Dr. Ian Smith, 1922-2012

Farewell to Dr. Ian Maclean Smith, who died earlier this week in Iowa City. Dr. Smith was the founder and first director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa, and was a faculty member here for over 40 years. He accomplished a great deal during his long career, some of which is summarized in this obituary. He retired the year I arrived at Iowa for ID fellowship training, so I only knew him as an emeritus professor and an occasional guide to the early Staphylococcus aureus literature. A few years ago, as I prepared a talk on the epidemiology of invasive S. aureus disease, I asked him for early (pre-antibiotic era) descriptions of the natural history of untreated S. aureus bacteremia. Shortly thereafter he showed up in my office with a bound volume of Lancet issues from 1960. The table below is from Ian’s 1960 publication in this volume, describing 338 cases of S. aureus bacteremia from 1936-1955, a time period that straddled the introduction of effective antimicrobials (pre-antibiotic era mortality was 90%).

While I was looking for an earlier photo of Ian, I also ran across an article from the Kingsport, Tennessee Daily News in April 1977 announcing that Ian had published two articles in the journal Geriatrics (yes, he was also a geriatrician). I had forgotten that his career at Iowa was interrupted by a stint at East Tennessee State University, a medical school he helped to establish and for which he was Chair of the Department of Medicine for two years. I was also pleased to see that the local papers saw fit to announce whenever faculty members published peer-reviewed papers. I’ll have to call our local Iowa City paper tomorrow morning...

Thanks, Ian, for your contributions to our field.