William Parry Murphy


Murphy, William Parry,

1892–1987, American physician, b. Stoughton, Wis., M.D. Harvard, 1920. He taught at Harvard from 1923 and was associated with the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, in Boston, from 1922. He made special studies of diabetes and diseases of the blood and particularly of the liver treatment for pernicious anemia. For his work on anemia he shared with G. H. Whipple and G. R. Minot the 1934 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He wrote Anemia in Practice (1939).

Murphy, William Parry

 

Born Feb. 6, 1892, in Stoughton, Wis. American doctor of internal medicine and hematologist.

In 1914, Murphy received his A.B. from the University of Oregon; he became a doctor of medicine in 1920. In 1922 he began working at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, where he became consultant in hematology in 1958. In 1923 he began teaching at the Harvard University Medical School (Mass.). Murphy’s principal works were devoted to the treatment of diabetes mellitus and some blood diseases. In 1926 he proposed a special diet of raw liver for patients with pernicious anemia. In 1934, Murphy received a Nobel Prize (with G. Minot and G. Whipple) for developing a method of treating anemia with intramuscular injections of liver extract.