Emory’s Obituary:

EMORY D. WARNER, M.D.
(July 5, 1905-November 22, 1982)

Endowed with great analytic insight and at the same time a philosopher and a pragmatic realist, both bold and always insistent on rigorous marshaling of facts, he is a premier pathologist of our time, eclectic in the search for causes and modulators of disease, and always modest and unassuming regarding his attainments.
—Kenneth M. Brinkhous, M.D. at the Presentation of the Gold Headed Cane of the American Association of Pathologists to Emory D. Warner, April 16, 1980.

Emory Dean Warner was born on a farm near North English in eastern Iowa, the son of Jasper B. and Minnie (Roller) Warner. Like tens of thousands of Iowa youngsters of that era, Emory Warner began his education at a one-room country school, and, after graduation from a local high school, he enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1927. Just two years later, he earned his M.D., also from the University of Iowa. George H. Whipple, Professor of Pathology and first dean of the University of Rochester School of Medicine, came to Iowa City to deliver a guest lecture during Warner’s senior year and, during the course of his visit, offered young Warner a one-year assistant residency in pathology at Rochester. In 1930, Warner returned to Iowa City in the company of Harry P. Smith, one of his Rochester mentors and newly designated head of the Department of Pathology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the dean and his clinical department heads ruled the College of Medicine with a firm hand, generally preferring junior faculty members, like children in the Victorian family, to be seen and not heard. Moreover, pay scales were abysmal; promotions were agonizingly slow in coming; and the rate of turnover among young faculty members was correspondingly high. All that notwithstanding, Emory Warner rose rapidly through the academic hierarchy, beginning his career in 1930 at the rank of assistant, rising to instructor in 1931, to assistant professor in 1933, and to associate professor in 1938. Even more remarkable, Harry Smith designated Warner—at the astonishingly tender age of 26—vice chairman and executive officer of the Department of Pathology, and Warner was a key player in realizing Smith’s vision of a thoroughly reorganized department with integrated teaching, research, and service programs.

As was true of most medical schools of the period, research was a relatively minor sideline at the University of Iowa College of Medicine in the 1930s. On that score, too, however, the Department of Pathology stood apart, acquiring a significant research reputation based in no small part on the efforts of Emory Warner. Early on, Warner assembled a multi-disciplinary research team—a relatively unknown and, to many of his peers, not entirely welcome innovation—to conduct research on the physiology and biochemistry of blood clotting along with the pathophysiology of hemorrhage, an interest likely traceable in part to George Whipple’s extensive research on the liver and anemia. In order to satisfy prevailing expectations within the research community, Warner also established his credentials as an independent investigator by performing additional research work on his own. Importantly, Warner and his team were among the few College of Medicine researchers to receive external funding to support their work, for example, winning a $10,000 award from the John and Mary Markle Foundation in 1937. From 1930 to 1942, the work of Warner and his colleagues appeared in a series of important papers on vitamin K and the mechanism of coagulation, work that earned Warner the Ward Burdick Medal from the American Society of Clinical Pathologists in 1941.

In 1945, newly promoted to professor, Emory Warner became head of the Department of Pathology. It was, however, a sadly depleted department. The wartime mobilization that began in 1941-42 had reduced the College of Medicine faculty to a skeleton and stripped the University Hospitals of interns and residents as well, imposing heavy teaching and patient care burdens on remaining staff members that left little time and even less incentive for research. In pathology in particular, the diminished resident workforce was keenly felt, since surgical residents on one-year assignments to the department had traditionally performed much of the routine pathology work. Intense competition for faculty recruits in the immediate aftermath of the war complicated the Department’s recovery. In the meantime, a heavy backlog of young physicians seeking to fulfill internship and residency requirements added to teaching burdens, and the rapid growth in clinical pathology services at the University Hospitals, as at other major teaching hospitals, added to the Department’s service obligations.

For Emory Warner, then, circumstances—both personal and institutional—of the late 1940s and 1950s were much changed from those of the 1930s, when, as a young faculty member, he and his colleagues had won national recognition for their research. As department chair during a period of rapid expansion in academic medicine, Warner shouldered much heavier administrative burdens than had his predecessors, including, because of his reputation among his colleagues, a much larger role in College of Medicine affairs. For example, Warner was instrumental in establishment of the College’s Medical Service Plan in 1947, an achievement that capped a long-running controversy over the distribution of faculty earnings from private practice in the University Hospitals. Similarly, he was part of a five-person Executive Committee appointed by University of Iowa President Virgil M. Hancher to guide the College of Medicine during a four-year interregnum in the deanship from 1949 to 1953.

Meanwhile, although not without significant dissent, scientific research became an increasingly important enterprise in the College of Medicine during the first postwar decades. In 1945, the College counted only some $30,000 in research grants; in 1954, however, the total surpassed $1 million for the first time. In the five-year period from 1960 to 1965, the College recorded an average of $3.1 million annually in research grants, and, by 1970, scientific research came, in many ways, to define academic medicine. In keeping with that trend, and despite his greater administrative duties, Emory Warner carried on with his own research agenda, including the metabolism of prothrombin and anticoagulants and branching into nutritional factors and disease. One of his colleagues called him "a pioneer in nutritional pathology." In the 1960s, Warner’s research interest turned to atherosclerosis, and in 1970 he demonstrated that experimental atherosclerotic plaques were reversible, a finding subsequently confirmed in animal subjects and, later, in humans.

A popular teacher, Emory Warner taught medical students throughout his tenure at the University of Iowa. As department head, he also developed training programs at the graduate and postdoctoral levels, including residency Programs in Anatomic Pathology and Clinical Pathology. It was during his tenure that Pathology educators at Iowa began the Group for Research in Pathology Education, which expanded to include similar pathology education programs throughout the nation and maintained extensive banks of examination items and images. Warner supported the development of many educational innovations in pathology courses and the establishment of the University of Iowa Clinical Laboratory Sciences Program. Dr. Warner was also an outstanding mentor. Many of his close colleagues and students earned national and international reputations for their research; many also became department heads in other institutions.

Emory Warner retired as department head in 1970. Characteristically, his was an uncommonly gracious exit. Not wanting to intrude upon his successor George D. Penick, Warner immediately accepted a professorship at the University of Arizona. In 1973, however, at Pennick’s invitation, Warner became professor emeritus in the department that he had led for a quarter century, and for several years prior to his death he divided his time between Arizona and Iowa. Dr. Warner died shortly before dedication of the Emory Dean Warner Clinical Laboratories at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

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100 CMAB Iowa City, IA 52242-1101, PH: (319) 335-8050. Reviewed/Updated 9/14/01 Contact: debra-henricks@uiowa.edu