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23rd APS President (1950-1951)
David B. Dill
(1891-1986)
David Bruce Dill succeeded to the office of president after the death of
Henry Cuthbert Bazett and served the remainder of the term; he presided at
the fall meeting in Columbus, Ohio, in 1950 and the spring meeting in
Cleveland in 1951. He had previously served as treasurer (1947-48) and for
two years as a member of Council before his election as president elect.
Dill was born in Kansas, but after the death of his parents he was raised
from an early age by relatives, first in Iowa and then in Santa Ana,
California. He received his B.S. degree from Occidental College in
California in 1913 and an M.A. degree from Stanford University in 1914.
After teaching chemistry in high schools in California for two years, he was
employed by the Bureau of Chemistry, U.S. Department of Agriculture, from
1916 to 1923. He returned to Stanford in 1923 as a fellow in chemistry and
received the Ph.D. degree in 1925. He then went to Harvard University as a
National Research Council Fellow to work with L. J. Henderson.
In 1927 he became one of the founding faculty of the Harvard Fatigue
Laboratory in the School of Public Health, with which he was associated
until 1947. Dill was elected to membership in APS in 1941. During World War
II he served first with the U.S. Army Air Corps and later with the
Quartermaster Corps, which awarded him the Legion of Merit. In 1947, with
the discontinuance of the Fatigue Laboratory, he accepted appointment as
scientific director of the Medical Division of the Army Chemical Center in
Edgewood, Maryland. After his retirement from this position in 1961 he held
research professorships at the University of Indiana and the University of
Nevada.
During his APS presidency he proposed the establishment of the president
elect's tour, which became a Society tradition. Eugene Landis, his successor
as president elect, began the practice by visiting a number of institutions,
lecturing and exchanging views with their physiologists and administration.
Dill also completed the activities of the Committee on Scientific Aid, which
had been begun by Bazett and carried on by Walter Root. One of his most
lasting contributions to the Society is the Senior Physiologists Committee,
which he initiated in 1951 and chaired until 1980.
Throughout his career, Dill made contributions in the fields of exercise
and environmental physiology. In the process, he led expeditions to
high-altitude, tropical, and desert environments to study the effects of
environmental extremes under natural as well as laboratory conditions. He
continued his research in the Nevada desert to the age of ninety-five. At
the 1986 Spring Meeting of the Society in St. Louis, a report of his
research on aerobic capacity and aging was presented, and at the business
meeting he received from President Howard Morgan the Society's Ray G. Daggs
Award.
Selected Publications
1. Bean, E. Dr. D. B. Dill. Physiologist 17: 449-450, 1974.
2. Fenn, W. O. History of the American Physiological Society: The
Third Quarter Century, 1937-1962. Washington, DC: Am. Physiol. Soc.,
1963, p. 21-23.
3. Horvath, E. C., and S. M. Horvath. David Bruce Dill. Physiologist
22(2): 1-2, 1979.
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