Chauncey Depew Leake (September 5, 1896 – January 11, 1978) was an American pharmacologist, medical historian and ethicist. Leake received a bachelor's degree with majors in
biology
Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditar ...
,
chemistry, and
philosophy from
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...
. He received his M.S. (1920) and Ph.D. (1923) from the
University of Wisconsin
A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which ...
in pharmacology and physiology.
Leake was born in
. At age 10, he was treated by the ophthalmologist
Karl Koller.
Leake married the microbiologist Elisabeth Wilson in 1921, and they collaborated for many years. They had two sons and remained married until her death in 1977.
Leake discovered the anesthetic
divinyl ether. One of his publications was a translation of the 1628 physiological work ''
De motu cordis'' (''On the Motion of the Heart'') from Latin to English.
Leake became a fulltime university administrator from 1942, first at the
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and from 1962 at Ohio State University.
In 1973, Leake was one of the signers of the
Humanist Manifesto II.
He was awarded the
UCSF
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It cond ...
medal in 1975.
A collection of his papers is held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
References
Literature
* Robinson, Victor: ''Victory Over Pain: A History of Anaesthesia.''
External links
* https://web.archive.org/web/20081010212901/http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/manuscripts/ead/leake.html
The old Egyptian medical papyriLogan Clendening lecture on the history and philosophy of medicine, University of Kansas, 1952. Full-text PDF.
1896 births
1978 deaths
Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars
Writers from Elizabeth, New Jersey
University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy alumni
University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
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