Medicine through biographies

Barr, Murray Llewellyn ( 1908 – 1995) was a Canadian physician and medical researcher who discovered together with his graduate student Ewart George Bertram, in 1948, an important cell structure, the "Barr body". Born in Belmont, Ontario, he was educated at the University of Western Ontario, where he received his B.A. in 1930, M.D. in 1933, and M.Sc. in 1938.He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1968, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 1959, he received the Royal Society of Canada's Flavelle Medal. In 1962, he won a Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation Award for his contributions to the understanding of the causes of mental retardation. In 1963, he received the Gairdner Foundation International Award and in 1972 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1998, he was posthumously inducted into Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

Reference:

Barr ML, Bertram EG "A Morphological Distinction between Neurons of the Male and Female, and the Behavior of the Nucleolar Satellite during accelerated nucleoprotein synthesis". [Nature, N 163, P. 676 (April 30, 1949)]

Shereshevsky Nicolay Adolfovich (1885 – 1961) was a Soviet endocrinologist and internist, who described in 1925 an infertile woman with primary hypogonadism, low stature, alar-shaped skin folds between neck and deltoid area and other signs of disease later named after him and Dr. Turner. The description of seven other cases was completed in 1938. Shereshevsky was educated at the Medical School of Moscow University, where he received his M.D. in 1911, worked as an internist at a sanatorium and served as military doctor in Red Army. In 1921 he became associate professor at the Second Moscow University, where he delivered one of the first courses on Clinical Endocrinology, later he headed the first Research Institute of Endocrinology and Hormone Chemistry (1934 – 1953). In 1953, during a campaign of mass repressions against Kremlin physicians, he was arrested and accused of being a “foreign spy”. He was released from prison after Stalin’s death. Nikolai Adolphovich Shereshevsky published over 100 articles.

Reference: Shereshevsky N.A. Clinical Endocrinology. Moscow: Medgiz, 1957.

Fig.. Phenotype in Shereshevsky-Turner syndrome