Epidemic Respiratory Disease: The Pneumonias and Other Infections of the Respiratory Tract Accompanying Influenza and Measles
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Francis Gilman Blake was an American physician and educator. He served as professor of medicine at the Yale Medical School.
Background
Francis Blake was born on February 22, 1887, in Mansfield Valley, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Francis Clark and Winifred Pamelia Ballard Blake. His father was a mining engineer interested in the development of the coal and iron resources of Pennsylvania. When Francis Blake was three years old his father died, and the family moved to Massachusetts. Blake spent most of his boyhood in Williamstown and Brookline. During the summers he went to Camp Pasquaney in New Hampshire, where he was strongly influenced by Ned Wilson, the camp director, to whom he became greatly attached.
Education
It was as a young camper that Blake developed an enthusiastic interest in natural history, especially of birds, and his first scientific paper, written with his brother Maurice and published in the Auk when Francis was fifteen, reflects his early interest in zoology. Blake retained his interest in the science of living things throughout his life. At Dartmouth College, where he received the A. B. in 1908, he took as many courses as possible in biology and zoology. After a year in the Maine woods tutoring a schoolboy in order to earn enough money to study medicine, Blake entered Harvard Medical School in 1909. He received the M. D. in 1913.
Career
Blake spent the years from 1913 to 1916 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital as an intern and then as resident in medicine. His first medical publications, in 1916, on the etiology of rat-bite fever and on the formation of methemoglobin by Streptococcus viridans, were based on research carried out while a house officer at the hospital and were apparently conducted under the influence of the eminent pathologist and microbiologist Theobald Smith. In 1916 Blake decided to enter academic medicine. He accepted a Moseley Travelling Fellowship from Harvard University and spent a year at the hospital of the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. There he worked on the differentiation of varieties of pneumococci, a problem of considerable scientific interest at the time. In June 1917 he became assistant professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, but in January 1918 he was commissioned first lieutenant in the Medical Reserve Corps and assigned to the Pneumonia Commission, then stationed at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.
Pneumonia was a problem of considerable concern in the United States Army camps during World War I, and the members of the commission attempted to investigate the problem with the limited knowledge available. Since the understanding of viruses was still minimal, the team produced no startling results. Later Blake worked with another group on the monograph Epidemic Respiratory Disease, which was published in 1921. After the war was over, this research on pneumonia was continued at the Army Medical School by Blake and Russell Cecil. In a series of ten papers published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, they dealt with the experimental production of bacterial pneumonia in monkeys and how to prevent it.
In 1919 Blake was appointed associate in medicine at the hospital of the Rockefeller Institute, where he began to work with viruses, assisted by J. D. Trask. These studies, published in 1921, proved conclusively that measles is caused by a virus and can be transmitted experimentally to rhesus monkeys. They also demonstrated the conditions under which the disease is infective. This work led to later investigations by Trask on poliomyelitis virus infection in rhesus monkeys.
Blake joined the faculty of the Yale Medical School as the John Slade Ely Professor of Medicine at the age of thirty-four, one of the youngest men ever appointed to a full professorship at the university. This was the period in which American medical schools were being transformed into centers of medical science - a result of the Flexner Report and the efforts of the General Education Board, a Rockefeller agency. The creation of full-time faculties was part of this effort, and Blake was one of the first full-time professors in clinical medicine. Despite offers from other universities, he remained at Yale as professor of medicine and chairman of the department of internal medicine for thirty years. In 1927 he was named Sterling Professor of Medicine, and from 1940 to 1947 he served as dean of the medical school. In the latter year he resigned to devote his full time to the chairmanship of the department of internal medicine and to his work for various governmental and scientific agencies.
Blake had become a member of the division of medical sciences of the National Research Council in 1925, and during subsequent decades he was actively involved in its work. In 1941 he was appointed consultant to the secretary of war and became president of a board for the investigation and control of influenza and other epidemic diseases in the army, a unit that eventually became the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board. He served as president until 1946 and remained a member until his death. The board was a working unit with investigators in the field, and in 1943 Blake accompanied such a group to New Guinea to study scrub typhus (also known as tsutsugamushi fever), an important cause of serious illness among American troops in the South Pacific. He returned with a great deal of new and important information, a collection of butterflies from New Guinea, and a case of tertian malaria that plagued him for two years.
Blake had a lifelong interest in clinical investigation, particularly with respect to acute respiratory disease (pneumonia, influenza), measles, scarlet fever, immunological reactions in infectious disease, and the use of chemotherapeutic agents and antibiotics. As a clinician his great strength was his ability as a diagnostician. He was thorough in examining patients and exercised rare clinical judgment, in large measure resulting from his keen capacity for analysis. As a teacher and administrator he took care of affairs with dispatch, dealing with matters briskly but also with deliberation. He made medical students feel that they were part of the march of medicine.
Throughout his life Blake maintained a love of natural history and the outdoors. Until 1941 he and his family spent their summers at a small cottage called Pebble Hedges at Newfound Lake, New Hampshire. He died in Washington, D. C. , two weeks after retiring from his post at Yale.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Membership
Blake was a member of the American College of Physicians, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
Personality
Blake was not a demonstrative man, but he had a sense of humor and a great liking for puzzles. At parties given at home he and his guests amused themselves with all kinds of games, from arithmetical tricks to balancing stunts.
Connections
At the Brigham Blake met Dorothy P. Dewey, a nurse in training from Springfield, Massachussets. The couplewere married on June 1, 1916; they had three sons.