Roswell Park

Roswell Park (May 4, 1852 – February 15, 1914) was an American physician and cancer researcher, best known for starting Gratwick Research Laboratory in 1898, which is now known as Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Biography

Roswell Park was born on May 4, 1852, in Pomfret, Connecticut, to Rev. Roswell Park and Mary Brewster Baldwin, daughter of Colonel Benjamin Franklin Baldwin. His grandmother, Mary Carter Coolidge, was later married to manufacturer Burrage Yale after Col. Baldwin's death.

In 1883, when Park was thirty-one, he went to Buffalo, New York. He came from Chicago where he received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Northwestern University in 1876. He received his B.A. in 1872 and M.A. in 1875 from Racine College in Racine, Wisconsin.

He then went on to finish his Doctor of Medicine studies at the Northwestern University School of Medicine in 1876. Park received an honorary M.A. from Harvard University in 1895 and an honorary LL.D. from Yale University. Over the years he served on many boards, both national and international. By 1914, the total number of textbooks, articles, and monographs that he wrote reached 167.

In 1900, the Gratwick family of Buffalo helped to finance Park's laboratory with a $25,000 donation in memory of William Henry Gratwick, a patient of Park's. Park was also a professor of surgery at the University at Buffalo Medical School and a surgeon at Buffalo General Hospital.

Park was an advocate of the parasitic theory of cancer and claimed that it was the only theory "which satisfies the needs of both the pathologist and the clinician". However, most of the medical community were unconvinced of the parasitic theory as no cancer parasite was detected.