'There was an article in The Canyon Oaks Quarterly,' I said, 'about the importance of screening elderly patients for anti-cholinergics so as not to misdiagnose senile psychosis.'

In 1945 he suffered a mental breakdown, diagnosed as "senile psychosis," and died less than a year later at the Hudson River Psychiatric Institute in Poughkeepsie, New York.

It was striking that the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic and statistical manual labeled people who reminisced as garrulous and that this was seen as an early sign of what at that time was called senile psychosis.