Some Factoids About the Psychiatrist Jean Tatlock
Better known for her relationship with J. Robert Oppenheimer
Jean Tatlock graduated from medical school at Stanford in 1941. She completed her internship at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., and psychiatry residency at Mount Zion Hospital (now a part of the University of California San Francisco Medical Center). Tatlock got into a romantic relationship with Oppenheimer in 1936, when she was a graduate student at Stanford and Oppenheimer was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
The information below, unless specified otherwise, is from the book American Prometheus (2007) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
# Jean Tatlock died by suicide on January 4, 1944. She left
an unsigned suicide note, scribbled in pencil on the back of an envelope. It read in part, “I am disgusted with everything… To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t… I think I would have been a liability all my life—at least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world.” From there the words ran into a jagged, illegible line. (p250)