Allan Macy Butler

Allan Macy Butler (1894 to 1986) was an American pediatrician who spent most of his career at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Born in Yonkers, New York, he served as an artillery officer in the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War and then in Poland with the Hoover mission, before entering Harvard Medical School in 1922 and graduating in 1926. A period at the Rockefeller Institute turned his attention to fluid and electrolyte metabolism, and wartime life-raft studies for the Office of Scientific Research and Development contributed to advances in treating diarrhea and dehydration. He became an instructor in pediatrics at Harvard in 1929, a professor in 1944, and from then until 1960 held two posts at once, Chief of the Children's Medical Service and physician in charge of the chemical laboratories at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also remembered as a pioneer in health services who argued for government-paid medical care for the elderly and people on low incomes, and in 1969 he received the American Pediatric Society's John Howland Award.