George 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. At the age of fourteen Whipple entered Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and enrolled at Yale College (now Yale University) as a premedical student four years later. After graduating with high standing in 1900, Whipple spent a year teaching and coaching at Holbrook Military Academy in New York to earn money for medical studies, and in 1901 he entered Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine.

When Whipple received his M.D. in 1905, he joined the Johns Hopkins staff as an assistant in pathology, working under the renowned pathologist William Henry Welch. It was as a 29-year-old assistant performing an autopsy on a missionary doctor that Whipple made his first notable medical contribution: he described a rare condition in the intestinal tissues, which has since come to...