Mr. Gates's Summer Vacation: A Centennial Remembrance

15 July 1997 | Volume 127 Issue 2 | Pages 148-153

In 1897, Frederick T.Gates, a Baptist minister and adviser to John D. Rockefeller Sr., read the entire second edition of The Principles and Practice of Medicine by William Osler while on a summer vacation at Lake Liberty, New York. The book reinforced the low opinion Gates had of the efficacy of medicine but convinced him that medical science would be a wise investment for the Rockefeller fortune. The results of this investment included the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the International Health Board. Gates sponsored Rockefeller funding of full-time clinical professorships, an idea that Osler opposed but that eventually became the prevailing model for medical departments at universities in the United States.

Author and Article Information

From the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.
Presented in part at the 27th annual meeting of the American Osler Society, Williamsburg, Virginia, 3 April 1997.
Acknowledgments: The author thanks Thomas E. Rosenbaum of the Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, New York, and June Schachter of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, for their assistance and thanks their institutions for permission to excerpt from unpublished materials. prompted Gates to secure $150 000 to make insulin available at 15 hospitals within the United States and Canada [50, 51]. Gates died of acute appendicitis, a condition on which Osler-his era's foremost reconciler of the old art with the emerging new science-had been a pioneering authority [52].
Requests for Reprints: Charles S. Bryan, MD, Department of Medicine, University of South Carolina School of Medicine, 2 Richland Medical Park, Suite 502, Columbia, SC 29203.