THE PEDIATRICIAN AND IATRIC INFECTIOUS DISEASE

The privilege of presenting the second R. Cannon Eley Memorial Lecture permits acknowledgment of personal indebtedness to an individual who was a pediatrician's pediatrician. In 1939, with a primary interest in infectious and parasitic disease, I was faced with the choice of an internship. The decision was not difficult for the superb teaching of communicable and infectious diseases by the group composed of Charles F. McKhann, R. Cannon Eley, Leroy Fothergill, and John Davies at the Children's had a magnetic quality and the diversified program of research on infectious agents then in progress was unique in Boston. In the McKhann-Eley laboratory, extraction of gamma-globulin from human placentas was to provide the first preparation for the prevention or modification of measles in the exposed child. From 1946 to 1963, when Cannon resigned his Children's and Harvard appointments to become Professor of Pediatrics at Brown University and Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at Roger Williams Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, he was our pediatrician. Thus our affection for Cannon and appreciation for his depth of clinical experience in the communicable disease field, stems from an association that transcended that customarily achieved between a senior staff man and his junior. As a consequence, we, perhaps more than others, had partial insight into Cannon's numerous unpublicized acts of kindness to generations of house staff and graduate students, as he assisted in the resolution of their personal crises, be they professional, economic or social. From the foregoing remarks it is apparent that the request to present this Eley lecture has evoked memories of my own years at the Children's, and in turn reflection on changes that have occurred in the interim in the teaching and handling of infectious diseases.