(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
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Charles Wallis Edmunds was born on Febuary 22, 1873 in Bridport, Dorset, England. He was the third of five sons and seventh of nine children of Thomas Hallett Edmunds and Caroline (Wallis) Edmunds. In 1883 the family emigrated to the United States and settled in Richmond, Indiana, where the father, previously in the tannery business, operated a chair factory.
Charles attended the University of Indiana for one year (1895 - 96) and then transferred to the University of Michigan, where he received the M. D. degree in 1901 and later (1904) the A. B. degree.
While serving his internship at the university's medical school, Edmunds attracted the attention of Arthur R. Cushny, head of the department of materia medica and therapeutics, by his keen observations in a case of cardiac irregularity, a field in which Cushny was interested. As a result, Edmunds in 1902 was appointed an assistant in the department.
When Cushny returned to England in 1905, Edmunds was promoted to lecturer, and in 1907 to professor; he remained with the department for the rest of his career. During his early teaching years he took postgraduate work with Rudolf Gottlieb and Hugo Magnus at the University of Heidelberg (1905) and with Cushny at University College, London (1907), and he spent the summer months of 1908 and 1909 at the Hygienic Laboratory (later the National Institute of Health) in Washington, D. C. In later years he was secretary of the medical school (1911 - 21) and assistant dean (1918 - 21).
Edmunds was an able administrator. He also enjoyed teaching and took a helpful personal interest in his associates. Pharmacology was still a relatively new discipline in American medical schools when Edmunds began his career, the first such department having been set up at the University of Michigan in 1892 under John J. Abel.
His major concern was the establishment of drug standards and methods of bioassay for such drugs as digitalis and ergot, for which chemical assay methods were not available. He also worked at standardizing the potency of liver extracts and other substances used in treating pernicious anemia.
For thirty years (1910 - 40) he served on the committee for revision of the United States Pharmacopeia; under his leadership official (U. S. P. ) bioassay methods of standardization were introduced.
Edmunds went to Geneva in 1925 as a member of the international committee on drug standardization of the Health Committee of the League of Nations. He was for twenty years (1921 - 41) a member of the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association, which then had considerable unofficial authority in the labeling and advertising of new drugs, and was chairman of its committee on grants to support research on therapeutic problems.
Among the subjects of Edmunds's laboratory research were the actions of botulinus and diphtheria toxins, autonomic drugs, and caffeine. Deeply interested in the problem of safe narcotics in medical practice, he investigated the role of chemical structure in the addictive properties of morphine and its derivatives, and was a member (1930 - 40) of the committee on drug addiction of the National Research Council. He also experimented in the intravenous use of dextrose in treating circulatory collapse in diphtheria, the subject of his Henry Russell lecture (1937) at the University of Michigan.
In addition to his papers, he was co-author with Cushny of A Laboratory Guide in Experimental Pharmacology (1905), which went through at least three revisions, and with J. A. Gunn of Oxford, England, he made successive revisions of Cushny's Textbook of Pharmacology and Therapeutics; both textbook and manual did much to set the pattern of classroom instruction in the field of pharmacology. Edmunds felt strongly that pharmacology should be maintained as a discipline separate from physiology and biochemistry in medical schools; to this end he used all the influence he could muster.
Sensitive to conflicts of interest in science, he strongly supported a movement which for some time excluded pharmacologists employed by industry from membership in the Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. Edmunds was one of the eighteen founders of this society and served for three years (1921 - 23) as its president.
He died suddenly of a coronary embolism shortly after his sixty-eighth birthday at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and was buried in Richmond, Indiana.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
Edmunds was quiet and tactful.
On September 15, 1909, Edmunds married Lilian Virginia Kaminski. They had two children, Ann and Charles Wallis.
