Rufus Cole

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rufus Ivory Cole (born April 30, 1872 in Rowsburg , Ohio , † April 20, 1966 in Washington, DC ) was an American internist . He is considered the nestor of scientific clinical medicine in the United States.

Live and act

Cole's father was a doctor in Illinois . From 1892 Rufus Cole studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor , where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1896 , then at Johns Hopkins University with an MD as a medical degree in 1899. He completed his clinical training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital , including with William Osler . Cole was given responsibility for the microbiological laboratory, where, among other things, he carried out systematic work on typhus . Interrupted by a research stay in 1903/1904 with August von Wassermann at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Cole stayed at the Johns Hopkins Hospital until 1909 , where he was promoted to senior physician.

In 1908, Cole was promoted to the position of founding director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City , which opened in 1910 with 50 beds. In 1909, Cole traveled to the United Kingdom and the continent of Europe to get inspiration for the direction of the hospital with an explicit research assignment. The five diseases that were to be treated and researched primarily at the research hospital were pneumonia ( pneumonia ), poliomyelitis , syphilis , "heart disease" and - at the special request of Christian Archibald Herter , who was temporarily on the institution's supervisory board - celiac disease (at that time under the name intestinal infantilism ). Cole himself devoted himself to research into pneumonia, which was both common at the time and had a high mortality rate.

Cole and coworkers developed an immune serum against pneumococci type I. The Canadian Oswald T. Avery also belonged to his working group, who proved in experiments with pneumococci that carrying genetic information must be the essence of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). In the run-up to the United States' entry into World War I , Cole was commissioned by the Surgeon General of the United States Army to investigate outbreaks of pneumonia in camps . He was able to identify important epidemiological facts about the spread of pneumococcal pneumonia and identified infections with β-hemolytic streptococci as a complication of measles as a common cause of pneumonia.

In addition to the training of numerous leading clinical physicians, Cole's achievement is the establishment of full-time work for doctors - instead of additional half-day work in private practice - in academic hospitals. Under his leadership, clinical work at the patient's bedside became a scientific discipline in its own right. Cole's ideas were first realized at the University of Chicago Hospital .

In 1908 Cole married Annie Hegeler, a daughter of the engineer and publisher ( Open Court Publishing Company , The Monist ) Edward C. Hegeler . The couple had three daughters. Rufus Cole retired in 1937 and moved to Mount Kisco , New York . Here he devoted himself to gardening and published on English landscape gardens and on the social, political and religious history of England in the late sixteenth and entire seventeenth centuries.

Cole died of fatal pneumonia at the age of 94 when he was in Washington, DC to receive the Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal for his scientific work.

Awards (selection)

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present (PDF; 1.7 MB) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org); accessed on August 28, 2016.
  2. ↑ Rufus Cole. In: nasonline.org. Retrieved August 28, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Jessie Stevenson Kovalenko Medal. In: nasonline.org. Retrieved August 28, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Cole, Rufus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cole, Rufus I .; Cole, Rufus Ivory
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American internist
DATE OF BIRTH April 30, 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH Rowsburg , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH April 20, 1966
Place of death Washington, DC