Biography
Wilbur graduated from the University of Michigan in 1930 and was one of eight women medical college graduates in 1939. She was the first female medical student extern at Kalamazoo State Hospital, where she first treated an agoraphobic "hysterical" girl and came to believe that it was possible to treat the "hysteria" and not just the symptoms. Wilbur was a pioneer clinician, as well as an educator, researcher, and mentor for others in the field of psychiatry. Wilbur was one of the authors of Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, an influential 1962 study of the development of male homosexuality.
Wilbur is best known for her work with Shirley Ardell Mason, a woman purportedly abused as a child who, Wilbur decided, had developed 16 different and distinct personalities as a result. A book, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber, and a television film, both titled Sybil, were ostensibly non-fiction accounts of the psychiatric treatment received by Mason while in Wilbur's care. She diagnosed and treated Mason for dissociative identity disorder beginning in 1954 and continuing for 11 years.
Wilbur remained friends with Mason for the rest of her life, and the two women shared a home for some years. Since 1998, however, Wilbur's's diagnosis of Mason has publicly been called into serious question, and both she and Flora Schreiber have been accused of inventing or exaggerating the multiple personality diagnosis and manipulating Mason for professional and financial gain. The most recent critical examination of the "Sybil" story is Debbie Nathan's book, Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case. Nathan presented evidence that Mason never enacted multiple personalities until she met Wilbur. The patient’s symptoms emerged over the years from a mutually reinforced self-deception of both Mason and Wilbur. Nathan’s research indicated that Wilbur and Schreiber fabricated numbers of narrative in Sybil to bolster their story of Mason, including the bogus confession of Mason’s father that her deceased mother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Wilbur lectured around the world about child, spouse, and elder abuse and their repercussions, and advocated parenting education to prevent child abuse. She was also interested in increasing the admission rates of women to medical schools.
In the late 1970s, Wilbur consulted on the case of Billy Milligan, the first man to be acquitted of a crime in the United States by reason of insanity due to multiple personality disorder.
Read more about this topic: Cornelia B. Wilbur
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