Ralph Herman Major
1884-1970
Ralph Herman Major was born on August 29, 1884 in Liberty, Missouri. He took his A. B. from William Jewell College in 1902 and embarked upon three years of study in Leipzig, Munich, and Heidelberg before returning to the United States to entering medical school at Johns Hopkins in 1910. After receiving his M. D. from Hopkins, Dr. Major returned to Europe to serve as an assistant in clinics in Munich and Vienna. He came back to the United States around 1913 to complete postgraduate study in pathology at Stanford University.
Dr. Major began his remarkable forty-five year career at the University of Kansas Medical Center in September 1914 as professor of pathology. His KUMC tenure was briefly interrupted in 1919 when he served as a physician at the Henry Ford Hospital. Dr. Major returned to KUMC in 1921 to become became the first Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. He held this position for nearly thirty years before assuming the same position in the Department of the History of Medicine in 1950.
Dr. Major authored over 200 articles and ten books, both clinical and historical. According to Stanley Friesen, MD, Dr. Major "was one of the first clinicians to give the new, miraculous insulin to diabetics¹."
Dr. Major was extremely popular with medical students. Robert Bolinger, MD recollected "Dr. Major's rounds were always fascinating. He would arrive on the floor for rounds in the morning and was known to say "Where is your patient with diabetic acidosis?" This was always a surprise, and we begged to know how he knew this. He pointed out that he could smell the ketones and that if we hadn't been smokers we would also be able to smell. He was always chiding the house staff about smoking. Rounds were fun, as we always played a game of trying to fool Dr. Major regarding the classical physical signs on the patients. We usually lost that game."
His Physical Diagnosis first appeared in 1937 and was translated into six languages. Other books include The Doctor Explains (1931); Classic Descriptions of Disease (1932); Disease and Destiny (1936); Faiths That Healed (1940); Fatal Partners (1941); A History of Medicine (1954); An Account of the University of Kansas School of Medicine (1968); Memories of a Vanished Era (1967); and, Old Ties and New (1968).
After retiring in 1954, Dr. Major traveled extensively and donated many medical artifacts of ancient civilizations to the Clendening History of Medicine Library. And, although Dr. Major once stated that he didn't know when Logan Clendening caught the book collecting virus, he himself fell prey to the same bug. The Clendening Library is fortunate to have received the products of his bibliomania. Among the finer volumes donated to the Library by Dr. Major are sixteen works of Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest whose intellect has been compared to Galileo and Newton. Others, however, described Kircher as a charlatan. Dr. Major also bequeathed a fine collection of folios to the Library.
Dr. Major died on October 15, 1970.
1. Stanley R. Friesen and Robert P. Hudson, The Kansas School of Medicine: eyewitness reflections on its formative years (University of Kansas Press, 1996).