Priscilla White (physician)
Priscilla White ( born March 17, 1900 in Boston, † December 16, 1989 in Ashland, Massachusetts) was an American diabetologist. She served for many years as director of the Children and Youth Department, founded by Elliott P. Joslin Diabetes Clinic in Boston and a professor at Harvard University and at Tufts University. Focus their scientific and medical interest was particularly diabetes mellitus during pregnancy and childhood. As its main merit is considered to increase the survival rate of newborn infants of diabetic mothers at the Joslin Clinic of around 54 percent in the 1920s to about 97 percent at the end of the 1970s.
Life
Priscilla White was born in 1900 in Boston and began after high school graduation in 1917 to study the liberal arts at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two years later she moved to Tufts University, where she studied until 1923 Medicine and graduated in third best in her class. In 1924, two years after the introduction of insulin in the treatment of diabetes mellitus by Frederick Banting and Charles Best, she went to the run by Elliott P. Joslin Diabetes Clinic at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston.
Almost from the beginning it was about Joslin, whose intercourse with her White in her memoirs described as strong father - daughter relationship, the responsibility for looked after by the hospital diabetic mothers and children. In 1932 she published the work "Diabetes in Childhood and Adolescence " their first major monograph, after they had already written the chapter on diabetes mellitus during pregnancy in the fourth edition of Joslin's " The Treatment of Diabetes mellitus ."
In addition to managing the children and youth department of the Joslin Clinic Priscilla White taught at both Harvard University and at Tufts University as an assistant professor of medicine. On a number of other hospitals in Boston and its vicinity, she was a consultant. Throughout her career, she was responsible for approximately 2,200 births to diabetic mothers and 10,000 children with diabetes. She herself remained unmarried and childless, and went in 1975 to retire. In 1989, she died in Ashland following a heart attack.
Scientific and medical work
Priscilla White was devoted to various activities in the field of clinical research, with a particular focus on improving the survival of newborn infants of diabetic mothers. This was 54 percent in Joslin Clinic in the 1920s and had risen to 97 percent by the end of the 1970s. In this regard, saw Priscilla White in particular the importance of a strict setting of a non-diabetic metabolic state during the entire pregnancy and optionally an early delivery.
When her second important contribution to diabetology applies a designed by their classification of diabetes during pregnancy, depending on the age of onset and duration of the disease and the occurrence of atherosclerosis, of complications to the kidney as well as diabetic retinopathy. That person, the White Classification of Diabetic pregnancies classification was widely known, and allowed the assessment of disease progression and the survival of newborn infants of diabetic mothers, and thus the individual adaptation of appropriate measures during pregnancy.
In addition, she worked with the heritability, the course and treatment of diabetes mellitus in children and the psychosocial aspects of the disease. In the area of basic research, it supported in particular studies on the healing of diabetes mellitus by islet cell transplantation.
Awards and appreciation
The Middlebury College, Tufts University and the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania awarded Priscilla White an honorary doctorate. From the American College of Physicians, the professional association of internists in the United States, she was appointed Fellow ( FACP ). It was 1960, the first woman who held the Banting Memorial Lecture at the University of Toronto. In addition, she was awarded the Banting Medal in the same year for its far-reaching and long -term services in the field of diabetology also the first woman, the highest scientific honor of the American Diabetes Association. Named after her is the annually organized by the Joslin Clinic and the Medical Faculty of Harvard University Priscilla White Lecture.
Works (selection)
- Diabetes in Pregnancy. In: Elliott Joslin (Ed.): The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus. Fourth edition. Philadelphia 1928, pp. 861-872
- Diabetes in Childhood and Adolescence. Philadelphia 1932
- On the Inheritance of Diabetes Mellitus. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 19 (6 ) / 1933, pp. 631-635
- Diabetes mellitus: Handbook for Physicians. New York 1956 ( as co-author )
- Classification of Obstetric diabetes. In: American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. 130/1978, pp. 228-230