Marsden S. Blois

Marsden Scott Blois, Jr. (1919-1988) was a pioneer in health informatics.

Marsden Blois

Life

Marsden Scott Blois, Jr., born January 5, 1919 in San Antonio, Texas. He graduated from the US Naval academy in 1941. He left his position as Director of Naval Research in the late 1940s to pursue a Ph.D. in biophysics at Stanford. Dr. Blois’ scientific career began as a biophysicist at Stanford University’s Hansen Laboratories of Applied Physics. In addition to his post doctoral work at the Hansen Laboratories, Blois served as director of Stanford’s biophysics graduate program. By the late 1950s his research on electron spin resonance of biopolymers led to an interest in melanin. To better enable his dermatological inquiries, Blois earned at medical degree at Stanford in the early 1960s and continued his research there. While continuing his affiliations with Stanford, Blois helped establish the Melanoma Clinic and Melanoma Foundation at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the late 1960s. His determination to better facilitate treatment and medical research led to his exploration of medical informatics. From the early 1970s until his death in 1988, Dr. Blois was a leader in the development of medical informatics, serving as editor to MedComp, writing and speaking on theories of medical description, and chairing the incipient Department of Medical Information Sciences at UCSF. He died in 1988.

Contributions

Scott Blois brought medicine and information science together, wrote Information and Medicine (1984), and was a professor of medical information science and dermatology at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF). He was interested in theories of information as well as to the structure of descriptors and information processes an worked with the NLM on a unified medical language.

Publications

Google Scholar lists numerous publications. [1]

• "Antioxidant determinations by the use of a stable free radical." Nature 181 no. 4617 (1958): 1199-1200.
• "Clinical judgment and computers." New England Journal of Medicine 303, no. 4 (1980): 192-197.
• "Conceptual issues in computer-aided diagnosis and the hierarchical nature of medical knowledge." The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 8, no. 1 (1983): 29-50.
• Information and medicine : the nature of medical descriptions. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1984.
• "A framework for medical information science." Medical informatics 9 (1984): 778-785.
• "Evaluating RECONSIDER: a computer program for diagnostic prompting." With others. Journal of Medical Systems 9 (1985): 379-388.
• "What is medical informatics?" Western journal of medicine 145 (1986): 776-777.
• "Medicine and the nature of vertical reasoning." New England Journal of Medicine 318, no. 13 (1988): 847-851.
• "The computer meets medicine and biology: emergence of a discipline." With E. H. Shortliffe. Biomedical informatics: Computer applications in health care and biomedicine (2006): 3-45.

Further reading

• Sagebiel, Richard W., Thomas C. Blaisdell Jr., & Edwin Barkley Boldre. In Memoriam: Dr. Marsden Scott Blois, Jr., 1919-1988. UCSF Professor of Medicine.. [2]
• Masic, Izet. "The most influential scientist in the development of medical informatics (10): Marsden S. Blois." Acta informatica medica. 24, no. 1 (Feb 2, 2016): 78-79. [3]
• Ball, M. J. and others. "Informatics education and the professions," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 40, no 5 (1989): 368-377.

Papers

National Library of Medicine. Bethesda, MD, Marsden Scott Blois Papers. MS C 583. 1947-1989. 12 boxes (10 linear feet). Finding aid: [4]