Paul Beeson

Paul Bruce Beeson (18 October 1908 – 14 August 2006) was an American physician and professor of medicine, specializing in infectious diseases and the pathogenesis of fever.

Biography After undergraduate study at the University of Washington in Seattle, Paul Beeson studied medicine at McGill University Medical School, where he received his MD in 1933. After two years as an intern at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he joined his father's and elder brother's practice in Wooster, Ohio. In 1937 he became a research fellow at Manhattan's Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. There he worked for two years in the laboratory of Oswald Avery. In 1939 he relocated to Harvard Medical School's teaching affiliate Peter Brent Brigham Hospital to work under Soma Weiss.

The study, published in the journal Medicine in 1961, was "a landmark paper," said Dr. Lawrence S. Cohen, a cardiologist-internist and professor of medicine at Yale. Dr. Cohen said it was "as relevant in 2006 as in 1961, in pointing out causes that were not obvious and teaching clinicians what they should be thinking about in making a differential diagnosis". He published The Eosinophil (Philadelphia/London, Saunders) in 1977. and Richard Rapport's Physician: The Life of Paul Beeson (2001) explain the importance of Beeson's career.

Beeson married in 1942. Upon his death he was survived by his widow, two sons, a daughter, six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.