Robert "Bob" Leopold Muellner, MD, died on December 20, 2021 at his residence in Brookline, MA, aged 83. The first child of Salomo Richard Muellner, a surgeon who had emigrated from Latvia at age 19, and Anne Muellner (née Meyer), Bob grew up in Brookline, MA, determined from toddlerhood to become a doctor.
Bob prepared at Brookline High School prior to matriculating at Harvard College. He graduated from Harvard, where he was a member of Eliot House, with an A.B. cum laude in English in 1960. Bob spent a summer motorcycling across Europe before attending New York University Medical School for two years and completing his M.D. degree (1964) at Tufts Medical School He interned in New York completed residency training in psychiatry at Tufts-New England Medical Center.
During the Vietnam War, he joined the Public Health Service and traveled across the United States, allocating funds for community mental health services and working in cooperation with local administrators, clinicians and community groups to build and staff them. After settling in Cambridge, MA, in the early 1970s, he focused his attention on community mental health services in Boston. Serving as Director of the Child Guidance Center of Boston City Hospital and then as Director of Children's Ambulatory Services for the Fuller Mental Health Center, he worked to develop comprehensive services for children and their families in the South End and Roxbury. In 1974, during the violent protests against Boston school desegregation, he and his staff rode the buses with students. Even as government funding for community mental health dwindled, Bob secured funds to run an inpatient program for adolescents who had committed murder. Ultimately, he transitioned entirely to private practice, completing training in both child and adult psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute (BPSI), where he became a revered teacher, mentor and supervisor.
He is survived by Hanno, Nicholas, Ada and Leo Muellner (the children from his over 40-year marriage to Joan Lipson Muellner); as well as his brother, Leonard Muellner (H’65; PhD.’73); five grandchildren, four nieces and nephews; and Vivian Friedman, loving companion for the final chapter of his life.
They will remember him always as a loving, though reserved, man, invariably equipped with a pipeful of tobacco and pens in his shirt pocket, who abhorred bullying, stood up for compassion, gave warm bear hugs, and adored, among other things, the Red Sox, classical music, literature, animals, games, "Your Show of Shows," and fried clams, and could be counted on to order black raspberry at any ice cream parlor that offered it.
A Memorial gathering is being planned. In lieu of flowers, donations in his honor to the Children's Defense Fund (www.childrensdefense.org) would be greatly appreciated.
Slightly revised version of that which was published by The Boston Globe from January 29 to January 30, 2022.
