Marsden S. Blois

Marsden Blois

Marsden S. Blois, Jr. (1919-1988) was a visionary in health informatics. He 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.

Life

Born in 1919, Blois graduated from the U.S. 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 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.

Contributions

health informatics

Papers

LOCATION #1: National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division (Bethesda, MD)

• DATES: 1947-1989
• SIZE: 12 boxes (10 linear feet)
• INCLUDES: Notes and reports generated from work at Stanford University and the University of California, San Francisco make up the largest portion of the collection, devoted to biophysics, melanoma and melanin research, and the development of medical informatics (1952-1989); the same subjects are covered in a collection of articles and speeches written by Blois (1951-1987). The collection also contains scant correspondence (1953-1988), notes from physics course work taken at Stanford University (1947-1951), and programs and notes from various scientific and medical conferences (1955-1987).
• FINDING AID: http://oculus.nlm.nih.gov/blois583