Med Professor Minot Is Dead

Dr. George R. Minot '08, professor of Medicine, emeritus, at the Harvard Medical School, died on Saturday. One of the few Harvard alumni ever to receive the Nobel Prize, Dr. Minot shared this highest of honors in medicine with two other doctors, Dr. George H. Whipple and Dr. William P. Murphy '20, in 1934.

His outstanding achievement was the discovery of the liver treatment for pernicious anemia in 1926. Not only did he realize that a liver diet could reduce the seriousness of this red-blood cell deficiency, but he spend many years extracting the effective fraction of liver and making it commercially available for the medical profession.

It is ironic that such a famed doctor as Minot should have been a life-long sufferer from diabetes, the disease he finally died of. He contracted the illness soon after his graduation from Harvard Medical School in 1912 and became one of the first Boston patients to receive regular insulin treatments.

Dr. Minot has had an exceptionally distinguished career in medicine. Besides his service as professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School from 1928 to 1948, he has been chief of medical services at the Collis P. Huntington Hospital in Boston and, at various times in his career, he has been a member of the staff of the Massachusetts General, Peter Bent Brigham, and Johns Hopkins Hospitals.

He has received numerous honors for his work with the liver cure. In 1928, he was given an honorary Doctorate of of Science by Harvard University and, during the same year, the Association of American Physicians gave him the Kober gold medal. In this country, he has been awarded the John Scott medal of the city of Philadelphia and the gold medal of the Humane Society of Massachusetts.

His foreign honors include a medal from the Royal College of Physicians, London; a fellowship from the University of Toronto; and the Cameron Prize of the University of Edinburgh.