for his bedside compassion
Dr. Paul Bruce Beeson, who chaired the Department of Internal Medicine from 1952 to 1965 and was an expert in infectious disease, died Aug. 14 in Exeter, New Hampshire. He was 97 years old.
Beeson was known for the standard he set as a caring physician and bedside teacher who, by his own example, conveyed to generations of students the importance of patients as human beings.
"Paul Beeson was revered by patients, students and colleagues as the perfect example of a doctor -- a healer with skill, dedication, understanding and compassion," said his biographer, Dr. Richard Rapport, whose book "Physician: The Life of Paul Beeson" was published in 2001. Commenting on changes in modern medicine that have made it more impersonal, Rapport wrote: "[T]here remains the example of Paul Beeson sitting beside a patient on an open ward, surrounded by students, listening to clues, fears and questions embedded in the story of a single sick person."
Beeson was on the forefront of research into the mechanisms of fever, infectious disease and immunology in the 1930s and 1940s. He chaired the department of medicine at Emory University from 1947 until he joined the Yale faculty in 1952. While at Emory, he discovered that hepatitis may be transmitted by blood transfusion. He was also the first to identify the proteins in white blood cells known as cytokines, which are known to influence infection and cancer. Later in his career, Beeson focused on geriatric care.
Born on Oct. 18, 1908, in Livingston, Montana, Beeson spent most of his childhood in Anchorage, Alaska, where his father, John Beeson, was a general practitioner and surgeon for the Alaskan Railway. The modern-day Iditarod dog-sled race from Anchorage to Nome follows the first part of a trail that John Beeson had driven in 1921, 400 miles on dogsled, to reach an ailing patient in Iditarod.
Paul Beeson was accepted at McGill University Medical School before he finished his undergraduate education at the University of Washington in Seattle. Following an internship at the University of Pennsylvania, Beeson entered practice with his brother Harold and his father, who had begun a general practice in Wooster, Ohio. He left, however, to pursue research at the Rockefeller Institute and Hospital in New York.
Beeson worked in the laboratory of Dr. Oswald Avery, the scientist who discovered that DNA is the substance of genetic material 20 years before Watson and Crick described the structure of the molecule. He left New York in 1939 for the Harvard University Medical Service at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where he became chief resident to Dr. Soma Weiss. During World War II, Beeson volunteered to work at the Harvard Cross Hospital in Salisbury, England. During that time, he met American Red Cross nurse Barbara Neal, whom he married in 1942.
After leaving Yale in 1965, Beeson served as the Nuffield Professor of Medicine at Oxford University for 10 years. When he returned to the United States, he and his wife settled in Redmond, Washington. Beeson served as the Veterans Administration Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle until his retirement in 1981.
In 1981, the Paul B. Beeson Professorship in Internal Medicine was established at the Yale School of Medicine, endowed by a former colleague, Dr. Elisha Atkins and his wife Elizabeth. In 1996, the medical school named its medical service in Beeson's honor.
Beeson was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a master of the American College of Physicians, which gave him the John Phillips Memorial Award in 1976. He received the Bristol Award for distinguished achievement and leadership in his field from the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 1972 and received the Kober Medal, the highest award given by the Association of American Physicians, in 1973. That same year, Queen Elizabeth named him an Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, a rare honor for an American.
As an ardent opponent of nuclear proliferation, Beeson was a member of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, based in Seattle.
In addition to his wife, Barbara, of 64 years, Beeson is survived by his children, John N. Beeson of Livingston, New Jersey; Peter G. Beeson of Concord, New Hampshire; and Judith Beeson Assirelli of Montello, Italy. He also leaves six grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
A memorial service will be held at Yale in the fall. Contributions in Beeson's memory can be made to Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, 4554 12th Ave. NE, Seattle, Washington 98105.
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