Robert Allan Phillips

Robert Allan Phillips ( * July 16, 1906 in Clear Lake, Iowa; † 20 September 1976) was an American physician.

Life

Phillips studied at Iowa State University ( BS 1927) and at Washington University in St. Louis (MD 1929). From 1936 to 1940 he was assistant professor at the Medical College of Cornell University.

As a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy at the Rockefeller Institute, he developed during World War II an effective, operational in the medical front line method to determine the hematocrit value and thus the fluid loss of the wounded. The method is still used today, for example, in blood donation candidates.

After the war, he founded and led medical research units of the U.S. Navy, 1946 ( NAMRU, United States Naval Medical Research Unit) in Cairo and 1955 in Taipei. Even in Egypt, he explored methods of treating cholera and developed an effective Rehydrierungsmethode by intravenous infusion and in the 1960s with other even simpler, based on oral glucose rehydration therapy. Phillips had thus first success in 1964 with two cholera patients in the Philippines, which was then expanded by others in diarrhea subsequent to the standard procedures of ORS therapy. After his retirement (he had the rank of captain ), he developed at the University of Washington and the Chinese government cheaper alternatives to dialysis for kidney failure, based on rehydration.

In 1967 he received the Lasker ~ DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award.