Donaldson, Henry Herbert

(b. Yonkers, New York, 12 May 1857; d. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 23 January 1938)

neurology.

Donaldson, scion of a banking family, showed an early interest in science, and after studies at Phillips Andover and Yale stayed on an additional year in New Haven to do research in arsenic detection at Sheffield Scientific School (1879–1880) under Russell H. Chittenden. He then received somewhat reluctant parental approval to study medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York (1880–1881), but after one year became convinced that his true bent lay in research rather than practice. Donaldson was offered, and accepted, a fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where he spent two years (1881–1883) studying the effects of digitalin on the heart and of cocaine on the nerves controlling temperature. The latter work, done under the supervision of G. Stanley Hall, became the theme of his Ph.D. dissertation (1895). Donaldson next spent almost two years (1886–1887) in Europe at the great neurological centers, studying under such masters as Forel, Gudden, Theodor Meynert, and Golgi. Returning briefly to Johns Hopkins as associate in psychology, he soon followed Hall, who had become president of Clark University, to Worcester, Massachusetts. Here, while assistant professor of neurology (1889–1892), he carried out his classic study on the brain of Laura Bridgman, a blind deaf-mute. This study, characterized as “probably the most thorough study of a single human brain that has ever been carried out,” determined the theme that was to dominate all of Donaldson’s subsequent research: the growth and development of the human brain from birth to maturity. His early papers were incorporated in a monograph. The Growth of the Brain: A Study of the Nervous System in Relation to Education (1895).

In 1892 Donaldson moved to Chicago to join the faculty of the recently opened university. Here he served as professor of neurology and dean of the Ogden School of Science until 1898, when his teaching career was interrupted by a crippling tubercular infection of the knee which necessitated a prolonged recuperative period in Colorado. From 1891 to 1910 there was a continuous flow of papers concerned with the rate of growth of the brain and spinal cord, and the relationship of their weight and length to that of the entire body.

In 1905, after serious consideration, Donaldson finally decided to accept the distinguished appointment as head of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia, a position he was to retain until his death. In 1906 there appeared the first of a long series of papers in which the white or albino rat (rather than the frog) was used as a research tool. Donaldson had already used this animal in his work with Adolf Meyer in Baltimore as early as 1893, but the superiority of the rat over the frog had long been advocated by Shinkishi Hatai, who had joined Donaldson in Philadelphia. He then proceeded to work out the equivalence in age between man and rodent, and as a result of lengthy genetic studies was able to produce the famous Wistar Institute stock of white rats, which have since then figured in innumerable research projects. The fundamental studies on growth, although primarily directed toward the brain and central nervous system, were later expanded to include the muscles, bones, teeth, and viscera.

Among the many distinguished workers associated with Donaldson in Chicago and Philadelphia were Alice Hamilton, John B. Watson, S. W. Ranson, and Frederick S. Hammett. His numerous foreign students included at least twenty Japanese. A member of the American Philosophical Society from 1906, Donaldson served that organization in various important positions until his death. He was also honored with the presidency of the Association of American Anatomists (1916–1918), the American Society of Naturalists (1927), and the American Neurological Society (1937). Both Yale and Clark granted him the honorary D.Sc.

Donaldson was a man of great culture and a true humanist. He loved music, the arts, and literature, but did not neglect to concern himself actively with social problems of the day. From 1888, when he helped to found the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, he kept open house each summer for a host of friends and admirers. On his seventy-fifth birthday he was presented with a special volume of the Journal of Comparative Neurology (1932), dedicated to him and containing twenty contributions as well as an affectionate eulogy. His first marriage, to Julia Desboro Vaux of New York, produced two sons, one of whom, John C. Donaldson, served as professor of anatomy at the medical school of the University of Pittsburgh.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See “The Physiology of the Central Nervous System,” in An American Textbook of Physiology (1898); and The Rat (1924). His diaries (1890–1936), in 49 vols. in manuscript, are at the American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia.

A biography is Edward G. Conklin, “Henry Herbert Donaldson (1857–1938),” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences (1939), 229–243, with a bibliography and portrait.

Morris H. Saffron