WHIPPLE PIONEER MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS
The careers of five generations of Whipple medical professionals began in New London, NH in 1849 when Solomon Whipple began his practice as a country doctor. His son, Ashley Cooper received his M.D. degree from Dartmouth, College in Hanover, NH in 1874 and began his practice in Ashland, NH. Ashley’s oldest son, George Hoyt was graduated from Baltimore’s John Hopkins University of Medicine in 1905 and 29 years later was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. His son, Dr. G. Hoyt PhD., earned degrees from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT the Massachusetts of Technology, and the U. of Rochester (Rochester, NY) and worked in the fields of environmental and industrial health. G. Hoyt’s daughter, Margaret also became a doctor.
Dr. Solomon Mason Whipple
Dr. Solomon Mason Whipple (1820-1884) began his early education at Lebanon, NH and later at Norwich University in Vermont where he was graduated A.B. in 1846. By then he had decided to become a doctor and according to the custom of the time began professional studies with an experienced practicing physician and attended lectures at Dartmouth Medical College and at the U. of Vermont at Burlington.
His life-work led to eminence in his profession. He was considered a good diagnostician and surgeon. His colleagues evidently respected and trusted him as they appointed him to several offices in the New Hampshire Medical Society and in 1876 elected him its president. His presidential address was a plea for better medical education. He called for higher standards for professional qualifications and for a state law regulating the licensing of doctors. He made this plea to colleagues who were graduates of Harvard and Dartmouth as well as others had entered medical practice from an apprentice-ship supplemented by a course or two of lectures, or on the authority of a diploma from one of the ill-equipped proprietary schools throughout the country. Within two years, the New Hampshire legislature enacted a law requiring doctors to be examined before being licensed.
He lived long enough to see his son Ashley become a member of the Licensing Board and continue the work of medical reform and to see the birth of his grandson George who was destined half a century later to lead a great new medical school and to educate physicians to a standard far beyond his hopes.
Dr. Ashley Cooper Whipple (1852-1880), who completed the usual 
course of secondary education at the New London Academy (NH) in 1870, trained for medicine in the traditional way of an apprentice- ship followed by lecture courses. He began as his father’s pupil and in 1871 was in charge of a ward at the NH Asylum for the Insane. He took his first course of lecture at Dartmouth Medical College, attended courses at New York University the 1873-74 academic year, received the M.D. degree from Dartmouth in 1874, and began his practice in Ashland, NH.
He married Frances Anna Hoyt in 1876. She was the daughter of George Hoyt, a prominent businessman connected with the Ashland woolen mill and other local enterprises. The Hoyt’s brick house on Pleasant street was designed for two families and the newlyweds moved into half the house where their son George was born. Less than two years after George’s birth, Ashley, barely 28, became ill with typhoid fever. He kept seeing patients for two weeks before taking to bed and died a week later.
In an eulogy before the New Hampshire Medical Society, Dr. Granville P. Conn of Concord commended him for his zeal in serving his patients but wished he had taken greater care of his own health. According to Conn, Ashley worked “as one who never knew fatigue and would see patients long after a majority of men would have taken to their beds.”
Dr. George Hoyt Whipple Family
George Hoyt Whipple (1878-1976) was raised by his well-read mother who valued education and when George was 14 she moved her family to Andover, Mass. where he entered Phillips Academy and his sister Ashley attended Abbot Academy. His classmates called him “Whip.”
Except for science and math which he found easy, class work was hard. He was enrolled in the “Classical Department” to insure subsequent admission to a liberal arts college and drill in Greek and Latin meant dogged memory work. He was graduated in 1896 with Senior Honors in physics. He entered Yale College that fall as a freshman premedical student and was graduated in June 1900 with Senior Honors with the rating of “Orations,” equivalent to an A.D. cume laude.
Financial considerations required him to teach at Dr. Holbrook’s Military School in Ossing, N.Y. for a year before enrolling at John Hopkins University (then the nation’s premier Medical School) from which he was graduated in 1905.
