George Hoyt Whipple knew he would be a physician from the time he was in elementary school at the turn of the century. The son and grandson of doctors, Whipple followed the family tradition by choosing a career in medicine, researching 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, hard-working Yankee from New Hampshire, Whipple authored more than 200 publications on anemia, pigment metabolism, liver injury and repair, and other related subjects. Yet in his last days, it was as an educator that he hoped to be remembered.

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...