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By Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook, July 8, 2019

The Center for the History of Medicine is pleased to announce that the George Cheever Shattuck papers, 1822-1973 (inclusive), 1890-1972 (bulk), are open to research.

George Cheever Shattuck was born October 12, 1879. After completing his medical degree at Harvard Medical School in 1905, Shattuck embarked on a world tour and ended up stopping for several months to work with Richard P. Strong (1872-1948) at the latter’s laboratory in the Philippines. After his time in the Philippines, Shattuck undertook additional clinical training in Vienna, Austria, and then returned in 1908 to Harvard Medical School. When the Department of Tropical Medicine was formed at the Medical School in 1913, Shattuck was recruited as a faculty member.
In 1916, the American Red Cross organized a medical commission to travel to Serbia to assist Serbian physicians in controlling an epidemic of typhus. Shattuck, Richard P. Strong, Hans Zinsser, and A. Watson Sellards were all members. Shattuck was responsible for the examination of post-mortem evidence and performed numerous autopsies, collating the data for the commission’s final report, published in 1920. From 1917 to 1919, Shattuck served with the Harvard Surgical Unit embedded with the British Expeditionary Force; after the armistice that ended World War I, he served in Switzerland as General Medical Secretary of the League of Red Cross Societies.

Shattuck returned to Boston in 1921 as assistant professor of tropical medicine at Harvard Medical School and worked to establish a service for tropical medicine at Boston City Hospital. In 1924-1925, Shattuck accompanied the Hamilton Rice expedition to the upper Amazon in Brazil. He co-led a medical survey expedition with Richard P. Strong to Liberia and the Belgian Congo in 1926-1927. Between 1929 and 1932, Shattuck led three expeditions funded by the Carnegie Institute to identify health problems in the Yucatan and Guatemala.

The papers consist of records collected and created by George Cheever Shattuck during his lifetime and professional career as a specialist in tropical medicine. Series I consists of materials collected by Shattuck with reference to the genealogy and activities of the Shattuck family from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Series II consists of records reflecting Shattuck’s international medical work, including his trips through South America and Africa, and his work in Serbia with the American Red Cross expedition led by Richard P. Strong. Series III consists of materials related to Shattuck’s work as a writer, including the reports he produced in relation to the activities documented in Series II. Shattuck was also the author of a textbook on tropical diseases published in 1951 and multiple articles on the subject. Series IV consists of article reprints on a variety of medical topics, primarily physiological and embryological.