Profile · Fond du Lac, Wisconsin
Darold A. Treffert, M.D.
Psychiatrist and savant-syndrome researcher; lifelong Fond du Lac
$2 million
Darold A. Treffert, M.D., was the Fond du Lac psychiatrist who spent fifty years studying savant syndrome and served as a script consultant on Rain Man. He liked to say he was born at St. Agnes Hospital—the same campus that later put his name on the Treffert Center. Born at St. Agnes on March 12, 1933, he took a University of Wisconsin medical degree in 1958 and in 1962 built the child-adolescent unit at Winnebago Mental Health Institute, just up the lake. He was superintendent there from 1964 to 1979. That is where he met his first savants—islands of genius beside severe disability—and did not let go. He returned home to private practice, the county health-care center, and the alcoholism unit at St. Agnes, and he ran the State Medical Society and then its board. In 1988 he consulted on Rain Man; Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt is the popular memory, Kim Peek the friend Treffert actually studied. Extraordinary People (1989) went into ten languages; Islands of Genius (2010) took up acquired savant syndrome. Agnesian opened the Treffert Center on the St. Agnes campus in 2016. He died unexpectedly at eighty-seven on December 14, 2020, at home in Fond du Lac—the town he never really left.