Paul Dudley White

Paul Dudley White ( born June 6, 1886 in Roxbury, Massachusetts, † 31 October 1973 ) was an American cardiologist and founder of the American Heart Association.

In 1953 he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research.

Life

Paul Dudley White was born to a family doctor and grew up in Roxbury on in Massachusetts, where he attended high school. Once finished, he moved to Harvard College, where he earned his baccalaureate degree in 1908. It is said that the death of his sister, who died at the age of twelve years on rheumatic fever, had aroused his interest in cardiology. White studied at Harvard University and received his medical degree 1911. Subsequently, he worked at the newly established Department of Pediatrics at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1913 he received a scholarship and spent a year at University College Hospital in London with studies of the electrocardiogram. With the outbreak of the First World War, he undertook volunteered for military service and served with a Harvard unit near Bologna. In 1917 he helped to establish the American air base in Bordeaux. For organizing a relief expedition of the American Red Cross to combat a typhus epidemic in Macedonia and the Greek Islands, he was honored by the Greek government. Returned to the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1919, he founded a cardiology department, which he headed until 1949. He was succeeded by Edward Franklin Bland.

Work

Even in his time as a junior doctor Bland developed together with his colleague Robert Irving Lee a method to measure blood clotting, his first medical publication. Due to his outstanding clinical skills, he created the basis for its own international reputation and now also including substantiated by the cardiology department of the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1924 he was one of the founders of the American Heart Association, whose president he became in 1941. 1931 was first published his classic textbook Heart Diseases ( heart disease ), which went through several editions. In 1948 he was elected president of the International Society of Cardiology and was then President of the World Congress of Cardiology. White stressed the importance of physical fitness and exercise in the prevention of diseases of the coronary vessels. His use of the bike was world famous and still bears the " Dr. Paul Dudley White Bike Path " in the Boston area its name. In addition, a congenital malformation of the coronary arteries, the Bland- White- Garland syndrome, and Wolff- Parkinson -White syndrome are named after him.