Arthur Purdy Stout

Arthur Purdy Stout (1885 to 1967) was an American surgeon who became one of the leading figures in surgical pathology. A graduate of Yale and of Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, he served as a field surgeon in France in the First World War and then joined the Columbia faculty, rising to full professor of surgery in 1947 and professor of pathology from 1950. Although trained as a surgeon, he gave his attention to the study of surgical specimens and built special expertise in tumor pathology, directing the Laboratory of Surgical Pathology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center from the late 1920s to the early 1950s and training many later leaders in diagnostic pathology. He wrote more than three hundred articles, the monograph Human Cancer in 1932 and three fascicles of the Atlas of Tumor Pathology, and in 1954 coined the term fibromatosis. The Arthur Purdy Stout Society of Surgical Pathologists carries his name.