Following graduation, he spent nine years at John Hopkins (except for 1907) as an assistant in pathology. He spent 1907 as a pathologist at the Ancon Hospital, Panama Canal Zone where he studied the pathology of tuberculosis and pancreatic disease and other tropical diseases. His autopsy of a physician whose illness had baffled prominent internists resulted in a paper on intestinal lipodystrophy (Whipple’s Disease). His study of bile pigments began in 1908 and led to his interest in the body’s manufacture of the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin, an important element in the production of bile pigments. He did postgraduate study in Heidelberg, Germany and Vienna, Austria.
He joined the staff of the U. of California in San Francisco in 1914 (Dean of the Medical School 1920-21) where he taught research medicine and began a study on how bile pigments were affected by diets. Experimenting with dogs, he found that liver was one of the best foods for the production of new, hemoglobin-filled red blood cells. This discovery gave George R. Minot (1885-1950), a Harvard hematologist, and his assistant, William R. Murphy, the idea of using a liver diet to treat pernicious anemia in humans, a previously incurable and fatal disease. For this work, Whipple, Minot, and Murphy were awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.
A triple division of the Nobel Prize was unprecedented with the reasons set forth in the citation: This year’s prize for Physiology and Medicine to three American investigators was awarded in recognition of their discoveries respecting liver therapy in anaemias . . . Of the three, it was Whipple who first occupied himself with the investigations for which the prize has been awarded. He began in 1920 to study the influence of food on blood-regeneration, the rebuilding up of the blood in cases of anaemia consequent upon loss of blood. The method Whipple adopted in his experiments was to withdraw a certain quantity of blood from dogs then feed them food of various kinds, thus discovering that certain foods were considerably superior to others in stimulating a more vigorous reformation of blood by stimulating the bone marrow in which the blood-corpuscles are produced. First and foremost was liver, then kidney, then meat followed by certain vegetables. Whipple’s experiments were well planned and administered leading to results of absolute reliability. His investigations and results led Minot and Murphy to seek similar results in the case of pernicious anaemia.
Whipple became Dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the U. of Rochester (1921-53) and Professor of Pathology (1921-1955). His design of the new Medical School combined the Medical Center and University Hospital and became standard for this type of integrated facility. He retired as Dean at age 75. His last and most sophisticated scientific study was of the body’s method for storing and releasing proteins which he summarized in his only book, The Dynamic Equilibrium of Body Proteins (1956).
The Whipple family home at 4 Pleasant St., Ashland, NH is now the Whipple House Museum and is open from June through Labor Day. It features information about him, his family, and the area. Of particular interest is the Glidden Toy Museum which has over 1,000 items.
G. Hoyt Whipple, PhD
Professor G. Hoyt Whipple (1917-1999), born in San Francisco, grew up in Rochester, earned a B.S. in chemistry from Wesleyan University in 1939, became a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where from 1942-47 he was a staff member of the Division of Industrial Cooperation engaged in research and development of a number of military projects including Loran, dehydration of food, and aerial bomb fuses. In 1947 he joined the Health Instruments Division of the Hanford Works, General Electric Co. where he was in charge of a special group working on problems of radiation protection.
In 1950, he joined the U. of Rochester Atomic Energy Project and received his PhD. in biophysics in 1953. During his seven years at Rochester, he conducted research in radiation dosimetry and radiation biology and taught courses in health physics He joined the U. of Michigan in 1957 as an Associate Professor of radiological health and established the graduate program in radiological health at the School of Public Health, leading it until his retirement in 1982.
He was recognized as an outstanding authority in the field of radiological health and radiation protection, was board certified by the American Board of Health Physics and the American Board of Industrial Hygiene in the radiological aspects of industrial hygiene and an active member of the Health Physics Society and the American Institutional Hygiene Association.
His advice and counsel concerning radiological health problems was widely sought by numerous industries and especially by the electric utility companies of the country. He served as a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Defense, the State Department, the International Atomic Energy Commission, the World Health Organization, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and worked with the Atoms for Peace Program. Upon retirement, he moved to Tallahassee, Fla. and in 1995 to Gainesville, Fla. where died.
Dr. Margaret Whipple. I have been unsuccessful in finding a biography on Professor Whipple’s daughter.
