Lawson Wilkins and my life: part 3
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Lawson Wilkins and my life: part 3 Claude J Migeon The legacy of Lawson Wilkins: a new medical specialty, pediatric endocrinology At this point, it is important to outline the contributions of Dr. Wilkins to the medical field. He is often referred to as the “Father of Pediatric Endocrinology.” Indeed, he came to the field of Pediatrics at a time when it was subdivided into specialties. He and his textbook “The Diagnosis and Treatment of Endocrine Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence” (1st Edition, 1950) were the basis of this new field. How he came to this is well presented by one of his early fellows, Judson J. Van Wyk who gave a conference on the subject in October 28, 2003, and is reported here as follows: Tale of Lawson Wilkins By Judson Van Wyk October 28, 2003
Many were surprised to learn that Dr. Wilkins was a general pediatrician in private practice until he was over 50. Wilkins’s father was a general practitioner in Baltimore whose hero was William Osler. Lawson sometimes drove the horse and buggy for his father on his rounds and later cited his Dad as one of the 3 most important influences on his career, the others being Fuller Albright and Edwards Park. Lawson attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, but received his MD in France, where he had spent his 4th year as an orderly on the battlefields of World War I. On his return he took a medical internship at Yale and a pediatric residency in Pediatrics at the Harriett Lane Home under John Howland. Wilkins’s solo practice as a private pediatrician in Baltimore gave him the freedom to spend part of each week in one of the specialty clinics: such as the syphilis clinic or the epilepsy clinic. His first paper in 1923 was on the potassium content of human serum, carried out by a laborious gravimetric assay method. (He was also interested in calcium metabolism and rickets. He wrote a few early papers in collaboration with Drs. Orr WJ, Holt LE Jr, Boone FH and Kramer, B.) Correspondence: [email protected] 502 Somerset Rd, Baltimore, MD 21210, USA
In 1935, Dr. Edwards Park, chief of Pediatrics at the Harriett Lane Home had the wisdom to foresee that the new discipline of endocrinology might be of value in understanding the growth and development of children; He showed even greater wisdom by asking Wilkins to organize a pediatric endocrine clinic. Wilkins resisted: “Do you want to make a charlatan out of me?” Nevertheless, Wilkins accepted the challenge and spent every evening into the small hours reading the fat tomes written by so-called “experts” in the field. Wilkins became increasingly frustrated by the absence of any science and the long convoluted descriptions of endless “glandular syndromes.” Lawson was never one to suffer fools gladly, and his most important act one night while reading in bed was to fling the volume against the wall while cursing the stuffed shirts who could write such garbage. He decided to begin over from scratch and learn everything he could by carefully documenting every clinical feature of his patie
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