George Hoyt Whipple advanced medical research into the creation and breakdown of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin in the blood; this research resulted in not only a treatment for pernicious anemia, but also in a share of the 1934 Nobel Prize. An industrious physician-scientist, Whipple authored more than 200 publications on anemia, pigment metabolism, liver injury and repair, and other related subjects.

Whipple was born on August 28, 1878, in Ashland, New Hampshire, the son of Frances Anna Hoyt Whipple and Ashley Cooper Whipple, a general practitioner held in high esteem by his patients and colleagues. Whipple's father died of typhoid fever just two years after the birth of his son, and Whipple and his sister Ashley were brought up by their mother and grandmothers. His was an outdoor life in rural New Hampshire, and he took a love of hunting, fishing, and camping with him into adulthood. Whipple knew he would be a physician...