Dr. Tom Douglas Spies was a distinguished American physician and medical educator. Dr. Spies was an authority in the study of nutritional diseases. In the 1930s, he contributed significantly to finding a cure for pellagra, a nutritional disease that once afflicted millions in the American South. Later, he also made a large contribution to finding cure for tropical sprue. For his efforts in elimination of pellagra, Time Magazine named him as 1938 "Man of the Year" in comprehensive science.
Education
Member of Phi Beta Kappa, he received a B.A. degree from the University of Texas in 1923 and an M.D. from Harvard in 1927. He spent the next two years in pathology in Boston hospitals and then went to Western Reserve University to become an instructor in medicine until 1935.
Dr. Spies was best known as a director of Nutrition Clinic at the Hillman Hospital, Birmingham, Alabama, after 1936. He was invited to come to Birmingham in 1935 by Dr. James S. McLester, physician-in-chief of the Hillman Hospital, who was then also the President of the American Medical Association. In his Clinic, Dr. Spies successfully treated numerous pellagra patients. In 1945, he and six social workers, including Martha Hutchinson, studied the effects of daily supplementation of milk on the growth and development of malnourished children.
Other contributions
Dr. Spies was also appointed to Food and Nutrition Board of National Research Council in 1943, and was a consultant on tropical medicine at Washington’s Army Medical School, 1945. He labored with unremitting zeal to put thiamine, nicotinic acid, riboflavin, folic acid, vitamin B12 and thymine to use in clinical and preventive medicine. Dr Spies organised and led the "Spies Committee for Clinical Research". Charles Kettering, the founder of the Kettering Foundation, served on the Board of Directors of this Committee in 1947–1958. In the late 1940s, Dr. Spies experimented with the use of folic acid and other vitamins in the treatment of tropical sprue, which was a deadly disease at that time; he conducted his research in Cuba and Puerto Rico. He received recognition from the Cuban and Puerto Rican governments for his efforts. According to the American Medical Association,
Through his researches, pellagra in the southern United States and tropical sprue in Cuba and Puerto Rico have been virtually eliminated. Perhaps his greatest contribution has been his study of the dietary requirements for the preservation of tissue integrity, whereby premature aging can be prevented.
