Elmer L. DeGowin, MD
1901-1980

Transactions of the Association of American Physicians,the friends' and students of Elmer DeGowin were saddened by his death on August 31, 1980. The rich opportunities for achievement by individuals of character, strength, and determination, laboring in the heartland of our country, are well exemplified by the chronicle of this scientist, master clinician,medical scholar, and teacher.

He was born on September 27, 1901 in the north lumber country of Michigan. His father was a grocer and Justice of the Peace in Cheboygan, a small town on the shore of Lake Huron close to the straits of Mackinac. Elmer's traits of quiet confidence, independence, and self reliance were surely forged in a happy home and an optimistic town still rich in frontier lore. His terse, gruff, and salty demeanor might also have sprung from rural origins, but was interpreted correctly and appreciated fully only by the observer careful enough to capture the simultaneous faint smile and transient twinkle of eye.

Upon completing high school in Cheboygan, he ventured the then long distance well over two hundred miles-to Ann Arbor for college and medical school education at the University of Michigan. While attending medical school, Elmer met, courted, and married Laura Evelyn Meader, the secretary to the great cardiologist and electrocardiographer, Frank Wilson. A young colleague who later became Chairman of Microbiology at the University of Michigan described DeGowin as the best student assistant the great Dr. F. G. Novy ever had, probably because his theoretical knowledge from the classroom was tempered not only by work in the laboratory but also by many extra hours spent as a technician in the old Infectious Disease Hospital during an era when smallpox, tetanus, typhoid fever and diphtheria were common maladies.

Following graduation in 1928, internship and residency at the Cleveland City Hospital and a return to Ann Arbor for an instructorship in Internal Medicine, Dr. DeGowin joined the faculty of the University of Iowa College of Medicine in 1932. It was here he was destined to spend a successful, productive, and happy career spanning nearly a half century.

DeGowin's meteoric rise in American medicine was the consequence of his pioneering work in the banking, storage, and transportation of blood. In 1938, a group of investigators under his leadership established the Blood Transfusion service at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Their blood bank was the first established west of the Mississippi River. In recognition of his efforts the Elmer L. DeGowin Memorial Blood Center was dedicated in December of 1981. Under his direction a series of studies proved conclusively the beneficial role of glucose in extending the useful life span of blood and the safety of blood stored in the cold for prolonged periods. Anticipating needs that were soon to be acute in the armed forces, DeGowin's group demonstrated in the autumn of 1940 the viability of several dozen samples of blood after airplane voyages half way across the continent in ice-packed containers. His contributions to blood transfusion and banking culminated in his service for five years as Secretary on the Subcommittee of Blood of the National Research Council.

In addition to his pioneering work in the expanding field of blood transfusion, he was a tireless student and scholar of Internal Medicine in all its ramifications. His eclectic interests are exemplified by his writings on enterococcus peritonitis, serum reactions, allergic migraine, diabetes insipidus, traumatic shock, brucella endocarditis, hemolytic anemia, and thyrotoxicosis. He was the first physician to use sulfonamides and penicillin at the University of Iowa Hospital. He designed the hospital charts for the University of Iowa Hospital which have been in continuous use since 1956. His devotion to his patients, his relentless sifting of new knowledge, and his integration of an expanding body of information into a coherent structure of understanding were matched by a lifetime tending to the intellectual needs of medical students. For over a decade he taught, planned, gathered, and organized, all by way of preparation for the culmination of his life's work a medical student's pocket companion for guidance on the ward and in the clinic. Bedside Diagnostic Examination is used frequently by medical students in nearly all American medical schools, and its popularity in this country and in Europe continues to expand fifteen years after its original publication. Currently translations are available in French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Elmer DeGowin served two terms as Governor of Iowa for the American College of Physicians from 1965-71 and in 1974 was designated a Master of that organization.

Each of our Midwestern universities and medical schools retains its own distinct character and reputation, shaped by the energies, devotion, vision, and accomplishment of its senior faculty members, whose pursuits spanning decades have established, maintained, and finally codified its standards. Elmer DeGowin's contributions to American medicine survive in the competence of his students, the relevance of his writings, the accomplishments of his son Richard DeGowin, MD, and the excellence of the University of Iowa College of Medicine.