Background
Walter was born on February 24, 1874 in New York City. He was the son of Frederick J. E. Timme, a Lutheran minister, and Emma Wirth.
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endocrinologist neurologist physician scientist
Walter was born on February 24, 1874 in New York City. He was the son of Frederick J. E. Timme, a Lutheran minister, and Emma Wirth.
He attended public schools and took private lessons in piano, organ, and voice. After he graduated from the City College of New York in 1893, he entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Following graduation in 1897, Timme practiced general medicine in Manhattan.
From 1912 to 1913 he took graduate courses at the University of Berlin.
In 1898 he joined the staff of the Vanderbilt Clinic, focusing on the new specialties of neurology and endocrinology. In 1910 Timme joined the staff of the newly formed Neurological Institute of New York.
He was appointed chief neurologist at the Vanderbilt Clinic. A pioneer in patient care, research, and teaching neurology in the United States, he became military director of the Institute for Neurological Research during World War I, training a hundred medical officers in neuropsy-chiatry, emphasizing the anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the nervous system. This descriptive approach omitted the mental component later recognized as significant during wartime.
After World War I endocrinology captured wide interest. From 1918 to 1937 Timme headed a separate neuro-endocrine department at the Neurological Institute, as endocrinology, the study of the relation of the body's internal secretions to growth, development, and disease, explored normal and abnormal growth and appearance. Since impressive cures sometimes occurred through supplemental therapy, the public clamored for more information.
Because there were few governmental restrictions on the drug marketplace, Timme began in 1916 to participate in the Association for the Study of Internal Secretions, which promoted research in the new field, monitored endocrine product purity, and protected the public from charlatans. Timme's work included associate editorship of the association's journal, Endocrinology. His major contribution was his work on pluriglandular endocrinologic disturbances--that is, dysfunction in one or more glands, causing complex feedback effects.
In 1918 he first described publicly the syndrome named for him, ovarian and adrenal insufficiency leading to compensatory hypopituitarism. Timme also contributed to neurology.
In 1920 he founded, and served as the first president of, the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases. Its method, which he labeled "intensive ante-mortem study, " consisted of selecting a disease entity in advance, identifying available experts, and convening in New York each December for a symposium. The organization continues to fulfill his goal: "a unified and inspired all-American group of neurologists and psychiatrists" sharing current information on neurological disease.
Timme's successes should be viewed against the context of the years of his work. During intense investigation of endocrinology's relationship to human genetics, growth, and development, moral and racial biases existed that sometimes distorted scientific ideas for social purposes. Timme was courageous and farsighted in dealing with most of the issues and problems that the new knowledge generated and usually supported a reasoned approach to reform when public concern overlapped with his fields.
In 1923 he called for new definitions nationally of the racial aspects of disease and in 1928 joined others at the state level in suggesting that legalizing hard drugs on the open market would reduce crime and needless public expenditure. In the latter year he discussed mongolism, a newly recognized form of idiocy, reminding Americans that mongoloids were only part of a neglected 1. 5 million feebleminded people and urging attention to scientific rather than racial or moral views of such diseases. Appeals to the public by Timme and his colleagues, however, sometimes reflected biases of the 1920's that curtailed patient rights.
In 1928, while heading a campaign to raise $2 million for the Neurological Institute, Timme cited his seventeen years of research on feeblemindness and argued that endocrinopathic inheritance of hypoplastic body characteristics correlated directly with subsequent criminal activity. His predictions of benefits from the early identification, isolation, and therapeutic alteration of such individuals did not withstand subsequent scientific scrutiny.
In 1937 Timme retired from the Neurological Institute and the position he had held since 1929 as professor of clinical neurology at Columbia.
He died in St. Petersburg, Fla.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
In 1920 he founded, and served as the first president of, the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases.
On June 27, 1901, Timme married Ida Helen Haar. They lived in a large country residence overlooking the Hudson, and Timme commuted to his Manhattan office.
Ida Timme died in 1940. On July 28, 1951, Timme married Anne Cecil Auwell.