned Purdue Pharma into a large privately owned business with products including OxyContin. Using his fortune from pharmaceuticals he became a generous donor to charitable causes across the world.

In the US, Sackler's donations included:

In the UK, Sackler's donations included:

Jointly with his brothers he endowed the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University. In 1995, Sackler was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his services to education.

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