Background
Cecil Kent Drinker was born on March 17, 1887, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Henry Sturgis Drinker, an engineer, lawyer, and president of Lehigh University, and Aimee Ernesta Beaux.
Cecil Kent Drinker was born on March 17, 1887, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Henry Sturgis Drinker, an engineer, lawyer, and president of Lehigh University, and Aimee Ernesta Beaux.
Cecil attended Haverford School and Haverford College, graduating with a B. S. in 1908. He obtained the M. D. Degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1913. He ranked at the head of his class for each of the four years.
After receiving the M. D. , Drinker did research from 1913 to 1914 in the laboratory of Alfred Newton Richards at the University of Pennsylvania. Richards' catheterization of the kidney glomerulus probably stimulated Drinker's later research in catheterizing the lymphatics.
In 1914 Drinker took a fourteen-month residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. This clinical experience was valuable in broadening his outlook for later research. He spent the winter of 1915-1916 in the department of physiology at Johns Hopkins, and then joined the department of physiology at the Harvard Medical School as an instructor. Drinker was acting head of the department in 1917-1918, while Walter B. Cannon did war work. Promotions followed, and he was appointed professor in 1924.
In 1921 President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard named Drinker to the committee planning the departmental composition and curriculum of the new school of public health at the university. The following year Drinker became acting head of the department of physiology there. For the next two decades he divided his efforts between applied physiology and administration at the school of public health and pure physiology at the medical school. Drinker and several of his colleagues performed health surveys in various industries, and their reports on poisoning from manganese, radium, and carbon monoxide were pioneering efforts that became accepted as standards throughout the country.
In 1926-1927 Drinker took a sabbatical leave to work in Copenhagen with August Krogh. He served as acting dean of the school of public health in 1930-1931, and in 1935 he became dean.
During World War II, Drinker was involved in projects to develop the high-altitude oxygen masks that were vital for the army and navy bombing programs. The work on these masks was a natural outgrowth of his earlier investigations of respiration during the 1920's that had led the navy to send its ablest research physicians to work with Drinker on oxygen poisoning and decompression sickness. Drinker continued this relationship with the navy after the war, serving as consultant physiologist to the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1948 to 1954.
In 1942 Drinker resigned from the deanship because of ill health, and in 1948 he retired completely from Harvard. During 1948-1949 he lectured on physiology at the Cornell University Medical College in New York City. He died in Falmouth, Massachussets.
Drinker married Katherine Livingston Rotan on September 7, 1910. They had two children. His wife obtained the M. D. degree from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1914. He and his wife then moved to Falmouth, Massachussets, because of his ill health in 1942.