William Thomas Salter (1901-1952)

This is our first meeting* since the untimely death, on July 30, 1952, of Dr. William Thomas Salter, Professor of Pharmacology in this School since 1941. It is also the first meeting from which he has been absent in some time. We shall miss his cheerful presence which often went far to dispel the excess gravity which has on occasion crept into the deliberations of this Board. The record of his work and of his career is familiar to most of us. We were aware that he had been moulded in a certain pattern which was well established before he came, at the age of thirty-nine, to New Haven. Essentially, he was heart and soul a Bostonian who had emigrated south to Yale, and, somewhat to his surprise, had found much that was good here. Educated in solid Bostonian traditions, at Roxbury Latin School, and at Harvard College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he graduated in medicine at the Harvard Medical School in 1925. During the subsequent two years he served on the house staff of the Massachusetts General Hospital where he also became a member of the research team, headed by Dr. George R. Minot, which first tested the use of liver extracts in the therapy of pernicious anemia. Subsequently, after a year abroad, which took him to London for research on the thyroid gland, he returned to the Department of Medicine at Harvard in 1929, to serve there for the next twelve years. During this active period of his life he was affiliated in various capacities with a number of Boston hospitals as well as with the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory where he was able to combine biochemical research effectively with clinical medicine-an opportunity, in other words, for true clinical investigation. He also published his first book at this time, The Endocrine Function of Iodine, which appeared in 1940. In 1941 he came to this medical school as Professor of Pharmacology. The eleven years in which he was with us were a short, but busy period to which the expansion of the Department of Pharmacology bears witness. Under his direction it became a University department in the true sense of' the word. This was largely due to his own activity directed along special lines of work, on the metabolism of iodine (for which he received, in 1949, a distinguished award from the American Pharmaceutical Association), and in other fields including the metabolism of calcium and phosphate, carcinogenic agents, radio-active isotopes, and drug action. His other contributions to the welfare of the School were not inconsiderable. Although perhaps as a Bostonian he always claimed to be somewhat