James Dowling Trask was a medical scientist and pediatrician.
Background
James was born on August 21, 1890 in Astoria, Long Island, N. Y. He was the second of the three sons of James Dowling Trask, a native of White Plains, N. Y. , and Julia Norton (Hartshorne) Trask.
Both his father and his paternal grandfather were physicians; their ancestors had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. His maternal grandfather, originally from Highlands, N. J. , had sailed around Cape Horn and settled in San Francisco during the gold rush of 1849. When young Trask's father retired from practice the family moved to Highlands.
Education
As a boy Trask attended Craigie School in New York City and the Lawrenceville (N. J. ) School and spent much of his vacations sailing with his father and brothers in the adjacent coastal waters of New Jersey and New York.
He entered the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in 1908, where he studied civil engineering, but in his senior year an operation for appendicitis forced him to drop out for a time and turned his interests toward medicine.
On his return to Yale, he shifted to biology, entering as a junior, and graduated with a Ph. B. degree in 1913. He then enrolled at Cornell Medical College and received the M. D. degree in 1917.
Career
Since the country was engaged in World War I, he had an abbreviated internship at Bellevue Hospital in New York City (1917 - 18) and then served until the close of the war as a lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps, stationed at Camp Wadsworth, Spartanburg, S. C. Having decided against entering private practice, Trask applied for a research post at the hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
In 1919 he was appointed assistant resident physician and joined the brilliant group of bacteriologists, immunologists, organic chemists, and clinicians that included Oswald T. Avery, A. Raymond Dochez, Donald D. Van Slyke, and Francis G. Blake. Under Blake's direction, Trask embarked on an ambitious project to determine whether measles was caused by a specific virus or, as some workers believed, by a streptococcus. The two demonstrated that measles was indeed a virus disease. This early success encouraged Trask to continue in medical research, and in 1921, when Blake was appointed the first full-time professor of medicine at Yale, Trask joined him in the move to New Haven, as instructor in medicine.
In the next few years, with Blake and others, he made important studies of scarlet fever and the use of antistreptococcal sera. Seeking a greater opportunity to study infectious diseases, he decided to specialize in pediatrics, and in 1927 he was made associate professor in that specialty at Yale. He thus came under the immediate direction of Edwards A. Park and Grover F. Powers and carried out significant studies on pneumonia, scarlet fever, and streptococcal infections.
When in 1931 an epidemic of infantile paralysis swept New Haven, Trask served on the Yale Poliomyelitis Commission and thereafter made intensive studies of the disease and its mode of transmission in association with John R. Paul and others. Trask's interests went beyond his immediate teaching and clinical responsibilities. He was concerned not only with the individual patient but also with the patient's family and with the circumstances under which the patient had become ill. This concept of family epidemiology led to his appointment in 1939 to the New Haven Board of Health.
In 1941 Trask was appointed to two commissions of the army's epidemiological board, one on neurotropic virus diseases and the other on hemolytic streptococcal infections. In the spring of 1942, while investigating an outbreak of streptococcal disease at Chanute Field, Ill. , he contracted an acute colon bacillus infection and died forty-eight hours later, of septicemia and peritonitis, at Billings Hospital, Chicago, at the age of fifty-one. He was buried at the White Plains (N. Y. ) Rural Cemetery.
He belonged to a large number of professional groups, including the American Association of Immunologists, the Society of American Bacteriologists, and the Society for Pediatric Research.
Personality
His love of the outdoors was only one of the many personal qualities, including cheerful good humor, enthusiasm, wit, and generosity, that won him friends in every walk of life.
Interests
Although his duties included teaching, the practice of hospital medicine, the direction of a large research unit, and the writing of the resulting papers, he also found time for duck hunting, trout fishing, and sailing.
Connections
On June 4, 1921, Trask married Phyllis Hayden Randall of Fort Wayne, Ind. , a former nurse. They had one daughter, Phyllis Randall.