Homer Fordyce Swift

Homer Swift graduated from Western Reserve in 1902, and he took his medical degree in 1906 from New York University (Bellevue Medical School). He was born to be a researcher and teacher. He was Associate Professor of Medicine at Columbia and later at Cornell; but in 1919 he returned to the Rockefeller Institute, where he was made a member, and he occupied himself there first with syphilis and later with streptococcal infections in general.

He was in the combat division of medicine. He would stalk a spirochete or a member of the coccus tribe until he knew all about its habits and make-up. Then he would go into the chemical laboratory and devise a lethal weapon that would destroy the enemy while permitting the host to survive. He followed these ugly customers into the brains, the blood, the tissues of men. He blasted them from the central nervous system, and he strained them from the body fluids. His attack was systematic and relentless. At the last he was working on rheumatic fever, one of the most deadly and crippling of childhood diseases.

Swift was a serious person, but he harbored a sense of humor that saved him from being overintense. It amused him to pretend he was naïve. His wife was a first-class painter, and he got great entertainment from this. Innately ascetic, he made sober inquiries into the wines of France—as though he were studying new phenomena—and when he acquired gout he found his past acquaintance with them a palliating thought.

He was a line officer of the shock troops of medicine: kindly, simple, and exceedingly competent. He died in his laboratory with his harness on his back.

George W. MartinMember profile currently not available; contact Archivist for information on this Centurion
1954 Century Association Yearbook