1910 -
Biography
Born January 10, 1910 on the banks of the Mississippi in Killona, Louisiana. Son of a country doctor, throughout boyhood he assisted his father with patients. M.D. 1933 from Tulane University School of Medicine; one year internship at New Orleans' Charity Hospital. Began lifelong career on Tulane's medical faculty in the Department of Medicine. Outbreak of World War II wrecked scheduled arrangement to work with Sir Thomas Lewis in London on a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship; instead spent 1939-1941 with Dr. Alfred E. Cohn at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York. Certified: American Board of Internal Medicine and Subspecialty Board of Cardiovascular Diseases. Returned to Tulane to head the newly formed Cardiovascular Laboratory and Section, keeping that post even after named Henderson Professor of Medicine and Chairman of Medicine in 1947.
An accomplished investigator with wide interests, particularly in peripheral circulation, congestive heart failure, the effects of climate on the cardiovascular system, the venous side of circulation, the cardiomyopathies, electrocardiography and vectorcardiography, he extracted key insights from his pioneer work. Employing radioactive isotopes (one of the earliest in medicine to do so, he held license No. 1), he pinpointed sodium as the culprit in congestive heart failure; discovered the value of vasodilators in that same disease; found that the veins were not passive carriers, but actively pumped blood back to the heart; proved that the heart works harder in hot, humid climates; and introduced the concept of the heart's pressure-volume "loop" - all contributions to today's mainstream medicine. His studies convinced him that plaque collected in the arteries on the sites of earlier lesions from viral infection and that viral infection could be the source in a whole list of "chronic" diseases, such as diabetes. Through weekly "looking at the hearts" sessions for almost 40 years, correlating autopsy findings with EKGs and vectorcardiograms, he developed an outstanding acuity in interpreting those recordings.
Through the course of his cutting-edge work, he of necessity devised new methodologies and equipment which he shared freely with other scientists and commercial concerns without ever seeking patents or compensation himself. Among those innovations were the rheoplethysmograph and a central switch for simultaneous recording of leads, a feature incorporated in all contemporary ECG machines.
His findings went into his teaching and training, resulting, too, in 12 books and 864 scientific publications. He served on numerous editorial boards and for 23 years was editor of the American Heart Journal, in which he aired his insights, strictures and philosophy in frequent annotations and editorials.
A member of numerous scientific and medical societies, he served on many of their boards, and was an active member and chairman of numerous committees, including chairman of the ad hoc committee of the National Heart Institute that established the nation's regional primate research centers, chairman of the Life Insurance Medical Research Fund Advisory Board, chairman of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Panel on Cardiovascular Diseases and chairman of the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Army on Environmental Medicine and Physiology involved in successfully sending the first two monkeys into space, continuing as a consultant to NASA. A founding member of the Einthoven Foundation Advisory Board in Leiden, the Netherlands, he was vice president of the American Heart Association and vice president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, president of the Cardiac Electrophysiology Society, president of the Central Society for Clinical Research, president of the Southern Society for Clinical Investigation and president of the Pavlovian Society. In addition, he was one of the founders of the Association of Professors of Medicine and the Southern Society for Clinical Investigation, and founded the Association of Former Chairmen of Medicine and the Association of University Cardiologists, and was the latter's first president.
His numerous awards include the 1947 AMA Gold Medal for Research Exhibit (on the mechanism of congestive heart failure using radioactive isotopes), the 1946 Award from the Mexican National Assembly of Surgeons for Distinguished Scientific Exhibit (on plethysmography), the American Heart Association's James B. Herrick Award, the American College of Cardiology's Distinguished Fellowship Award, the American Geriatric's Society's Willard O. Thompson Award and the American Medical Association's Scientific Achievement Award. Named a Master by the American College of Physicians, he was a Senior Examiner and chairman of the Subspecialty Boards of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and a Diplomate of the National Board of Medical Examiners. In 1970, CHEST magazine honored him with a festschrift, as did the American Journal of Cardiology in 1987.
An innovative and pioneering investigator, he was a solicitous and cautious physician with consultancies at dozens of hospitals including the American Hospital in Paris, and for over fifty years was in charge of the same ward at New Orleans' Charity Hospital. Among his miscellaneous accomplishments, he took EKGs of the fruit fly, oversaw implantation of one of the earliest nuclear pacemakers, and amassed a fine collection of medical, cardiological and electrocardiological objects. His suggestion to the head of the Macarthur Foundation was the genesis of its so-called "Genius Awards", and his own research fund was willed to the Smithsonian to establishe there the Burch Fellowship for Theoretical Medicine and Affiliated Theoretical Sciences.
- Vivian Burch Martin
