5 World-Changing Geniuses (Who Were Also Total Monsters)

Why He Was A Total Asshole:

More like Sigmund Fraud. (We're the first to make this joke, don't look it up.) For starters, he would lie about patients being cured or fudge facts about his cases to "prove" his points, and then conveniently burn his original notes, leaving little evidence of his trickery. For instance, he once wrote about a patient, the Wolf Man (not his legal name), remembering something which confirmed Freud's theory about the origin of his dreams. But when a journalist later tracked the patient in question down, the guy essentially said, "LOL no."

Not all of Freud's patients left his office with the same problems they had when they came in, though. Some left with even more. One patient, "Dora," was a victim of unwanted advances whom Freud accused of actually being, like, super into it (and her dad) and in denial. Probably the worst instance of this was the case of Horace Frink, whom Freud instructed to divorce his wife and marry another patient, who herself was married. Frink and the other patient did so, but eventually realized this wasn't such a bright idea, and Frink never recovered from the stress. His new wife started to look like a man or a pig to him.

Freud offered this helpful (and grammatically appalling) tidbit: "Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your fantasy of making me a rich man let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds." Very smooth. Frink ended up having to be committed to a mental hospital, which you might recognize as usually the exact opposite of a therapist's goal.

Elmer McCollum was one of the researchers in the cutting-edge field of some newfangled things called "vitamins," which prevent all kinds of horrible diseases and are now shaped like adorable bears and Fred Flintstone. Yay!

Why He Was An Asshole:

He was also a credit hog who didn't seem to care much for research ethics or being a halfway decent human being. When McCollum was offered a job at another university, he promised his lab assistant, Harry Steenbock, that he would leave their data in a usable condition so Steenbock could continue his own related research. Unfortunately, all the lab notebooks mysteriously disappeared around the time McCollum left. Then McCollum informed Steenbock that they were now rivals, and he would not be cooperating with him. Steenbock's data later appeared, finally -- in an article with McCollum's name on it.

In truth, there's no one person who discovered vitamins, since it was a wide-ranging effort involving a lot of talented people. But that didn't stop McCollum from playing up his own contributions. He started "cultivating a Horatio Alger image," and gradually worked his way up to claiming that he was "discoverer of 'two of the four known vitamins,'" and from there to the discoverer of vitamins, full stop. He would have claimed he invented the alphabet too if he thought he could get away with it.

As if that weren't enough, he would give hectoring talks about how a lack of vitamins would ruin your life, your baby's life, and everything you held dear, illustrating this with gruesome slides. This was bad for science, but great for advertisers, who promoted vitamins as miracle elixirs. Which they're not, unless your definition of "miracle elixir" is something that might increase cancer risk.

Why He's A Total Asshole:

Being a horndog isn't a crime, and it isn't even necessarily a moral failing. Preying on your teenage students, however, definitely is, especially given that Schrodinger was so goddamn creepy about it. He was married, but he didn't find his wife very sexually appealing (and wasn't shy about telling her), so he decided to take on a series of mistresses, one of whom eventually lived in his house. That's really not our concern here. Nor are the "little black books" in which he kept track of all his love affairs, carefully noting each one's "denouement," as one biographer calls it.

What really grosses us out is how he was tutoring two 14-year-old twins, Withi and Ithi Junger, and began "petting and cuddling" Ithi (or as he called her, "Ithy-bitty") during lessons, started trying to get her to have sex with him when she was 16, and then slept with her when she was 17. She got pregnant, at which point he lost interest and she had a disastrous abortion. He liked 'em young, but not fetus young.

Ithi wasn't the only young girl to catch Schrodinger's eye. One biographer describes him as having a "Lolita complex," and not in the "he liked dressing as a Japanese maid" sense (although who knows). He was also pretty creepy toward 26-year-old Kate Nolan, a "frightened virgin" whom he "consoled" by saying, "You had no father, now you get one to lie in bed with." Even though she was super worried about getting pregnant, he got her pregnant too. In WWII-era Ireland, where it was almost impossible to get an abortion. We wonder what his excuse was. "Technically, you were both pregnant and not pregnant until you took the test. So really, this is your fault."

As if all this weren't creepy enough, at one point he made a statue of his sister -- with whom he was still having sex -- having sex with her husband. He called it ... Fucking. That was definitely creepy enough, but he also used his daughters/victims as nude models, which, nope, we're not displaying or even linking to here. Instead, here's the appropriate tribute to Gill's wretched life:

Nimby has a Twitter and, if any fancy Hollywood agents are reading this, several scripts (email: nimby DOT writer AT gmail DOT com).

The RAINN National Sexual Assault hotline is 800.656.HOPE (4673).

Never deal with that Schrodinger crap with your own cat -- get a pet carrier you can just look into.

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For more, check out 6 Historical Villains Who Were Actually OK Guys and 5 Famous Historical Bad Guys (And Their Side Of The Story).

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