Robert Anderson Aldrich
Born | 1888-12-13 |
Died | 1949 |
Related eponyms
Biography of Robert Anderson Aldrich
Robert Anderson Aldrich was the son of another distinguished American paediatrician, Charles Anderson Aldrich (1888-1949), professor of paediatrics at the Mayo Clinic and eponymously remembered for Aldrich’s test, an intradermal salt solution test.
Aldrich was educated at Amhurst College, Massachusetts, graduating in 1939, and at the Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago. After graduating MD – first in his class – from the latter university in 1944, he served an internship at Evanston Hospital. In World War II he served with the US Navy in the South Pacific as a medical officer in at Iwo Jima and Okinawathe
After military service, Aldrich completed paediatric residency training followed by a research fellowship at the University of Minnesota before he came to the Mayo Clinic in 1950 as a member of the consultant staff. The next year he obtained an appointment as assistant professor of paediatrics to the University of Oregon, and in 1956 became full professor of paediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
From 1962 Aldrich, on an invitation from President John F. Kennedy, formed a new National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health, Washington, DC. He later founded a Division of Human Ecology at his own university, and in 1980 returned to the University of Washington.
- "human development is peace. The question about whether we are capable of human development in the fullest sense remain unanswered".
Bibliography
- Babies are human beings; an interpretation of growth.
Written with Mary M. Aldrich.
New York, Macmillan, 1938. 128 pages. - Feeding our old fashioned children; a background for modern mealtimes.
Written with Mary M. Aldrich.
New York, Macmillan, 1941. 112 pages.