(Excerpt from Lectures on the Malarial Fevers
IN the foll...)
Excerpt from Lectures on the Malarial Fevers
IN the following lectures I shall endeavor to place before you a summary of the present status of our knowledge con cerning the malarial fevers. There are few diseases toward the comprehension of which greater advances have been made within the last fifteen or sixteen years, and yet it is surprising how slow the general medical public has been in appreciating the true significance and value of the results which have fol lowed Laveran's discovery of the malarial parasite.
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Thayer was born in Milton, Massachussets, in 1864. He was the eldest son of Sophia Bradford (Ripley) and James Bradley Thayer, and the descendant of Thomas Thayer who emigrated from Braintree, England, to Braintree, Massachussets, before 1647. His brother was Ezra Ripley Thayer.
Education
He graduated from Harvard College in 1885 and in 1889 from the Harvard Medical School. After serving as interne in the Massachusetts General Hospital, he studied under Paul Ehrlich and others in Berlin and Vienna.
Numerous honorary degrees were conferred upon him.
Career
On his return to America, he practised for a short time in Boston and in November 1890 became a member of the house staff of William Osler in the Johns Hopkins Hospital and was resident physician there for seven years. He became professor of clinical medicine in the Johns Hopkins Medical School and, later, professor of medicine and physician-in-chief to the hospital. In 1921 he was made professor emeritus of medicine.
Throughout his career he was prominent in medical research, teaching, organization, and practice. He investigated the blood in leukaemia, typhoid fever, and malaria, and he made numerous contributions to knowledge of the circulatory system, including publications upon the third heart sound, heart murmurs, bacterial endocarditis, heart block, angina pectoris, and arteriosclerosis. He published several volumes, including: Lectures on the Malarial Fevers (1897), America – 1917 and Other Verse (1926), and Osler and Other Papers (1931).
He inspired younger men to engage in research work, and many men were grateful to have been his pupils. As a teacher he laid great stress upon the accuracy of physical examinations and set an example of painstaking work himself. Skilled, too, in the use of the methods of the clinical laboratory, he drilled his students rigorously in their application to the study of patients. He insisted upon the keeping of most careful clinical records from the time of admission until the discharge of each patient; such records became very valuable later for statistical analyses. With William George MacCallum he held regular clinical-pathological conferences with regard to fatal cases, at which the clinical studies made during life were compared with the findings at autopsy. His students were urged, too, to make use of the library and were taught the importance and the technique of studies of the bibliography of the maladies that came under observation. A linguist himself, he encouraged his students to learn to read and to speak two or three foreign languages.
In 1917 he and his friend Frank Billings of Chicago were made members of the American Red Cross Mission to Russia, for which in 1918 he received the distinction badge of the Red Cross of Russia. He served successively as major, colonel, and brigadier-general of the medical corps in the World War and, during 1918-19, acted as chief consultant of the American Expeditionary Force in France.
He accepted invitations to deliver the Bright Lecture in London in 1927, the Gibson Lectures at Edinburgh in 1930, and the Frank Billings Lecture in Chicago in 1932. In May 1927 the "William Sydney Thayer and Susan Read Thayer Lectureship in Clinical Medicine, " providing for one or more lectures annually at Johns Hopkins, was endowed by a group of their friends.
He died suddenly from a heart attack while visiting in Washington.
(Excerpt from Lectures on the Malarial Fevers
IN the foll...)
Membership
He was made fellow of many foreign medical academies and honorary member of a large number of scientific associations in this country and abroad. He was president of the American Medical Association, 1928-29. He served as a trustee of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and for two terms as a member of the board of overseers of Harvard University.
He received the Distinguished Service Medal of the United States in 1919 and a commandership of the Legion of Honor in France in 1928.
Personality
Physically he was of average height, slender in later life, and healthy until some three years before his death, when he began to suffer from anginal attacks.
Connections
In August 1917, his wife, Susan Chisolm (Read) Thayer, to whom he had been married on September 3, 1901, died in Baltimore after a long invalidism. She left no children.