William Darwin Paul was an American inventor. He was a pioneer in the fields of sports medicine and rehabilitation medicine.
Background
William Darwin Paul was born on January 31, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the second of four children of immigrants Max Paul and Sarah Siegfried. His father, who immigrated to the United States from his birthplace in Warsaw, was descended from a family of Polish Jewish book dealers. Max Paul was intellectually inquisitive and aggressive, and conversant in several languages in which he read aloud to his wife each evening after a day of factory work. Paul's mother, born in Galicia, absorbed the content of her husband's reading, although she remained functionally illiterate. The Pauls conversed in Polish, Yiddish, and German, their children cultivated English. When Max Paul was killed in a streetcar accident in 1912, family leadership devolved upon the older son, Maurice.
Education
Maurice Paul, his older brother, encouraged William Darwin Paul to follow up his high school diploma from Eastern District High School in Brooklyn with study in New York City's Polytechnic School. A professor there recognized the young man's gifts and arranged for a scholarship for him to study medicine at the University of Cincinnati, where Paul took both his undergraduate and medical degrees, supporting his education as a chemical laboratory technician.
Career
In 1930 William Darwin Paul moved to Iowa City, Iowa, for a residency at the University of Iowa Hospital. That initial one-year commitment became instead a lifetime career at the university, where he became assistant professor of medicine in 1941, associate professor in 1946, and professor in 1954. The university granted him emeritus honors in 1965. William D. Paul's research and clinical medical practice improved the quality of medical care for people worldwide, especially in light of the buffered aspirin he developed. Paul had been stymied whenever a rheumatic patient could not deal with the unpleasant side effects of pain-suppressing (and acidic) aspirin. In 1944, Dr. John Krantz of the University of Maryland developed an antacid by reacting aluminum propoxide with glycine, forming a compound he dubbed "alglyn. " Krantz sent five pounds of the new alglyn to Paul at about the same time that one of Paul's Iowa colleagues, Dr. Kate Daum, complained that aspirin offered her no relief from her recurring severe headaches because of uncomfortable aspirin-related reactions.
Paul mixed powdered aspirin and the new alglyn into capsules and gave them to Dr. Daum, telling her it was a new headache medication. She took the compound and reported timely and effective pain relief without the usual side effects. Buffered aspirin was born. A similar opportunity to combine alglyn with penicillin made Paul the first physician to administer that drug orally. When the Bristol-Myers Company expressed interest in marketing Dr. Paul's buffered aspirin, he teamed up with Joseph I. Routh and R. L. Dryer to conduct the necessary laboratory research. Clinical studies with 238 subjects, 37 of whom submitted to blood analyses, documented not only that the buffer provided increased comfort for aspirin users, but that the aspirin-with-buffer promoted pain relief in half the time that aspirin alone required.
Bristol-Myers used this fact in its marketing slogan for Bufferin, "Twice as Fast. " Doctors Paul and Routh promoted a similar application of a buffering compound to antacid tablets which resulted in another marketing coup, the development of Rolaids by the American Chicle Company and the Chattanooga Chemical Company. Paul's contributions to medicine were the result of pioneering vision. From 1931 to the end of his career he published on internal medicine, handling issues as diverse as mechanism of pain in peptic ulcer; oxygen consumption and nitrogen metabolism; the relationships between bronchial asthma and heart disease; and complications that arose with the administration of the new drug penicillin. Paul introduced the administration of penicillin by mouth, on which he reported in 1945. From 1943 on, medical journals published his articles on rheumatology dealing with the effects of aspirin, fever therapy, palindromic rheumatism, and the efficacy of vitamin D treatments.
William Darwin Paul published in these specialties before they were officially recognized and given board certification. His genius was in applying laboratory research to clinical practice. When he learned about endoscopy, the technique of viewing the interiors of hollow organs, he adopted it and thus through his publications (beginning in July 1941) introduced a tool and a technique that is now routine for internists. He was similarly among the pioneers in using electrocardiography and in treating diabetes with insulin (on which he began publishing in 1932). In the field of physical therapy, he published on postpolio rehabilitation techniques as early as 1943 and pioneered in the combination of exercise and curare in 1949.
During the polio epidemics of the 1950's William Darwin Paul was head of the Polio Department of the University Hospital, where he further developed rehabilitation protocols. In spite of a distinguished scientific career that included dozens of articles in scientific journals, offices in numerous professional societies, development of new medicines, and pioneering work in surgery, gastroenterology, and diabetes therapy, the first sentence in Paul's obituary in the Iowa City Press-Citizen identified him as the popularly recognized "University of Iowa football and basketball team physician from 1932 to 1971. "
During his long association with university athletes the four foot, eleven inch tall doctor gained the sobriquet "Shorty, " a nickname in which he apparently delighted. He told with glee of an occasion when hulking football players picked him up by each arm and carried him along with his own feet high off the ground. Working among comparative physical giants, Shorty Paul practically invented the specialty of sports medicine and was one of the few physicians who worked consistently with university athletic teams at that time. He was without peer, as most coaches were content to rely on mere trainers to tape joints and give rubdowns. Paul was a team physician whom the athletes trusted.
William Darwin Paul served the interest of the coaches, too, by capably diagnosing athletic injuries. He elevated sports medicine to a respectable level by conducting responsible research and publishing his results in the field. Paul's published research into the effects of deep tissue heat on blood circulation, on protective taping, and on the effects of diet on athletes have been applied in locker rooms throughout the world. . Paul died in Iowa City after a brief illness on December 13, 1977.
Achievements
William Darwin Paul was the inventor of buffered aspirin. He was a head of the Polio Department of the University Hospital.
Personality
William Darwin Paul was eleven inch tall. His considerable self-confidence and feisty personality protected students from any coach who might want to send a badly injured player back into the game. Colleagues remembered Paul for his innate intelligence, his propensity for hard work, his mercurial temper, his unfeigned "Napoleon complex", his "crusty" demeanor.
Interests
William Darwin Paul was interested in music, history, languages, and art.
Connections
In 1930 William Darwin Paul married Louise Ebeling.
