乔治·惠普尔1878—1976

George Hoyt Whipple (August 28, 1878 – February 1, 1976) was an American physician, pathologist, 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". This makes Whipple the first of several Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Rochester.

Early life

Whipple was born to Ashley Cooper Whipple and Frances Anna Hoyt in Ashland, New Hampshire. Ashley Cooper Whipple was a physician, and his father (George's paternal grandfather) was a physician and President of the New Hampshire Medical Society. Whipple's father died from pneumonia or typhoid fever when George was just shy of two years old. His maternal grandfather also died when Whipple was two years old, and his paternal grandfather died a year later. This left Whipple to be raised by his mother, Frances, and grandmother, Frances Moody Hoyt, who impressed on him the value of hard work and education.

Education

Whipple attended Andover prep school and began attending Yale University as an undergraduate in 1896, earning A.B. degree in 1900. During these years, he developed as an outdoorsman, an affinity he would hold lifelong. He wrote in his autobiography about growing up in a lake district, "I feel very fortunate that I grew up in the country...I became interested in wild life and camping, also hiking, snowshoeing, skating, bob sledding, canoeing, fishing, hunting—all this was an essential part of my life". He even credited his love for the outdoors as a contributor to his successes in work, study, and teaching.

Career

In 1905, Whipple joined the pathology department at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as an assistant in pathology. He was promoted successively to Assistant, Instructor, Associate and associate professor in pathology until he left in 1914. During this time, he spent a year in Panama at Ancon Hospital as a pathologist. In Panama, he worked with Samuel Darling, a resident pathologist, and General Gorgas to gain experience in tropical diseases. This experience afforded him the opportunity to study massive hemolysis associated with blackwater fever.

Retirement

In 1953, at 75 years old, Whipple retired from the Deanship, and retirement from the university would follow in 1955. He was remembered as a superb teacher. In his autobiography, A Dozen Doctors, Whipple wrote, "I would be remembered as a teacher". He spent his retirement years dabbling in pathology department and medical school activities at the University of Rochester, but returned to his outdoors-man roots, filling his time with pheasant hunting, salmon fishing on the Margaree River, and tarpon fishing off the coast in Florida.

Whipple died in 1976 at the age of 97 and his ashes were scattered in Rochester's Mount Hope Cemetery.

Whipple's research

Over the course of his career, Whipple authored or co-authored more than 300 publications.

Whipple's research interests during his career primarily included anemia and the physiology and pathology of the liver. But he also researched and made significant contributions to tuberculosis, pancreatitis, chloroform poisoning in animals, the metabolism of bile pigments and iron, the constituents of the bile, and the regeneration of plasma protein, protein metabolism, and the stroma of the red blood cells.

One of his first publications described the role of the lungs, lymphatic system, and gastrointestinal tract in the spread of tubercle bacillus causing tuberculosis.

Nobel Prize, honors and distinctions

Whipple shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George R. Minot and William P. Murphy "for their discoveries concerning liver therapy in cases of anemia".

In presenting the Nobel Prize, Professor I. Holmgren of the Nobel committee observed that "Of the three prize winners, it was Whipple who first occupied himself with the investigations for which the prize is now awarded.... Whipple's experiments were planned exceedingly well, and carried out very accurately, and consequently their results can lay claim to absolute reliability.