Seriously Gratuitous Historickal Posting

Happy Birthday, George Hoyt Whipple!

Who he? Wikipedia has the condensed version:

George Hoyt Whipple (August 28, 1878 – February 1, 1976) was an American physician, biomedical researcher, and medical school educator and administrator. Whipple shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George Richards Minot and William Parry Murphy "for their discoveries concerning liver therapy in cases of anemia."

Whipple was born to Ashley Cooper Whipple and Frances Anna Hoyt in Ashland, New Hampshire. He was the son and grandson of physicians. Whipple attended Phillips Academy and then Yale University from which he graduated with a B.A. degree in 1900. He attended medical school at the Johns Hopkins University. from which he received the M.D. degree in 1905.

After graduation. Whipple worked in the pathology department at Hopkins until he went to Panama, during the time of the construction of the Panama Canal, as pathologist to the Ancon Hospital in 1907-08. Whipple returned to Baltimore, serving successively as Assistant, Instructor, Associate and Associate Professor in Pathology at Johns Hopkins until 1914.

In 1914, Whipple was appointed Professor of Research Medicine and Director of the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research at the University of California Medical School. He was dean of that medical school in 1920 and 1921.

At the urging of Abraham Flexner, who had done pioneering studies of medical education, and University of Rochester President Rush Rhees, Whipple agreed in 1921 to become Dean of the newly funded and yet-to-be-built medical school in Rochester, New York. Whipple thus became Professor and Chairman of Pathology and the founding Dean of the new School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Rochester. Whipple served the School as the Dean until 1954 and remained at Rochester for the rest of his life. Many at the university remember him as a superb teacher. George Hoyt Whipple died in 1976 at the age of 97.

"Mmmmmkay," you say. "And?"

Well and Dad studied under Dr. Whipple at the U of R med school, eventually going into pathology himself. What the wiki entry doesn't tell you is that Whipple was also an ardent fly-fisherman, as was Dad. Dad always said that this fact was what got him into med school. The moral? Always pursue those interests - you never know what direction they're going to take you.