FREDERIC SCHILLER LEE. 



Fourth president (1908-10) of the Society for Experi- 

 mental Biology and Medicine. 1 



Frederic Schiller Lee was born at Canton, New York, June 16, 

 1859. His ancestors, of vigorous English stock, came early to 

 Massachusetts, and they and their children played active and 

 honorable parts in the making of the New England colonies. In 

 his boyhood a love of nature was developed in him, and a scien- 

 tific career was foreshadowed early. From the first he lived in an 

 academic atmosphere. He received his college training at St. Law- 

 rence University, of which his father had been president, and 

 obtained his A.B. in 1878. After a few years of scientific teaching, 

 he became one of the band of young men who felt the stimulus of 

 the newly created Johns Hopkins University, and at that institu- 

 tion had his first adequate opportunity of gratifying his ambition 

 for the best scientific training. The four years from 1881 to 1885 

 he spent at Johns Hopkins under Newell Martin and William 

 Keith Brooks, and was successively assistant, graduate scholar 

 and fellow in biology. He received his doctorate in philosophy 

 there in 1885. During the following year he engaged in physio- 

 logical research at Leipsic with Carl Ludwig and von Frey. On 

 returning to this country he taught physiology for one year at 

 St. Lawrence University and for four years at Bryn Mawr College, 

 and in 1891 he was called to Columbia as demonstrator of physiol- 

 ogy. In 1895 he became an adjunct-professor, and since 1904 he 

 has been a professor of physiology. 



Professor Lee entered upon the study of physiology from the 

 standpoint of general biology, and this fact has influenced his 

 whole subsequent career. He has consistently viewed physiology 

 as primarily a biological science. While rigidly insisting upon a 

 large knowledge of it as the indispensable condition of scientific 

 medicine, as a university study he has deprecated its almost ex- 

 clusive development in medical schools, and has constantly urged 

 its inclusion also among the scientific courses of the university. 



'Similar brief biographies of former presidents appear in Vols. II, III and V. 



v 



