Robert Anthony Hatcher was an American pharmacologist and educator. He served as a professor of materia medica at the Cleveland School of Pharmacy, demonstrator in pharmacology at the Western Reserve Medical School, and professor of pharmacology at Harvard and at the University of Chicago.
Background
Robert AnthonyHatcher was born on February 24, 1819 in New Madrid, Missouri, United States. He was the fourth of five children and the only one to survive infancy.
His father, Richard Hardaway Hatcher, a lawyer impoverished by the Civil War, was descended from William Hatcher, who came from England to Henrico County, Virginia, in 1635. His mother, Harriet Hinton (Marr) Hatcher, was of seventeenth-century Scottish ancestry.
Hatcher spent his boyhood in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the home of an uncle, Robert H. Marr, a justice of the Louisiana supreme court.
Education
Hatcher attended local schools in New Orleans.
Drawn to pharmacy, he entered the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and after graduating in Pharmacy in 1889 spent several years as a druggist in New Orleans.
Since he wished to understand more about the physiological action of drugs, he enrolled in the medical college of Tulane University and received the Doctor of Medicine degree in 1898.
Career
In 1899 Hatcher became professor of materia medica at the Cleveland School of Pharmacy and, a year or so later, demonstrator in pharmacology at the Western Reserve Medical School. The newly established pharmacology department at Western Reserve was headed by Torald H. Sollmann, a product of training abroad where the science of experimental pharmacology was thriving long before it gained a foothold in the United States.
Hatcher's collaboration with Sollmann proved a stimulating one and resulted in their joint publication of A Textbook of Materia Medica (1904). In 1904, at the age of thirty-six, Hatcher joined the staff of the Cornell University Medical College in New York City as instructor in pharmacology. He spent the rest of his active career at Cornell, becoming assistant professor in 1906 and professor and head of the department of pharmacology and materia medica in 1908 (the term "materia medica" was later dropped from his title).
During the early period of his tenure at Cornell he was also called upon to inaugurate the teaching of pharmacology at Harvard and at the University of Chicago.
His basic principle was that of Thoreau: "No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. " His staff was small, and he had no interest in expansion. Among his assistants and associates were Cary Eggleston, who later became involved in clinical pharmacology and the practice of cardiology; Janet Travell, who after years in the laboratory also turned to clinical pharmacology and medical practice, and later became personal physician to President John F. Kennedy; Soma Weiss; and Harry Gold. These associates adopted Hatcher's approach to investigating the diverse behavior of drugs in man - absorption, distribution, elimination, bioassay - which developed into the present discipline of clinical pharmacology.
Hatcher sometimes suggested to a student a subject for investigation, but he gave his staff complete freedom to define their own projects and pursue them experimentally.
He analyzed the reflex mechanism of emesis (vomiting) and the role of various drugs in producing it, subjects that had been neglected by physiologists. He is perhaps best known for his extensive investigations of the action of digitalis. By assaying biologically the action of crude and purified preparations, he helped define the Hatcher-Brody cat unit of digitalis leaf that made possible safe and routine use of the drug in heart disease.
His critical analysis of publications submitted by the pharmaceutical industry to buttress their claims for new therapeutic preparations was a strong force in shielding American medicine from the onslaughts of nostrums and quackery. In addition to his textbook and many papers, he published The Pharmacopeia and the Physician (1906), with Martin I. Wilbert, and The Pharmacology of Useful Drugs (1915). From 1910 to 1935 he was a member of the committee of revision of the United States Pharmacopeia.
Hatcher retired from his Cornell professorship in 1935. In his last years he suffered from heart disease, and during his terminal illness he lay in bed enjoying Aristotle and Plato in Jowett's translation.
He died at the age of seventy-six at his home in Flushing, New York, of a myocardial infarction, and was buried in the cemetery of the Presbyterian church in Lewes.
Achievements
Robert Anthony Hatcher went down in history as a prominent pharmacologist and educator. He was especially good in teaching as he encouraged student participation in the classroom, and in laboratory exercises laid stress on cultivating the powers of observation. He himself was a dedicated researcher in experimental pharmacology, which he regarded as the road to rational drug therapy in man.
The stream of publications that flowed from his laboratory, together with the aloof formality of his appearance and manner, gave Hatcher something of a legendary character. His investigations extended over a large field. A first-rate experimentalist, he carried out studies of strychnine, morphine, the cinchona alkaloids, and local anesthetics.
Religion
Hatcher was a devout Presbyterian.
Membership
Hatcher was one of the founders of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and in 1934 was elected president. He was a member of the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association from its founding in 1905 until 1943.
Personality
Hatcher's life stylewas unpretentious, thrifty, and rather bland, though close acquaintance suggested that he had by strict self-discipline overcome hedonistic leanings.
He took great pleasure in teaching.
Interests
Hatcher showed little interest in social activities but found his chief recreation in reading history, biography, and science.
Connections
On December 28, 1904, Hatcher married May Quinn Burton of Lewes, Delaware; their only child, Robert Lee, became an economist.
