Fredric Wertham

Fredric Wertham, born Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer on March 20, 1895, in Nuremberg, Germany, and who died November 18, 1981, in Kempton, Pennsylvania, was a German-American psychiatrist and author. Early in his career he earned a reputation as a socially engaged clinician, treating poor Black patients at his Lafargue Clinic in New York during a period of pronounced discrimination in urban mental health care. He is most widely remembered for his campaign against violent and lurid imagery in comic books, articulated most fully in his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which argued that such material harmed young readers. That work fed directly into the American comic book industry's creation of the self-regulating Comics Code Authority, even though later researchers challenged the soundness of his underlying methods.