Charles Lee Hoagland

Background

Charles Lee Hoagland was born on June 6, 1907 in Benkelman, Nebraska, United States. He did not know who his parents were, although he had some hint that his mother was of French extraction.

Education

There is no record of Hoagland's early life and schooling. In 1927, while working as a busboy in a Missouri hotel, he volunteered to do some typing for a guest, Alfred L. McCawley, an influential lawyer and member of the state senate. Because of the young man's competence and winning personality, Senator McCawley offered him employment and took him into his own household; a few years later, he formally adopted him. Hoagland was thus able to obtain further education: a year at Southwest Missouri State Teachers College, three years (1928-1931) at Washington University, St. Louis, where he received the Bachelor of Science degree, and four years at the medical school of Washington University, from which he was graduated, Doctor of Medicine, in 1935. Hoagland's record as a medical student was brilliant, as was his work during two additional years at Washington University as assistant in medicine.

Career

Hoagland received an appointment in 1937-1938 as assistant resident physician at the Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City (later the Rockefeller University). The following year he returned to Washington University Medical School as instructor in medicine and assistant in pathology; Hoagland then returned to Rockefeller Institute in 1939 as assistant in the laboratory group headed by Oswald T. Avery, working on the immunochemistry of the pneumococcus.

He was transferred a year later to the laboratory of Thomas M. Rivers and Joseph S. Smadel, who were making a pioneer study of the vaccinia (cowpox) virus. Hoagland's part in this work, in which by masterly insight and ingenuity he showed that the virus is an organized biological entity, containing such complex substances as (for example) the vitamin riboflavin, was one of the earliest adequate studies of the chemical structure of an animal virus. This success, together with Hoagland's obvious clinical skill, led to his rapid promotion in 1942 to the rank of associate member of the Rockefeller Institute. Rivers, now director of the institute's hospital, supported Hoagland's desire to study certain little-understood diseases characterized by grave changes in metabolism possibly related to vitamin deficiencies or to failure of enzyme action.

Choosing to study, first, progressive muscular dystrophy, Hoagland and his assistants made some progress with regard to the biochemical disturbance characteristic of the disease, but his search for its cause was interrupted when the United States entered World War II. Volunteering for a field research unit being organized by Rivers for the navy, Hoagland was rejected because of abnormally high blood pressure. He had never complained of symptoms resulting from this condition, which must already have caused him much discomfort. He threw himself intensely, as a civilian, into a wartime undertaking of the Rockefeller Institute hospital to study and treat naval personnel suffering from infectious hepatitis.

In 1944 and 1945 the navy sent about 400 patients to the institute, which provided Hoagland with facilities for hospital care and laboratory study of the disease. In 1945 he was promoted to full membership in the institute. All of the eight or nine young physicians who worked with him on this project went on, after the war, to posts as professors in other institutions or as members of the institute. As leader of this able group Hoagland undertook to work out biochemical tests by which the extent of liver damage and the rate of repair of the liver during convalescence could be measured and to test various methods of treatment. He and his associates found, contrary to previous opinion, that patients with livers damaged by hepatitis or cirrhosis tolerate a relatively high proportion of fats in the diet, and that it is best to treat them by rest and a well-balanced general diet rather than by limiting the intake of fats.

Hoagland proved himself so obviously capable of leading a large program of medical research that his reputation began to spread beyond the Rockefeller Institute. He was offered professorships of internal medicine, physiology, and biochemistry in leading medical schools. His intelligence and charm won him personal regard and recognition in high social circles of New York, which he appreciated and sought all the more because of his rootless childhood.

Had his health not deteriorated he would almost surely have gone on to continued success in research and probably also in institutional administration. Giving himself no rest from the burden of his heavy wartime program, he developed, in June 1946, severe symptoms of malignant hypertension and became a patient in the hospital where he had cared for so many young men. After two months of painful, agitated illness, he died at the age of thirty-nine. He did not have time in his brief career to summarize his scientific findings in books; his numerous journal articles are listed in Index Medicus, 1938-1947.

Achievements

• Hoagland was a notable physician and biochemist. He was most prominent at the Rockefeller University, and is also best remembered for his studies of the cowpox virus.

Connections

Hoagland did not marry, and because of the circumstances of his infancy no surviving relatives were known.