Allen Oldfather Whipple 1881-1963

By Nicholas P. Christy '51

This series, Faculty Remembered, features profiles of former faculty members at P&S. The author of the series is a 1951 P&S graduate and former professor of medicine. He is now special lecturer in medicine and writer-in-residence at P&S. Allen O. Whipple, the 20th century’s major innovator in pancreatic surgery and Columbia’s most famous surgeon, chaired the surgery department at P&S and led the surgical service at Presbyterian Hospital for 25 years, from 1921 to 1946. His achievements and eminence stemmed from great ability of several kinds, not from a single trait or skill. “Officially” trained in clinical surgery only, he achieved distinction in many other fields: teaching--at premedical, medical student, and house staff levels--medical scholarship, department-building, medical history, and research, among others. Fortunate genetics, early adversity, and superb training account for his balance, kindness, energy, simplicity and genuine humility, moderation, and great versatility. Spiritually committed New England ancestors came to America in 1636; his parents, Presbyterian missionaries, were serving in Azerbaijan, Persia, when Allen was born in 1881. As a child he learned English, French, Armenian, Syriac, Turkish, and Persian; this early linguistic immersion gave Whipple a lifelong interest in the culture, religion, and medicine of the Middle East. Around 1890 the family moved back to the United States but during Whipple’s teen-age years his father died, leaving the son to work his way through school and college. He attended Princeton, where he excelled, tutoring classmates in Latin, taking elective courses in Arabic, and graduating in 1904. Intending to study medicine at Johns Hopkins he was attracted instead to P&S where George Huntington, Columbia’s great anatomist, offered him a prosectorship. Receiving his M.D. in 1908, he interned for the next three years at Roosevelt and Sloane hospitals. Appointed in 1911-1912 to the P&S faculty and the Presbyterian staff, he became professor of surgery at P&S and director of service at the hospital in 1921. Ten years later the Valentine Mott Chair of Surgery was established for him; he served until 1946, retiring as professor emeritus and consultant in surgery. The start of the Whipple era marked a drastic change in surgery at P&S and Presbyterian. A full-time system was instituted. Up to 1921 the residents were “guests of the Trustees”; in the Manhattan medical community the hospital attending surgeons were known as a gentlemen’s club. To create a truly academic department, the Rockefeller Foundation made a large endowment. Although several young surgeons found themselves unable to make ends meet on academic salaries, appropriate rearrangements were made; by 1928, when the medical center opened on Washington Heights, research programs and clinical divisions were being developed. Successful research was done in hemostasis, etiology of breast cancer, tissue culture, and surgical bacteriology. Some of the clinical units became world-famous: plastic surgery with Jerome Webster, thyroid surgery with W.B. Parsons, vascular and thoracic surgery with George H. Humphreys II and Arthur Blakemore (portocaval shunt for hepatic cirrhosis), surgical pathology with Arthur Purdy Stout, Virginia K. Frantz, and Raffaele Lattes. Whipple’s own contribution in pancreatic surgery began by accident. In 1935 Whipple was giving an amphitheater demonstration to distinguished American and foreign visiting surgeons on a patient thought to have gastric carcinoma; halfway through, Whipple discovered that the lesion was actually carcinoma of the pancreas, so he had to devise and execute on the spot the elaborate operation still in use: pancreatoduodenectomy, involving stomach, jejunum, duodenum, pancreas, and common bile duct (also known as Whipple’s operation). This feat required imagination, manual dexterity of a high order, and great courage. At about this time, 1935, Whipple set about excising insulin-secreting adenomas of the pancreatic islet cells associated with hypoglycemia. These experiences formed the basis for most of Whipple’s famous publications from the mid-1930s through the early 1950s. In retirement Whipple was far from idle. He wrote three books. For five years he served as clinical director of Manhattan’s Memorial Hospital. Faithful to his Middle Eastern past, he worked at and served as a trustee of the American University of Beirut. He contributed much to his alma mater, Princeton, by acting as adviser to pre-med students and becoming a trustee. From Princeton he received its highest honor, the Woodrow Wilson Prize. The stature he achieved was recognized by honorary degrees, honorary memberships, and fellowships in American and foreign medical and scientific societies and by the formation in 1955 of the A.O. Whipple Society. With all his eminence and honors Whipple remained simple in manner, unostentatious in leadership, exigent but temperate with subordinates, plain in speech and in writing. In the operating room he did not play the prima donna. If he wished his surgical team to hurry up he merely said “allegro;” if slowing down was in order he would say, softly, “andante.” Witnesses recall his OR swearing as mild: “darn,” “tarnation,” a muttered “oh, dear, oh, dear.” Revered by his colleagues as “truly humble” and “fearlessly honest,” Allen Whipple died at his home in Princeton, N.J., in 1963, eight days after the death of his only son. The writer acknowledges the following physicians for indispensable help in the preparation of this article: Philip Wiedel, Keith Reemtsma, George H. Humphreys II, and John M. Howard (professor of surgery emeritus at the Medical College of Ohio, Toledo).

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