George W. Thorn

Biography

George W. Thorn was an electric figure in medicine. At the age of 36 he burst on the scene at Harvard Medical School in 1942 as the ninth Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic and the third Physician in Chief of the Department of Medicine at the then Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Frequently mistaken for a medical student or resident, he remained youthful in outlook and appearance until his 90s. He died on 26 June 2004 at the age of 98. George made vital contributions to the clinical use of adrenal steroids. He began his career in endocrinology as a medical student at the University of Buffalo, went on to Ohio State and then joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins where Harvard found him. The Brigham, as it was called, was then a Dickensian institution as were all of the Harvard hospitals of the mid 20th century. Built in 1914, its design was inspired by a fear of hospital borne infection. The four 30 bed male and female surgical and medical services were wide open, poorly ventilated and over-heated pavilions separated from each other by a long corridor that was still partially open to the elements well into the 1950s. Flimsy curtains separated the ancient beds. Privacy was non-existent. So called semi private beds were on a floor above.

Research Interest

They were located on open wards as well, but those patients were the private patients of staff members, while the large first-floor pavilions were the provinces of the house staff. A three floor private service was housed near the pillared entrance of the hospital. It was scarcely lucullan in its appointments, but there the tired interns could make a decent breakfast for themselves on Sunday mornings. Laboratories at the old Brigham were primitive by any standards. One small old building housed the hematology, chemistry and pathology labs as well as George’s endocrinology lab and a few beds where patients with endocrine disorders could collect urine and undergo various hormone tests. It was an early form of the later General Clinical Research Centers based on the Rockefeller University Hospital model. A horribly ventilated and totally inadequate animal facility was in the basement. Despite lack of space and money, George conjured up a full time staff of investigators. His own program in endocrinology produced George Cahill and Albert Renold among many others. His many contributions to the endocrinology literature included over 400 papers. To expand the academic department of medicine he focused first on cardiology. He was wise enough to build on the clinical greatness of Samuel A. Levine and added the cardiac catheterization skills of Lewis Dexter and, later, Dick Gorlin. Frank Gardner came from the Thorndike laboratory at the Boston City Hospital to run hematology. He attracted house staff of the quality of Don Thomas and Clem Finch and scores of others who became leaders of academic medicine. George’s greatest gift was free floating imagination. His discussions of patients on rounds were always brilliant if occasionally somewhat off base. A favorite resident told me “You listen—I will not. Then when he is gone—we’ll do it my way.” Armed with that creative style, Thorn dissuaded John Merrill from a career in cardiology to lead an effort in renal dialysis and transplant. The renal transplant program at the Brigham became world-renowned. He was instrumental in the formation of the Harvard-MIT program in Health Science and Technology, and he was the first scientific leader of the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute. But his free flowing thought processes and his youthful, friendly personality were sometimes confusing. One inadequate resident once boasted that George had appointed him to the Chief Residency when actually George had fired him! In his later years as the Chief of Medicine, George began to worry about how to elevate the role of basic science in a department of medicine and how to prevent specialists from forgetting general medicine. He wrote two very important articles on those subjects in the New England Journal of Medicine. Whether one agrees with them or not, they are well worth reading today. George’s last appointment was: Physician in Chief, Emeritus, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic, Emeritus & Samuel A. Levine Professor of Medicine, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School.