W. Bruce Fye

Wallace Bruce Fye (born 1946) is an American retired cardiologist, medical historian, writer, bibliophile and philanthropist. He is emeritus professor of medicine and the history of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota and was the founding director of the institution's W. Bruce Fye Center for the History of Medicine.

Fye was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. A collector from a young age, he developed an interest for old books, and following qualifications in both medicine and history of medicine from the Johns Hopkins University, he pursued a dual career in cardiology and medical history, where his particular interests have included 19th century professionalization of physiology, the American medical education in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the history of cardiology, specialization, and the Mayo Clinic.

In 1978, he was both elected a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and appointed to the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, where he was chair of its Cardiology Department until 1999 and where he established the echocardiography laboratory. Fye's appointments have also included vice-chief of staff of St. Joseph's Hospital in Marshfield, governor of the ACC's Wisconsin chapter and head of cardiology at Marshfield Clinic. He has been a president of the American College of Cardiology, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the American Osler Society.

He is the sole author of more than a hundred articles. In 1987, he published his first book ''The Development of American Physiology: Scientific Medicine in the Nineteenth Century''. He contributed more than fifty biographical sketches to the "Profiles in Cardiology" series in the journal ''Clinical Cardiology''. These were reprinted in a book titled ''Profiles in Cardiology'' which was co-edited with J. Willis Hurst and C. Richard Conti. Other noted publications have included his 2006 article titled "Troponin trumps common sense" and “Women Cardiologists: Why so few?”

In 2014, when Fye retired from Mayo Clinic, he became emeritus professor of medicine and the history of medicine. he later donated many of the books and papers he had collected over the previous 50 years to the Mayo Clinic, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and the Alan Mason Chesney Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Maryland. Provided by Wikipedia