Temple University School of Medicine - Skull Yearbook (Philadelphia, PA)

Page 10 text:

search of the Philadelphia General Hospital. One day, in 1935, he was asked to lecture before the student body of the Temple Medical School as a substitute for his chief, I)r. Leonard G. Rountree. In the audience that day there happened to be an oft-present person, Dean William N. Parkinson. The Dean was quite taken with this young investigator and, as part of the current reorganization of the Department of Medicine, offered him the post of Associate Professor. This Dr. Lansburv accepted and. in the intervening years, he progressed to become Professor of Clinical Medicine, and Head of the Connective Tissue Disease Section, Department of Medicine. Temple University Medical Center. Even before entering upon the Temple scene, Dr. Lansbury became interested in the field of rheumatology when he worked with the later Nobel laureate, Dr. Philip S. Hench, at the Mayo Clinic. This interest in rheumatic diseases was spurred in 1936 when the French investigator, Dr. Jacques Forestier. came to Temple and reported his success in controlling rheumatoid arthritis by the use of gold salts. Dr. Lansbury did not confine himself to the field of rheumatology, however, until 1949. Before that time he also headed the Endocrinology Service at Temple and engaged, as he still does, in a full round of teaching, clinic and private practice. That he is active and well-known in the field of medicine is attested to by the following partial list of organizations to which he belongs, and the posts he holds in them: member of Alpha Omega Alpha, Fellow of the American College of Physicians, second vice-president of the American Rheumatism Association and Chairman of its Committee for the Evaluation of New Therapeutic Agents, former president of the Eastern Chapter of the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation, past president of the Philadelphia Rheumatism Society, past Chairman of the Section on General Medicine, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and member of Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Pi. In addition to these activhies, Dr. Lansbury serves as a Lecturer in Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Medicine, and has written over seventy articles, covering mainly cndocrinologic and rheumatologic problems. At present. Dr. Lansbury is interested in the furtherance of the use of Interlingua, an international language used widely for summaries of scientific articles. He serves as a co-editor for a section in Hol- 6

Page 9 text:

Teacher, clinician, investigator, friend these are the roles which Professor John Lansbury has filled in our medical school career. YVe first formally met this gentleman during our Sophomore course in Physical Diagnosis. As we now know, history-taking is probably the most important step in arriving at the proper diagnosis in any patient, and it was l)r. Lansbury who, at that time, instilled in us the basic concept of accurate detective work in eliciting histories. In these few hours we were impressed by the man and looked forward to future associations with him. Our anticipation was rewarded in out Junior seat when Dr. Lansbury gave a series of lectures in rheumatology which we found most informative: we only wished that he had more time to expound on other topics. Finally, as Seniors, we worked at his side in the care of patients, profiting from the personal contact and interchange of ideas not obtainable in the lecture amphitheatre. Here we could fully appreciate Dr. Lansbuiy's dedicated and tireless professional attitude. That these capital qualities had been present throughout his life was amply demonstrated to us when we had the pleasure of sitting down with this man one evening to find out more about him. Horn in Cheddar, Somersetshire, England in 1897, John, the son of the Reverend Wallace George and Mrs. (Mary Gadd Lansbury, obtained his early formal education there before emigrating with his family to Toronto, Canada in 1911. Financial necessity precluded further schooling at this time and the next font years saw our future physician employ his time successively with a stock brokerage firm, as a newspaper cartoonist, and even as a vaudevillean. The outbreak of the Great W ar in 1911 further post- poned his academic career. He volunteered for Army-Service and spent several years in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, two of which were passed on the battlefields in France as a member of the field artillery. With the coming of the Armistice, this voung inan of twenty-two returned to Canada, desirous of pursuing a course in medicine but thwarted by the fact that he had taken no formal education after the age of fourteen. He undertook an ambitious program of self-education. enrolling in a high school, where he managed to condense a four-year course into ten months. After graduating cum laude, he entered Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, where he enrolled for the combined six-year course of undergraduate and medical school training. From the Queen’s Faculty of Medicine he received his M.D., C.M. degrees in 192b, and was awarded a gold medal at graduation for excellence in medicine. His internship year at the Montreal General Hospital was followed by a medical fellowship at the famed Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Circumstances again forced our future professor to lay aside his academic ambitions for two years. After a trial of working in psychiatry at a mental institution, he entered private medical practice in Toronto and was later able to return to Rochester to complete |x st-graduate training. This he did in 1933, being awarded in that year an M.S. in Medicine degree from the University of Minnesota. He subsequently became a Diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine. In 1934, Dr. Lansbury came to Philadelphia where, under a former preceptor from the Mayo Clinic, he worked at the Philadelphia Institute for Medical Rc- 5

Page 11 text:

lander's Arthritis, and writes editorials for various medical periodicals. He is investigating basic factors in causation of the arthritic state and has developed a system for objective evaluation of therapeutic results in rheumatoid arthritis. When not engaged in these or other scientific pursuits, he can be found with his charming wife. Louise, and their three children, John. Roger, and Anne. His principal literary pastime is reading various anthropological and philosophical works and, in addition, he can occasionally be found working on pen and ink sketches - a throwback to his cartoonist days. We gratefully dedicate our Skull to Or. John Lansbury - able clinician, inquiring researcher, capable teacher, and. above all, sincere friend to patient and student alike. We who are about to embark on a life-long course in the field of medicine would do well to emulate the many fine qualities of this man. 7