Early in the twentieth century, when Emory University School of Medicine was a nascent school, and Piedmont Hospital was still a sanatorium located in a private home, J. Edgar Paullin, MD, began his indispensable roles in the development of both institutions.
To the general public, Paullin was best known as one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s physicians, who rushed to Warm Springs, Georgia, to attend the dying president. To the medical community, however, he was a highly regarded master diagnostician, a devoted clinician—“the ideal physician”—and innovative researcher who changed how diabetes, typhoid fever, syphilis, and other diseases were understood and treated in the state. At Emory, he was a tireless professor and chair of medicine, at a time in the history of the School of Medicine when all faculty were volunteer community physicians. He was the first house physician at Piedmont Hospital and established its first pathology laboratory.
