Theodore Drake

Theodore G.H. Drake, MD(1891- 1959) was a Canadian pediatrician and one of three doctors that developed Pablum.

This article is about the Canadian pediatrician. For the American sports artist, see Theodore W. Drake. For the British footballer, see Ted Drake.

Early life

Drake was born on September 16, 1891 in Webbwood, Ontario. He obtained his university degree from the University of Toronto in 1914. He spent two years in residence at the Toronto General Hospital. During World War I, Drake was a medical officer. After the war he went back to the Toronto General Hospital where he eventually became head of the research institute.

Medical accomplishments

In 1923, he, along with Dr. Alan Brown and Dr. Frederick Tisdale, helped work out the formula for Pablum. The cereal marked a breakthrough in nutritional science: it helped prevent rickets, a crippling childhood disease, by ensuring that children have enough vitamin D in their diet. Although Pablum was not the first food designed and sold specifically for babies, it was the first baby food to come pre-cooked and thoroughly dried. The ease of preparation made Pablum successful in an era when infant malnutrition was still a major problem in industrialized countries.

During World War II, Drake designed nutritional diets for RCAF personnel as well as for POW parcels. After the war, he was named a member of the Order of the British Empire for his work.

Personal life

Drake met his first wife, Gerturd Salmond, overseas. She predeceased him by 15 years. His second wife was Nina Johnson.

Drake was interested in the history of pediatric care. He began a collection of art and artifacts related to the history of children's health. Over 3000 artifacts and 1000 prints formed a base of his collection. This collection is now in the hands of the Royal Ontario Museum.

Drake died on October 18, 1959.

gollark: Because why *not* ship an entire gigantic browser with every application?
gollark: And which consumes several gigabytes of RAM and disk space, naturally.
gollark: Like node.js, and electron.
gollark: Horrible abuses of javascript?
gollark: I left a project for about half a year and came back to npm alerting me about about 10 security vulnerabilities in deps.

References
  • Toronto Globe and Mail, Feb 19, 1960
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.