Edward H. Lambert.

Dr. Edward H. Lambert died on July 27, 2003, in Rochester, Minnesota at the age of 88. He had been recognized as the “father of electromyography” by his many trainees and colleagues for his pioneering studies on the electrophysiology of neuromuscular diseases, which initiated the era of modern diagnostic clinical electromyography (EMG). His work was recognized early with a formal invitation to join the American Association of Electromyography & Electrodiagnosis in 1953 and his election as its president in 1956. He was on the Advisory Board of Muscle & Nerve for the first 12 years after its establishment, was Chair of the EMG Commission and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Societies for Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology from 1965 to 1969, and chaired the Medical Advisory Board of the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation between 1973 and 1975. An AAEM annual lectureship was named in his honor in 1976, and he was awarded the AAEM Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995, the highest honor that can be bestowed by the association on one of its members. Dr. Lambert was born in 1915 in Minneapolis of a second-generation Norwegian immigrant mother and a fourth-generation French-Scottish father from Montana. He was a talented boy with many musical interests but an overriding interest in biology. During the depression, he moved with his family to Chicago, where he received BS, MS, and MD degrees from the University of Illinois. These were followed by an internship at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago and a PhD in physiology with Dr. Ernst Gellhorn, with whom he published his first paper. He spent the next 10 years in cardiovascular and pulmonary research, making major contributions that included development of the aviator’s “G-suit”, for which he received the Presidential Certificate of Merit in 1946. He was appointed Professor of Physiology in the Mayo Graduate School in 1958. Ongoing cardiopulmonary studies in the mid-1960s were the forerunners of modern cardiac electrophysiology and the current Combi-tube for assisted respiration. In the late 1940s, Dr. Lambert began his studies on the electrophysiology of neuromuscular diseases, working with members of the Mayo Clinic Department of Neurology. Neurologists best know Dr. Lambert for his 1956 study with Lee Eaton and Doug Rooke that distinguished the myasthenic syndrome sometimes associated with lung carcinoma from other disorders of neuromuscular transmission. The disorder has been called the Lambert–Eaton myasthenic syndrome (LEMS) since 1968, when he and Dr. Dan Elmquist demonstrated the quantal pathophysiology of the neuromuscular transmission defect by detailed micro-electrophysiologCorrespondence to: J.R. Daube; e-mail: [email protected]