Lester S. King

Lester Snow King, M.D. (April 18, 1908 – October 6, 2002) was an American pathologist, medical editor, medical journalist, and medical historian.

Biography

Lester S. King was born in a Jewish family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father, Myron L. King, M.D., was a general practitioner. Lester S. King studied philosophy at Harvard College, where he graduated at age 19 with a bachelor's degree. At Harvard Medical School, he graduated in 1932 with a medical degree and after graduation was a Workman Fellow in anatomy. In December 1931 he married Marjorie Meehan, who was a medical student at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In the summer of 1935 he completed two papers written in collaboration with Raymond Alexander Kelser. Lester and Marjorie King had two children Alfred (b. 1932) and Frances (b. 1935). King with his family spent 15 months from the autumn of 1935 to the end of 1936 in Madrid and London. They were from 1935 to 1936 in Madrid, where he studied silver-staining techniques and neuroanatomy under the supervision of Pío del Río-Hortega. King and his family left Spain in March 1936, a few months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. After leaving Madrid, he did research on demyelinating diseases at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Queen Square, London.

King completed his medical residency at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, where he worked until 1939. From 1940 to the beginning of 1942 he worked as a pathologist at a Yale-affiliated Connecticut hospital and also taught pathology at Yale Medical School. At the entry of the USA into WW II, King volunteered for the U.S. Army and was sent to El Paso, Texas, where he worked as a pathologist at the William Beaumont General Hospital. He attained the rank of major. At the end of WW II in 1945, he moved with his family to Chicago. There he was a staff pathologist at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, an affiliate of the Chicago branch of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, where he was a professor until 1964. He resigned as a staff pathologist in 1963. His first book ''The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century'' was published in 1958.

At the ''Journal of the American Medical Association'', King was a senior editor from 1963 to 1973 and a contributing editor from 1973 to 1978. He was a lecturer in the history department of the University of Chicago from 1967 until near the end of the 1980s. He was a book collector and donated more than 200 historical medical books to the University of Chicago Library.

Toward the end of his life he lived in the Hallmark Retirement Community, located at 2960 N. Lake Shore Drive, immediately to the north of Lincoln Park in Chicago. At his retirement home, he lectured regularly on many subjects, including art and literature. He was predeceased by his wife. Upon his death he was survived by his son and daughter, three grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

Awards and honors

Lester King received in 1964 the Boerhaave Medal from Leiden University and in 1977 the William H. Welch Medal from the
American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM). In 1975 he delivered the AAHM's Garrison Lecture (named in honor of Fielding Hudson Garrison). In 1988 King became the first recipient of the AAHM's Lifetime Achievement Award.

Selected publications

Articles

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