Meyer Friedman

Meyer Friedman (13 July 1910 to 27 April 2001) was an American cardiologist, born in Kansas City, who developed with his colleague Ray H. Rosenman the hypothesis that the Type A behavior of chronically angry and impatient people increases their risk of heart disease. He graduated from Yale University in 1931, took his MD at Johns Hopkins University in 1935 and completed postgraduate training at Michael Reese Hospital in Illinois. He initiated the Harold Brunn Institute for Cardiovascular Research and worked until his death at 90 as director of a medical institute that bears his name. From the 1970s he collaborated with the Stanford psychologist Carl E. Thoresen on the Recurrent Coronary Prevention Project, which followed 1,013 heart attack survivors for four and a half years and showed that behavioral counseling to alter Type A behavior lowered the rate of recurrence to 13 percent from 21 percent or higher. He published more than 500 articles, most of them about coronary heart disease.