Thomas Benton Cooley (June 23, 1871 – October 13, 1945) was an American pediatrician and hematologist and professor of hygiene and medicine at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. He was the director of the Pasteur Institute at the University of Michigan from 1903 to 1904. He worked in private practice in Detroit as the city's first pediatrician starting in 1905. He worked with the Babies' Milk Fund and helped to reduce Detroit's high infant mortality rate in the 1900s and 1910s. During World War I, Cooley went to France as the assistant chief of the Children's Bureau of the American Red Cross. He was decorated in 1924 with the cross of the Legion of Honor for his work in France. From 1921 to 1941, Cooley was the head of pediatric service at Children's Hospital of Michigan. Cooley gained acclaim for his scientific work in the field of pediatric hematology and is principally remembered for his discovery of, and research into, a form of childhood anemia that became known as Cooley's anemia. Cooley was also a professor at the Wayne University College of Medicine from 1936 to 1941.
Early years
Cooley was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the son of Thomas McIntyre Cooley, a noted legal scholar. While Cooley was a boy, his father served variously as a professor and dean of the University of Michigan Law School, an Associate Justice and Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, and as the first chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Cooley attended the Ann Arbor public schools and graduated from Ann Arbor High School. He enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1891 and Doctor of Medicine degree in 1895.
After receiving his medical degree, Cooley was an intern at the Boston City Hospital from 1895 to 1897. He returned to the University of Michigan as an instructor of hygiene from 1898 to 1900. In 1900, he left Michigan to study and visit clinics for a year in Germany. In 1902, he returned to Boston City Hospital as a resident physician and also undertook further training in contagious diseases.
Medical career
Pasteur Institute
In 1903, Cooley returned to the University of Michigan as an assistant professor of hygiene, and he was there placed in charge of the Pasteur Institute at the University of Michigan. During 1903 and 1904, Cooley used funding of $2,500 to provide Pasteur treatment to individuals who had been, or were believed to have been, infected with rabies. In 1904, Cooley published a report detailing the results of providing 38 patients with the Pasteur treatment. Of the 38 patients treated, 36 had been bitten by dogs, one by a cat, and one by a horse. In none of the cases did the patient develop rabies.
Babies' Milk Fund
In 1905, he moved to Detroit where he practiced as a pediatrician. He served as the medical director of the Babies' Milk Fund. His efforts were credited with playing a "great role in the reduction of infant deaths from the diarrheal diseases in the early decades of the twentieth century."
World War I
During World War I, he served as the assistant chief of the Children's Bureau of the American Red Cross in France. During the war, medical and nursing personnel "vanished from the cities" in France, leaving an absence of care for the civilian population. A population of 400,000 "war orphans" added to the scope of the problem. After he returned from France in 1919, the Detroit Free Press published a full-page story on Cooley's efforts under the headline, "CHILDREN OF FRANCE ARE FOREVER HIS DEBTOR." The Free Press wrote:
Few persons realize that it was a modest, slow speaking Detroit doctor who was in a great measure responsible for much of the work that was done for those children of France. This unostentatious man is Dr. Thomas B. Cooley, child specialist of note. He returned from France scarcely a month ago and immediately put off his togs of khaki which bore a major's insignia and settled back into private life and practice as simply as if he had but come home from a summer vacation.
In addition to providing the children of France with medical care, the Children's Bureau also established camps, barracks and temporary hospitals. Cooley's projects in France included the establishment of a school of children's public health, transformation of the Edith Cavell hospital from a military hospital to a pediatric hospital, and creation of a model boarding home to house the war orphans. In the 19th arrondissement of Paris, the poorest district in the city, Cooley led a concentrated effort to deliver services to the children. He recalled,
