George Whipple

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 Andover 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 as pathologist to the Ancon Hospital in 1907-08. Whipple returned to Baltimore and there served 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. He was a superb teacher.

Whipple's main research was concerned with anemia and the physiology and pathology of the liver. He was the first to describe Whipple's disease (named after him) and gave clues as to its cause (bacteria), in 1907.He died in 1976 aged 97.

External links

• National Academy of Sciences biography
• Nobel biography
• Other biography