Blake Colburn Wilbur

Blake Colburn Wilbur was an American surgeon who lived from 29 May 1901 to 10 March 1974 and was one of the co-founders of the Palo Alto Medical Clinic. Born in San Francisco into a medical family, he was the son of Ray Lyman Wilbur, a physician who became president of Stanford University. He studied physiology at Stanford, took his medical degree at Harvard in 1925, interned in Boston and New York and then studied at the Mayo Clinic. He joined the Palo Alto doctors Russel Lee, Esther Clark and Fritz Roth on 1 January 1930, doing surgery of every kind alongside deliveries and general medicine, and during the Second World War he was the first at the clinic to use penicillin on a patient. He was also a clinical professor at the Stanford medical school from 1930 to 1966 and kept operating until his death. In 1962 he placed gastrostomy tubes in infants on ventilators at the suggestion of Dr D. Vernon Thomas, and the procedure was adopted for the neonatal care division.