Member

John was born on March 25, 1920, in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Mt. Lebanon High School until 1938. He graduated on the Dean’s List with a BS degree from Trinity College in 1942 and with a MD degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, specializing in neurology, especially pediatric neurology. He served a one-year internship at the School of Medicine, followed by four years residency at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as a Kirby-McCarthy Fellow. His medical career included membership on several faculties, including Yale (1950-53), Wayne State University School of Medicine (1961-83), and East Tennessee State University (1983-87). Aside from his medical career he also worked in botany, making over 10,000 collections of 6,000 species, donated to Michigan State University in 1965, with duplicates widely distributed to other herbaria. During the late 1960s he published on the distribution of Carex in Michigan and on Saxifraga cernua and S. aizoon in New England. He became a research fellow of the Botany Department of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian (1970-80s) and a research associate of the Cranbrook Institute of Science. He was honored in 1968 by a testimonial from the New England Botanical Club, and a citation in 1980 from Michigan State University and the Michigan Botanical Club. He was a good friend of John Wurdack, and they often went on field trips together to seek unusual and rare plants of the Appalachians. John resided in Johnson City, Tennessee, and was actively involved in writing a book when he died on November 18, 2000, from a recurrence of an earlier heart problem. John was elected to membership in the Washington Biologists’ Field Club in 1970.