Rollin Turner Woodyatt

Rollin Turner "Woody" Woodyatt (3 June 1878 – 17 December 1953) was an American physician, known for his contribution to the field of diabetes and other metabolic diseases. Woodyatt advocated a low-carbohydrate high-fat diet to treat diabetes.

Biography

Woodyatt's father, William Henry Woodyatt (1846–1880), was a Canadian-born, American-educated physician who practiced medicine in Chicago and became a professor of ophthalmology and otology. R. T. Woodyatt was helped by his uncle, the architect Daniel Burnham, whose sister Clara (1850–1939) was widowed by W. H. Woodyatt's early death from diphtheria. R. T. Woodyatt's brother Ernest (1874–1922) became an architect.

Woodyatt graduated in 1897 from Chicago Manual Training School in 1897 and studied at Cornell University from 1897 to 1898. He graduated with an M.D. from Rush Medical College in 1902 and from 1902 to 1904 was a medical intern at Chicago's Presbyterian Hospital, During WW I, he served as a major in the U.S. Army.

During the early 1930s, leading laboratories in diabetology were Woodyatt's laboratory in Chicago, Russell M. Wilder's laboratory at the Mayo Clinic, and Elliott P. Joslin's laboratory in Boston.

Woodyatt was elected to the presidencies of three learned societies: in 1916 to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, in 1936 to the Association of American Physicians, and in 1941 to the Institute of Medicine of Chicago Woodyatt was awarded the 1948 Banting Medal of the American Diabetes Association.

He was a lifelong bachelor. Arthur P. Thomson published in 1924 his findings concerning the Woodyatt formula as it pertained to diabetic patients undergoing dietary treatments in the pre-insulin era. Using the ideas of Shaffer and Woodyatt, Clarence Dean Withrow (1927–2006) published in 1980 a new formula for the ketogenic ratio (which is defined as the ratio of the sum of ketogenic factors to the sum of antiketogenic factors).

Selected publications