Walsh McDermott

Walsh McDermott (born October 24, 1909 in New Haven , † October 17, 1981 in Pawling ) was an American medic . He was Professor of Medicine and Public Health at Cornell University (Medical College).

Life

McDermott was the son of a general practitioner, attended Phillips Academy in Andover and studied at Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in 1930 and medicine from Columbia University with an MD in 1934. He completed his residency at New York Hospital, which with Cornell University was connected. In 1935 he became seriously ill with tuberculosis , spent seven months in the Trudeau Sanatorium on Saranac Lake (and a regular patient at the New York Hospital for the next twenty years) and then went to the Syphilis Clinic at New York Hospital. In 1942 he became head of the Infectious Diseases Department at New York Hospital, where he was in charge of testing, for example, penicillin (which proved to be very effective against syphilis, so that the special clinic that previously administered mainly arsenic-containing substances could be closed) and soon afterwards other antibiotics and isoniazid against tuberculosis. He also researched the resistance of microbes to chemotherapy drugs. Although he had no formal laboratory training himself, he managed his laboratory successfully, with the assistance of René Dubois from the Rockefeller Institute, with whom he was friends. In 1955 he was also Professor of Public Health and Chairman of the Department of Public Health at New York Hospital, which he remained until 1972. From the 1970s he worked for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on a number of occasions.

In the 1950s he became increasingly involved in public health, beginning with his fight against tuberculosis among the Navajo Indians . This expanded to an interest in health care in developing countries and he sat on many committees for international aid, for example 1958-1973 on the WHO Advisory Committee on Tuberculosis.

He served on the New York City Board of Health for seven years and was the first chairman of the New York City Health Research Council. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) since 1967 and in 1967 the chairman of its Board of Medicine. He later became a member of the NAS Institute of Medicine . He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1969), Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London and the Council of Foreign Relations. In 1955 he received the Lasker ~ DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award .

In 1948 he became Managing Editor and 1952 Editor of the American Review of Tuberculosis (now the American Review of Respiratory Disease ) and remained so for twenty years. In 1963 he received the Trudeau Medal of the National Tuberculosis Association, in 1968 the James D. Bruce Memorial Award from the American College of Physicians and in 1969 the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University.

In 1940 he married Marian MacPhail, who became a journalist and served on the editorial board of Life Magazine .

From the tenth edition in 1959 he was editor of The Cecil-Loeb Textbook of Medicine and replaced the first editors Russell Cecil and Robert Loeb (the book appeared since 1928, then as The Cecil Textbook of Medicine). He edited it with Paul B. Beeson until 1979.

Web links

• Paul B. Beeson, Biographical Memoirs National Academy, pdf
• Alfred E. Clark, New York Times obituary, October 19, 1981