Bailey K. Ashford and Robert A. Phillips Research Awards

Last week I ended up spending more time than I would have liked at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, because on Monday and Wednesday, I was competing for the two research awards at the hospital the Bailey K. Ashford Award and Robert A. Phillips Award. It was the first year that preventive medicine residents from WRAIR were allowed to compete, so I submitted my abstract on poisoning hospitalizations that I did at AFHSC several months ago, and was selected as a finalist for both.

Here's a picture of Bailey K. Ashford. He was an Army physician in the Spanish American War. After the war, he was sent to Puerto Rico to command the medical department troops (which today would a job given to a Medical Service Corps officer, not a doctor, because it's a pretty thankless job and kinda like herding cats. We don't listen to directions well). While he was there, he noticed that the Puerto Ricans were not only shorter than Americans, but that most of them were anemic. This led him to discovering a new species of hookworm and spent a year working on treating around 300,000 Puerto Ricans, reducing the death rate from anemia by 90% on the island. After this, he established the Puerto Rican Institute of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, which is now part of the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine. 

And this is Robert A. Phillips. He was a Navy physician and served in the Naval Reserves during WWII. In 1945-46, he was sent to Cairo to study typhus and ended up establishing the US Navy Medical Research Unit #3 (NAMRU-3), which is still there today. His first big assignment as the commanding officer of NAMRU-3 was a cholera outbreak in Egypt. In that outbreak, his research on cholera and treatment made him pretty much the world expert in it until he died in 1976.

In the good old days of the National Capital Region, when the Army had Walter Reed and the Navy had Bethesda, these were two separate competitions (Bailey K. Ashford at Walter Reed and Robert A. Phillips at Navy), and the two had nothing to do with each other. Four years ago, however, we all had to learn how to play well together, and both competitions were open to residents and fellows from either service. The main difference is that Bailey K. Ashford is for graduating residents, and Robert A. Phillips is for any resident. So there was quite a lot of overlap in the people competing for these awards, including me.

I didn't get the Robert A. Phillips award--it went to an Army orthopedic surgery resident who came up with a new system of classifying lumbosacral fractures--and the Bailey K. Ashford won't be announced until residency graduation in June, but I'm not exactly holding my breath. These are clinical research awards, which judges who are clinicians, and these people rarely consider epidemiology to be clinical research. Whatever. I was just happy that I was selected to be a finalist in both, because that meant that: a) someone recognizes the value of epidemiologic research; and/or b) someone thought my research was interesting enough that they wanted to hear me talk about it. And it got me out of clinic for two days, which is always a plus.