Presentation of the Howland Award to Horace Louis Hodes, M.D

Dr. Hodes was born in Philadelphia on December 21, 1907. He received his elementary and high school education in Philadelphia and pursued one of his favorite activities by being a member of his high school baseball team. During his childhood he had a major experience which did much to lead to his determination to study medicine and particularly pediatrics. When he was six years old, two of his younger brothers contracted diphtheria. The diagnosis was not made for a number of days so that they did not receive antitoxin until the fifth day of illness, at which time they were taken to the only contagious disease ward in Philadelphia at the municipal hospital. They were intubated, survived for 25-30 days and then unfortunately died. By the time Dr. Hodes showed symptoms of diphtheria, the diagnosis on his brothers had been established and fortunately he received the antitoxin on the second day of his illness. Parenthetically, although diphtheria antitoxin had been developed by Von Behring in 1891, Dr. Bela Schick, Dr. Hodes' predecessor as Chairman of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai, did not do his work until 1913, just barely in time for Dr. Hodes' benefit. This combination of an enormous personal tragedy and his eventual recognition of the power of good medicine was a large determinant in Dr. Hodes' career goal. At sixteen he entered the University of Pennsylvania where he received a full tuition competitive academic scholarship. At the tender age of 19 he began medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, again on full scholarship, won on the basis of a rigorous competitive examination. Although in retrospect this outcome could have been expected, it was also most fortunate, because financial considerations might well have prevented the medical profession from benefitting from Dr. Hodes' membership and activities. His college background in chemistry led him to begin a research project shortly after entering medical school. Together with another student, Milton Rappaport, he began to work actively on the newly discovered vitamin D. He was able to show that the action of vitamin D was primarily to increase the absorption of calcium from the intestine rather than, as was thought at the time, by stimulation of the parathyroid glands. He disproved the then current dogma by producing tetany in dogs by removal of the thyroid and parathyroid glands and then curing the hypocalcemia and tetany by the administration of large doses of vitamin D. He also was able to demonstrate the toxic effect of vitamin D on the kidney. This work was published in two papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry while Dr. Hodes was in his third year of medical school. This early research work instilled in Dr. Hodes a permanent deep involvement and joy in research, the results of which I will summarize later. His broad clinical talents as a pediatrician were shaped during his tenure at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as intern, resident, and chief resident, between 1931 and 1935, interrupted by a year of residency at Johns Hopkins. To this day he remains the most respected clinician in our department. After his residency, he spent the first of many years on the faculty of Johns Hopkins, initially as the Director of the Dispensary of the Harriet Lane Home. Desirous of additional education, he then became an Assistant in Bacteriology at the Rockefeller Institute. This important period of rigorous training in basic research and in experi-