and, in 1937, the chief of psychiatry and neurology at University Hospital in Augusta. In 1955, Cleckley was appointed clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology at the medical college and became founding chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Health Behavior. He served as psychiatric consultant to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Augusta and to the US Army Hospital at Camp Gordon. He was a member of the forensic committee of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry and fellow of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the Society for Biological Psychiatry. He also worked in the private practice of psychiatry along with Corbett Thigpen and later also Benjamin Moss, Jere Chambers and Seaborn McGarity. His first wife was Louise Martin; after her death, he married Emily Sheftall. Psychopathy In 1941, Cleckley authored his magnum opus The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality. This became a landmark in psychiatric case studies and was repeatedly reprinted in subsequent editions. Cleckley revised and expanded the work with each edition published; the second American edition published in 1950 he described as effectively a new book (Cleckley 1988, p.vii). The Mask of Sanity is distinguished by its central thesis, that the psychopath exhibits normal function according to standard psychiatric criteria, yet privately engages in destructive behavior. The book was intended to assist with detection and diagnosis of the elusive psychopath for purposes of palliation and offered no cure for the condition itself. The idea of a master deceiver secretly possessed of no moral or ethical restraints, yet behaving in public with excellent function, electrified American society and led to heightened interest in both psychological introspection and the detection of hidden psychopaths in society at large, leading to a refinement of the word itself into what was perceived to be a less stigmatizing term, "sociopath". Military application In the same year as he published The Mask of Sanity during World War II, Cleckley wrote an address warning: "In our present efforts to prepare for national defense no problem which confronts the examining boards for selective service is more pressing or more subtle than that of the so-called psychopathic personality". He argued such soldiers were likely to fail, be disorganized and a drain on time and resources. He recommended routinely checking for past encounters with law enforcement or drinking alcohol until incapacitated. In The Mask of