William Murphy - Definition and Overview

See William Beverly Murphy for the food businessman.

William Parry Murphy (February 6, 1892 (Stoughton, Wisconsin, U.S.A) - October 9, 1987) was a medical doctor who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1934 with George Richards Minot and George Hoyt Whipple for their combined work in devising and treating Macrocytic anaemia.

Murphy married Pearl Harriett Adams on September 10, 1919. They had a son, Dr. William P. Murphy Jr. Daughter Priscilla Adams died in 1916

In 1924, Murphy bled dogs to make them anemic, and then fed them various substances, and gauged their improvement. He discovered that ingesting large amounts of liver had seemed to cure the disease. Minot and Whipple then set about to chemically isolate the curative substance and ultimately were able to isolate the vitamin B12 from the liver.