Averill A. Liebow

In 1975, he suffered a fatal stroke while conducting a course in pulmonary pathology.

Liebow was the recipient of the Middleton Goldsmith medal New York Pathological Society, 1968, the California Physician of Year award American College Chest Physicians, 1975, and a gold medal from the California Lung Association. The Liebow Auditorium at University of California School Medical, San Diego, was named in his honor, 1978.

Liebow chronicled the experience in a diary in shorthand. His knowledge of shorthand enabled him to keep accurate records, from which he later published a memoir. In 1965, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published Liebow's diary under the title “Encounter with Disaster: a Medical Diary of Hiroshima, 1945.” Portions of Liebow's original shorthand diary and other records of his time in Japan are archived at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.

With publication in 1952 of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) fascicle, Tumors of the Lower Respiratory Tract, Liebow became widely recognized as an authority on surgical lesions of the lung. In 1969, Liebow and Charles B. Carrington published the first histological classification of idiopathic interstitial lung diseases (IIPs). Their landmark histopathologic classification schema for IIPs consisted of five patterns: usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP), bronchiolitis obliterans interstitial pneumonia and diffuse alveolar damage, desquamative interstitial pneumonia, lymphocytic interstitial pneumonia (LIP), and giant cell interstitial pneumonia.

Liebow returned to the United States in January 1946 and helped draft the joint commission's 1,300-page report, which was completed on Sept. 6, 1946. Written in collaboration with Shields Warren, the report is considered a milestone in atomic and radiation pathology. As one of his last official acts, Liebow composed a letter under Oughterson's signature recommending the continued study of the medical effects of the atomic bomb. In response, the Truman administration ordered the establishment of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission to study the effects of radiation among the atomic bomb survivors. The commission operated until 1975.

Immediately after World War II concluded, Liebow was recruited as a member of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan organized by Col. Ashley W. Oughterson and Prof. Masao Tsuzuki of Japan. The team was sent to survey the biological and medical consequences of the atomic explosions. Liebow and the members of the Commission reached Hiroshima on October 12, 1945.

The joint commission was charged with collecting a large amount of data, including the location of all casualties, living or dead, evidence of how casualties occurred (whether caused by the explosion or from secondary effects like building fires or flying debris), and evidence of residual radiation. Liebow's commander, Col. Ashley Oughterson, a professor of surgery at Yale, set a goal of examining and interviewing 10,000 patients. Liebow effectively collaborated with Japanese physicians and pathologists and developed a friendly relationship to many of them. Japanese doctors had arrived in the city shortly after the bombing and had already been investigating its effects on human health. (Liebow's archive includes a translated testimonial by a Japanese pathologist who on Aug. 10, 1945 performed the first autopsy of a bomb victim: a 13-year-old boy.)

During World War II, Liebow served as a pathologist with the 39th General Hospital, the Yale Unit in the South Pacific. During this time, he compiled studies of cutaneous diphtheria that made specific treatment possible for a form of “jungle rot,” which was a major problem in the South Pacific theater of the war.

Liebow graduated magnum cum laude from City College of New York, and received his medical degree from Yale School of Medicine in 1935. Appointed an assistant in pathology at Yale in 1935, he rose through the ranks to full professor in 1951. In 1968 he accepted the chairmanship of the department of pathology at the University of California, San Diego, which he held until his retirement in 1975.

Averill Abraham Liebow (March 31, 1911 - May 31, 1978) was an international leader on the pathology of the lung. He is credited with the development of a classification system for lung disease. His observations resulted in the discovery of new diseases. Liebow was among the first scientists to enter Hiroshima, Japan, after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. Accounts of that experience were published in “Encounter With Disaster: A Medical Diary of Hiroshima” and “Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan.”

Averill Abraham Liebow was born in 1911 in Stryj (Galicia, Hapsburg Empire). Poverty, famine, and instability led the Liebows to emigrate to the United States in 1920. Averill Liebow became a U.S. citizen in 1926.