Marsden S. Blois
Marsden Scott Blois, Jr. (1919-1988) was a pioneer in health informatics.
Marsden Scott Blois, Jr., born January 5, 1919 in San Antonio, Texas, was a US pioneer in health informatics. He died in 1988.
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.
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 (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.
Contributions
Developed health informatics.
Publications
- Information and medicine : the nature of medical descriptions. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1984.
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.. [1]
- 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. [2]
Papers
National Library of Medicine. Bethesda, MD, Marsden Scott Blois Papers. MS C 583. 1947-1989. 12 boxes (10 linear feet). Finding aid: [3]