A Short Biography of Abraham I. Braude

Abstract

chief until his death in 1984. We are grateful to the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and to the University of Chicago Press for underwriting the costs of publishing this symposium. Abraham I. Braude was born in Chicago on 15 June 1917. His father was an obstetrician. After attending high school in Chicago, he enrolled at the University of Chicago when he was only 16 years old. After graduation, he attended the University of Chicago Medical School and graduated in 1940, at the beginning of World War II. After only 1 year of internship at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, he was drafted into the U.S. Army Medical Corps. He served in Puerto Rico and Burma, and his experiences with tropical medicine while he was in the army influenced his choice of the subspecialty of infectious diseases as a career. After the war, he went to the University of Minnesota to finish his residency in internal medicine and to join Wesley Spink's laboratory, where he received his infectious diseases training and earned a Ph.D. in microbiology. Spink's laboratory was an exciting place for a young investigator. In 1951 the laboratory became the World Health Organization's center for brucellosis research in North America. From the results of a series of animal experiments, Braude was able to describe the natural history of Brucella abortus infections and to show that Brucella was an intracellular pathogen [1, 2]. Abe contracted brucellosis while working in the laboratory; he always felt that this experience made him a better doctor. The work on brucellosis led him to another