Donald Russell Hooker was born on September 7, 1876 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. He was the second son and youngest of three children of Frank Henry Hooker and Grace (Russell) Hooker. His father, a carriage manufacturer, was a direct descendant of Reverend Thomas Hooker, founder of the Connecticut Colony.
Hooker attended the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven and followed his father to Yale, gaining the degrees of Bachelor of Arts in 1899 and Master of Science in 1901. He then studied medicine at the Johns Hopkins University and in 1905 became a Doctor of Medicine. After a year at the University of Berlin, he joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Medical School as assistant in physiology under Prof. William Henry Howell, rising by 1910 to the rank of associate professor.
Hooker gave up this teaching post in 1920 because of the pressure of the editorial duties he had assumed for the American Journal of Physiology, but in 1926 accepted an appointment in the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins as lecturer in social hygiene--after 1935, in physiology. During this part of his career, which was devoted chiefly to research and teaching, Hooker worked almost exclusively on the physiology of the circulatory system. Alone or with collaborators he published more than forty journal articles, between 1907 and 1935, on the factors controlling blood pressure in the arteries, veins, and capillaries, on the regulation of the tone of the blood vessel walls, on the contractile activity of the blood capillaries, and on the role of calcium, potassium, and sodium ions in the activity of cardiac muscle. His work was of the kind that adds precision to the measurement or understanding of phenomena previously comprehended only in part, and much of it became incorporated in the general literature of physiology.
Jointly with J. A. E. Eyster he devised in 1908 a practical instrument for measuring the pressure of the blood within superficial veins (e. g. , of the back of the hand) by noting the height of a column of mercury required to collapse the vein by pressing upon it a soft rubber membrane. With this apparatus Hooker made an extensive study of venous pressure under various conditions. In a series of experimental observations published 1930-1933 he made fundamental observations of a type of irregularity of the heart beat known as ventricular fibrillation. His discovery that the rhythm of the fibrillating heart can be restored by properly graduated electric shock has resulted in effective methods for the treatment of cardiac fibrillation and "standstill" in human patients.
Hooker's editorial duties began in 1914, when the American Journal of Physiology was turned over to the American Physiological Society by its founder and first editor, William T. Porter. Hooker was appointed managing editor and served effectively in that post for thirty-two years. For a large part of that time he received no financial remuneration. He made the Journal not only self-supporting, but the source of a substantial reserve fund for the society. As editor, Hooker maintained high standards of accuracy, clarity, and brevity, and was at the same time considerate of the stylistic preferences of those fellow scientists who submitted articles for publication.
In 1921 he helped found and served as managing editor of a second periodical newly inaugurated by the society, Physiological Reviews, which reported on current research. Still further duties came in 1935, when Hooker was chosen as the first permanent secretary of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (founded in 1912), of which the American Physiological Society was one of the constituents. He held this post until a few months before his death, adding the editorship of the federation's administrative Proceedings to his already heavy editorial tasks. This new appointment virtually terminated his research career.
During World War I, he was a member of the subcommittee on surgical shock and of the committee on physiology of the National Research Council. He was also active in the social hygiene movement as early as 1908, organizing a society in Maryland and cooperating on the national level in the work of William F. Snow and others; he became secretary of the American Social Hygiene Association in 1928 and was a member of the board of directors. He died of pulmonary edema in Baltimore at the age of sixty-nine. Following cremation, his ashes were buried in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut.
Hooker was a notable physiologist and a pioneer in the resuscitative effects of electric shock on the heart and venous pressure. He was also a founder and editor of The Physiological Review. Together with his wife he established the Planned Parenthood Association of Baltimore and in 1907 the Guild of St. George, a home for unmarried mothers. The Hookers also founded in 1916 the Roosevelt Recreation Center in Hampden, a north Baltimore community; Hooker also took part in promoting the Maryland old-age pension program.
On June 14, 1905, Hooker married Edith Houghton of Buffalo, New York. They had five children: Donald Houghton; Russell Houghton; twins, Elizabeth Houghton and Edith Houghton; and Beatrice Houghton. Edith Hooker, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, had studied medicine for four years at Johns Hopkins, but gave up a medical career for marriage. She was an active and prominent worker for woman suffrage and for those social reforms in which the woman's movement was interested, particularly the establishment of neighborhood educational and recreational centers and the cause of social hygiene, i. e. the suppression of prostitution and its attendant evil, venereal disease. Hooker joined his wife in taking a leading role in these reforms.
