Biographical Memoirs Volume 54 (1983) / Chapter Skim
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Walter Joseph Meek
Walter Joseph Meek
Pages 250-269
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From page 251... ...
BROOKS WALTER J MEEK belonged to the generation of exclusively American-trained biomedical scientists that first clemonstrated the competence of American scholarship and raised the level of American attainment in physiology to rival that of any other nation of the Western World.
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The cattle drives from Texas to Abilene hacI stopped by the time Walter Meek was born, but Kansas was still "frontier" country—that period, now so romanticized, had not yet ended. Walter's sister he hac!
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From page 253... ...
As a student he much prized his Phi Beta Kappa key and wore it continually, even when he was working summers in the wheat fields. Eventually he lost his key in those fields, but a man working in a grain elevator in Minneapolis found it in the wheat ant!
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From page 254... ...
to meet these responsibilities, however, and held the posts of assistant dean of medicine from 1920 through 1942, acting dean from 1942 through 1945, and associate clean from 1945 until his
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He met her on shipboard during his first trip to Europe. They had three children: Joseph Walter Meek, born May 2, 1912, professor in the Law School of the University of New Mexico, died 1954; Mary Crescence Meek, born May 20, 1917, served as a stewardess for American Airlines for many years; and John Sawyer Meek, born August 12, 191S, became professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado.
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From page 256... ...
Meek's puritanical work ethic and ingenuity probably made him somewhat overwhelmed. He was a bookbinder; for many years he bound all the journals to which he susbscribed.
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This attracted his father's interest, with the result that Dr. Meek made albums, borders, and display cabinets lined with velvet.
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Most of these and other such papers were delivered at William Snow Miller's seminars on medical history at the University. Professor Ackerknecht regrets that many of the papers read in these seminars were not publishecl but he states that the group of individuals to which Dr.
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From page 259... ...
He was the first in this country to employ the method of primary negativity in tracing the origin and course of the excitatory process in the heart. He detected shifting of the pacemaker during vagus stimulation and when the sinoatrial node was destroyed.
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He studied chemical transmission of vagal effects on the small intestine, the influence of intestinal distension on gastric motility, and the actions of adrenalin and general anesthesia on intestinal function. He studied the causes of intestinal obstruction and ulceration.
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From page 261... ...
Among the many papers he presented before the Society, the following were of greatest interest: "The Origin of Fibrinogen in the Liver," "The Initiation and Course of Cardiac Excitation," and "Distension as a Factor in Intestinal Obstruction." ~ became a member of the American Physiological Society in 1934, a year after Dr. Meek's term as president hac} enclecI.
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Cannon" that he wrote in 1933 for the Texas Reports on Biology and Medicine. Cannon cTid not always receive from some of Meek's contemporaries the respectful treatment he deservecT in meetings of the American Physiological Society.
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From page 263... ...
Biographical accounts indicate that physiologists in his day were not members of so many societies as is now required. In acictition to the American Physiological Society, he belonged to the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, American Zoologists, American Naturalists, ant!
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The relative resistance of the heart ganglia, the intrinsic nerve plexus and the heart to the action of drugs.
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Instantaneous radiographs of the human heart at determined points in the cardiac cycle.
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Cardiac changes subsequent to experimental aortic lesions.
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A study of cyclopropane anesthesia with especial reference to gas concentrations, respiratory and electrocardiographic changes.
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From page 268... ...
Relationship of chemical structure of sympathomimetic amines to ventricular tachycardia during cyclopropane anesthesia.
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