Walter Walker Palmer was an American physician, scientist, and educator.
Background
Walter Walker Palmer was born on February 27, 1882 in Southfield, New Marlborough, Massachussets, United States. He was the fourth of five children of Henry Wellington Palmer and Almira Roxana Walker, both of Southfield. Ancestors on both sides were of English descent and settled in New England in the seventeenth century, where they were known as "the Stonington [Massachussets] Palmers. " The first of the family to arrive in the colonies was Walter Palmer, who emigrated in 1629 and finally settled in Stonington in 1653. Walter Walker Palmer was the ninth generation and his ancestors on both sides had all been farmers.
Education
Walter Walker Palmer graduated from Mount Hermon Academy in 1901 and entered Amherst College, from which he graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1905. Palmer taught mathematics at Milton Academy and then entered Harvard Medical School, from which he graduated with honors (Alpha Omega Alpha) in 1910. Palmer received the honorary degree of Doctor of Sciences from Amherst (1922), Columbia (1929), and Princeton (1947).
Career
Walter Walker Palmer participated in the Amherst paleontological expedition during the summer of 1904, when he identified (and later, in his first publication, described) a hitherto unknown species, which now bears his name. Upon completing his medical internship in 1911 at the Massachusetts General Hospital, he was appointed Henry P. Walcott fellow there, and between 1913 and 1915 he served as medical resident at the Massachusetts General and, in addition, became instructor in physiological chemistry at Harvard. Although he intended to enter medical practice, a visit to Professor L. J. Henderson at Harvard Medical School proved to be the turning point in his life, and he embarked on a fruitful career in full-time academic medicine. His earlier research, much of it in collaboration with Henderson, was devoted to important studies of acidbase balance, particularly in diabetes and nephritis.
From 1915 to 1917 Palmer was a member of the staff of the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where he extended this research and also developed the first reliable quantitative method for hemoglobin determination. His later investigation was largely concerned with the physiology of the thyroid gland. In 1917 he became associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and acting director, as well as associate attending physician, at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York. He reluctantly remained a civilian in World War I, but held a commission as 16t lieutenant in the Medical Reserve Corps. From 1919 to 1921 Palmer was associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and surrounded himself with a brilliant group of younger physicians and investigators. His stay in Baltimore was not a happy one, owing to the bitterness and ridicule to which he and his new group were often subjected by the authoritarian and reactionary attitudes of many associates.
In 1921 he declined the chair of medicine at Johns Hopkins and also at Yale and Michigan and returned to Columbia as Bard professor of medicine and director of the medical service at the Presbyterian Hospital. He brought his sympathetic group with him from Hopkins, and with his vision, his shining integrity, his rare sense of values and critique, his unfailing interest in and support of those about him, and his capacity to choose capable young physicians, he built up at Columbia one of the world's renowned departments of internal medicine. He established an esprit and a record of accomplishment in his department unexcelled elsewhere. Upon his mandatory retirement at Columbia, Palmer became director of the New York Public Health Research Institute, to which he brought an enormous scientific strength and new blood. He died on October 28, 1950 from heart disease on his beloved farm in Tyringham, Massachussets. He was buried in the village cemetery.
Achievements
Membership
Palmer was a vice-president of the Century Association in New York and president of the Harvey Society.
Personality
Walter Walker Palmer was the modest, gentle, soft-spoken farm boy, without early medical indoctrination and without powerful sponsorship, rose to pre-eminence in the medical field. He also was renowned as a rugged lines-man and varsity captain who had no peer on the gridiron. According to a close colleague, he was not indiscriminately gregarious nor politically ambitious, nor was he a facile speaker before formal gatherings, but his clarity of vision and his idealism led to positions of honor and trust in many scientific and learned organizations. A big man, both in physique and spirit, Dr. Palmer was regarded by his friends as a tower of strength. Those in need constantly sought his wise counsel, for with all his solidity he had disarming warmth and a gentle humor. He had deep human understanding and inspired complete confidence. He had rugged integrity and quiet but abiding contempt for sham, superficiality, and insincerity.
Connections
Walter Walker Palmer married Francesca de Kay Gilder, the daughter of Richard Watson Gilder, on October 22, 1922. They had three children: a daughter, Helena Francesca Gilder, and two sons, Gilder and Walter de Kay. He cherished his family life, which was immeasurably enriched by the musical, artistic, and literary environment created by his wife and her wide circle of distinguished friends.