Francis Gilman Blake papers

Francis Gilman Blake was born on February 22, 1887, in Mansfield Valley, Pennsylvania. After his father died when he was three, his family moved to Massachusetts. He received his A.B. from Dartmouth in 1908 and spent the next year tutoring a schoolboy in Maine in order to pay for Harvard Medical School, from which he received his M.D. in 1913. For the next three years, Blake worked as an intern at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. He met Dorothy P. Dewey, a nurse in training at Peter Bent Brigham, whom he married on June 1, 1916, and with whom he had three sons. Over the next few years, Blake worked as a researcher at the Rockefeller Institute and as a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. In 1921, he joined the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine as one of the youngest full professors of medicine in the school's history. He served as dean of the school from 1940 to 1947. His important contributions to the medical field include research in epidemic diseases and some of the first laboratory and clinical tests of penicillin. Throughout his life, Blake was associated with the government and army, serving as civil director of army medical research. He died of a heart condition at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, on February 1, 1952.