George Draper

Dr. George Draper (May 21, 1880 – July 1, 1959) was an American physician. He was affiliated with Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital. Most famously known as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's personal doctor, Draper was also a well known constitutionalist and eugenicist. Draper was a key figure in developing a constitutional view of medicine during the 20th century.

Constitutionalism

Constitutionalism was a movement in medicine away from the "one size fits all diagnosis" and towards re-introducing the individual into the medical diagnosis. Constitutionalist like Draper placed importance on aspects of a patient's constitution – this included heredity, their environment, and their personality. A patient's constitution played a larger role in diagnosis than in previous methods.

Draper received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for his Constitution Clinic in New York City. Draper sought to study chronic diseases and relate them to certain constitutions, believing that through an evaluation of a patient's constitution, doctors would be able to give better diagnoses and decide on better treatments.

During this period, genetics began to emerge as a field, as medicine began to solve the problem of infectious diseases and moved on to new issues. He also countered the importance of disease itself – medicine had been focused on classifying disease ever since the rise of hospital medicine in the early 1800s, and Draper called back instead to a prior time, when humoral theory and the individual were more important in a medical diagnosis. Draper defined a disease not as its own entity but as a thing carried by an individual, similar to humoral theory.

Draper defined constitution as follows:

Constitution is that aggregate of hereditarial characters, influenced more or less by the environment, which determines the individuals' reaction, successful or unsuccessful, to the stress of environment." Draper's focus in treatment was the psychological aspect.