Hektoen, Ludvig

(b. Westby, Wisconsin, 2 July 1863; d. Chicago, Illinois, 5 July 1951)

pathology, microbiology.

The son of a Lutheran parochial schoolteacher, Hektoen spent his early years on a farm in a Norwegian-speaking community in Wisconsin. He attended Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, for six years and earned the B.A. degree in 1883. Having decided to study medicine, he spent the following year taking the requisite science courses at the University of Wisconsin. In 1885 Hektoen began medical studies at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Chicago. After graduation in 1888 he was an intern at the Cook County Hospital. Here he came under the influence of Christian Fenger, a Danish-born surgeon and pathologist who brought the methods of the Vienna school to Chicago.

Hektoen’s rise in the academic medical world of Chicago was rapid, and by the turn of the century he was widely known as one of the most prominent midwestern physicians. He held several posts as pathologist and professor of pathology before he was appointed to head the department at the University of Chicago in 1901, a position he held until 1933. In 1902 Hektoen was appointed director of the newly founded John McCormick Institute of Infectious Diseases. Here, and in the closely related Durand Hospital, much important research, especially on scarlet fever, was carried out in the following four decades. Owing to financial pressures, the McCormick Institute closed in 1939. It was bought by Cook County Hospital in 1943 and reopened as the Hektoen Institute for Medical Research. Through his own work at the McCormick Institute and through his teaching of a new, more scientifically based pathology that was closely integrated with biology as a whole, Hektoen greatly stimulated medical research in the Chicago area, helping to make it an important medical center. In 1903 he was offered the prestigious chair of pathology at the University of Pennsylvania. Despite the urgings of Simon Flexner—who was leaving the position in Philadelphia to go to the Rockefeller Institute—and the entreaties of William Welch and William Osler, Hektoen elected to remain in Chicago.

Hektoen turned from the study of morbid anatomy to immunology in the early years of the twentieth century and thus became one of the pioneers in this rapidly developing field. In 1905 he was the first to demonstrate that measles virus circulates in the blood during the initial thirty hours of the rash. He proved, using volunteers, that the virus can be transmitted by injection. Hektoen was also among the first to make use of blood cultures from living patients in order to aid in proper clinical diagnosis. In 1933, when Hektoen was seventy, he and his co-workers developed an important and later widely used method for prolonging the antibody-producing powers of immunizing solutions by adsorbing the antigen to aluminum hydroxide. His understanding of the immunological problems of blood transfusion led him to suggest that donors must be carefully matched to recipients in order to avoid the dangers of transfusion reactions. As a result of the scientific climate that Hektoen helped to create, the first blood bank in the United States was established at Cook County Hospital in 1937.

Hektoen’s scientific career spanned more than sixty years, during which time he wrote more than 300 papers, edited numerous books, and, perhaps most significantly, served as editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases from its inception in 1904 until 1941 and of the Archives of Pathology from 1926 to 1950. He died at eighty-eight, a much honored and revered medical leader. Throughout his long career Hektoen played important national roles through his work on American Medical Association councils, in several Chicago and national medical and scientific societies, and in his editorial positions. His many scientific honors included membership in the National Academy of Sciences and eight honorary degrees.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Hektoen’s many scientific papers are listed in the bibliography included in Paul R. Cannon’s memoir (see below). A major book is The Technique of Post Mortem Examination (Chicago, 1894), intended for the many medical students who came to the postmortem demonstrations at the Cook County Hospital. With David Riesman he edited American Textbook of Pathology Philadelphia, 1901). He also edited the collected works of Howard Taylor Ricketts and Christian Fenger; and with Ella M. Salmonsen he compiled A Bibliography of Infantile Paralysis, 1789–1944 (Philadelphia, 1946).

II. Secondary Literature. The most comprehensive biographical sketch of Hektoen was written on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday by his student and colleague Morris Fishbein: “Ludvig Hektoen, A Biography and an Appreciation,” in Archives of Pathology, 26 (1938), 3–31, including a bibliography to that time. All subsequent writers have relied on this memoir. See also Thomas N. Bonner, Medicine in Chicago 1850–1950 (Madison, Wis., 1947), esp. pp. 91–92; Paul R. Cannon, “Ludvig Hektoen, 1863–1951,” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 28 (1952–1954), 163–197; James B. Herrick, “Ludvig Hektoen, 1863–1951,” in Proceedings of the Institute of Medicine of Chicago, 19 (1952), 3–11; and James P. Simonds, “Ludvig Hektoen: A Study in Changing Scientific Interests,” ibid., 14 (1942), 284–287.

Gert H. Brieger