Louis Blanchard Wilson was an American pathologist and medical educator.
Background
Louis B. Wilson was born on December 22, 1866, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Henry Harrison Wilson and his wife, Susan E. Harbach (or Harbaugh). His father was of Scottish descent, his mother seven-eighths Scottish and one-eighth German. Mrs. Wilson died when Louis was born, and since his father was on military duty in the regular army, the boy was reared by his maternal grandparents on their farm near Pittsburgh.
His grandfather died when Louis was six, and his youth was filled with fifteen-hour days of work and little play. An uncle, however, taught him to make things and to shoot. His grandfather had taught him to read before he began school, and the family's resources included a rather unusual library. Little is known of Louis's relationship with his father (who remarried), but Henry Wilson did supply his son with books and a microscope.
Education
Teaching was a family tradition, and at sixteen Louis entered the State Normal School at California, Pennsylvania.
In 1896, Wilson received Doctor of Medicine degree.
Career
After graduating in 1886, he stayed on for a year to teach and then went west to Des Moines, Iowa, as principal of a grade school.
In 1888 he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, as a teacher in the Central High School. While there, he also became a part-time medical student at the University of Minnesota. Teaching biology and physics in the high school enabled him to have a laboratory, which the army physician Walter Reed used when he was stationed in St. Paul in 1893. This association stimulated Wilson's interest in bacteriology, an interest which was greatly furthered by Frank Wesbrook, director of the laboratory of the state board of health and professor of bacteriology and pathology at the University of Minnesota. After receiving his M. D. degree in 1896, Wilson became Wesbrook's assistant. A short period of study followed at Harvard, chiefly under Frank Burr Mallory.
For two summers, beginning in 1902, Wilson was sent to Montana with Dr. William Chowning to conduct the first field and laboratory studies on the causes of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Their findings helped lay the groundwork for the conclusive research of Howard T. Ricketts on the disease.
In 1905, at the invitation of Dr. W. J. Mayo, Wilson joined the staff of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to establish laboratories for pathologic and bacteriologic studies. Freed now of the necessity of supplementing his small salary by general practice, he devoted his entire time to developing improved methods in the laboratory and to extensive studies in pathology, both of tissue removed during surgery and of tissue obtained at autopsy. Microscopic examination of tissue was, at the time, a slow process. Wilson recognized that the surgeon needed information about the pathology of the tissue immediately after it was removed. His frozen-tissue method for rapid but accurate histologic diagnosis, first described in a publication of 1905, enabled him to give the needed information within minutes; modified only slightly, the method has since been in constant use. Of his other studies in pathology, the most extensive and important were those bearing on the relation between gastric cancer and ulcer and those concerning the various disease states of the thyroid gland. The latter were carried out with the clinical collaboration of Henry S. Plummer and the chemical collaboration of Edward C. Kendall. They provided a classification of thyroid disease that has aided greatly in subsequent investigations.
Wilson's interest in teaching led to his appointment as the first director (1915 - 1937) of the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, later the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine. Under his guidance it became one of the leading institutions of its kind, with some 300 physicians and scientists enrolled at the time of his retirement in 1937. Six years after his retirement, Wilson died on October 5, 1943, in Rochester, Minnesota, of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Rochester.
Achievements
Louis Blanchard Wilson was an outstanding pathologist and educator, who devised a method of staining sections of live tissue. In addition, he developed cameras for laboratory use. Moreover, he fostered the growth of the medical photography and medical graphics sections at Mayo Clinic.
Membership
Louis B. Wilson was president of the Association of American Medical Colleges (1931 - 1933). Also, Wilson was an original member (1915 - 1924) of the National Board of Medical Examiners, president of the Advisory Board of Medical Specialties (1934 - 1937), chairman of the medical section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1931 - 1932), and president of the scientific honorary society, Sigma Xi (1932 - 1934).
In addition, he was a member of the National Rifle Association and the Minnesota Horticultural Society.
Personality
His younger friends remember him for his willingness to discuss their problems and his seemingly effortless help in getting them jobs or in giving whatever assistance they needed.
Interests
Louis B. Wilson was interested in everything around him: botany, horticulture, photography, including early use of Lumière plates, and the breeding and training of hunting dogs.
Connections
On August 26, 1891, Louis Wilson married Mary Elizabeth Stapleton. They had two children: Alice Mary and Carroll Louis.
On August 23, 1924, four years after his first wife's death, Wilson married Mrs. Annie Maud Headline Mellish, director of the editorial section of the Mayo Clinic. She died in 1933, and on January 2, 1935, he married her close friend, Grace Greenwood McCormick.
Father:
Henry Harrison Wilson
Mother:
Susan E. Wilson (Harbach or Harbaugh)
Wife:
Grace Greenwood Wilson (McCormick)
Wife:
Mary Elizabeth Wilson (Stapleton)
Wife:
Annie Maud Headline Wilson (Mellish)
Daughter:
Alice Mary Wilson
colleague:
Edward Calvin Kendall
Edward Calvin Kendall was an American chemist.
colleague:
Henry Stanley Plummer
Henry Stanley Plummer was an American internist and endocrinologist.
