Joseph E. Moore was born on July 9, 1892, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only child of Joseph Howard Moore, an executive with Spirella, a corset-manufacturing company, and Adelaide Marie Lovett. When Moore was eight years old, his parents separated and his mother took him to Kansas City, Missouri.
In Kansas City, Missouri, he attended public schools. In 1909 he entered the University of Kansas and received the Bachelor of Arts degree in February 1914 after completing three years' work in the arts and sciences and two years in medicine.
Following a summer session at the University of Chicago, he transferred to the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1914 and graduated in 1916.
In 1917, Moore became a resident house officer in medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and then, with the United States engaged in World War I, he entered the army as a first lieutenant.
Then Moore served in France initially as a battalion medical officer attached to the British Expeditionary Forces and later joined the American Expeditionary Forces, attaining the rank of captain. During this service he was assigned to venereal disease control activities, which were under the general direction of Colonel Hugh H. Young, on leave from Johns Hopkins; and upon returning to Baltimore, he became associated with the syphilis division of the Johns Hopkins Medical School and Hospital. The syphilis clinic at Johns Hopkins, the first of its kind in the country, had been established several years earlier for the purpose of centralizing the study and treatment of patients with this disease. Moore brought a new dynamism to the clinic, and under the joint leadership of himself on the clinical side and Alan M. Chesney on the experimental, it became perhaps the foremost center in the world for the study of syphilis. Moore became sole director of the clinic in 1929 and remained so until his death.
He and his associates undertook many detailed and exhaustive studies to determine the most effective treatment for syphilis in its various stages and its effects on the nervous system. Moore was basically an internist and approached clinical syphilology from that perspective. His first major work, entitled The Modern Treatment of Syphilis (1933), became an authoritative text.
When the effectiveness of penicillin against syphilis was demonstrated in 1943 and later established as the treatment of choice, Moore published Penicillin in Syphilis (1946), based on experience gained during World War II, which again became a standard work in its field. He served as consultant to the U. S. Public Health Service and the U. S. Army and was chairman of the venereal disease subcommittee of the National Research Council.
For several years after the war he served as chairman of the Syphilis Study Section of the National Institutes of Health, a group responsible for recommending grants for research in that field. When the number of new syphilis cases declined with the widespread use of penicillin, Moore persuaded the Johns Hopkins authorities to convert the syphilis clinic to the study of other chronic diseases and initiated a series of painstaking investigations similar to those so successfully used in the syphilis studies.
He was an effective supporter of Thomas Parran in his move to bring the problem of syphilis out of the shadows. Moore communicated his zeal and enthusiasm for the discovery of better methods for the prevention and treatment of syphilis to many students and young physicians. He designed a graduate course on the study of syphilis that attracted physicians from North and South America and the United Kingdom. Many of these physicians later became leaders in the venereal disease control programs of their states and countries. One of his major accomplishments was the demonstration at Johns Hopkins of the feasibility of using an outpatient clinic as an effective clinical research facility.
Moore established the American Journal of Syphilis, which eventually became the Journal of Chronic Diseases, of which he was coeditor. He was a fluent speaker, an exceptionally effective committee chairman, and an excellent teacher, whose bibliography contains over 150 titles. In addition to maintaining a successful private practice throughout his career, Moore held senior academic appointments at both the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the School of Hygiene and Public Health. Moore died on December 6, 1957, in Baltimore, Maryland.
Joseph Earle Moore was a prominent physician, and his main contributions to biomedical knowledge were the demonstration of the value of regular and long-term treatment of syphilis with established drugs, elucidation of the evolution of certain forms of neurosyphilis, and recognition of the occurrence of false positive serologic tests for syphilis in certain other chronic diseases. Joseph E. Moore was awarded the Medal of Merit for his services during World War II. The outpatient clinic for research in chronic diseases at the Johns Hopkins Hospital is named in his honor.
On May 24, 1917, Joseph E. Moore married Grace Douglas Barclay of Baltimore, a graduate of the School of Nursing of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. His first wife died in 1954 leaving no children, and on December 23 of that year he married Irene Mason Gieske of Baltimore.
