Early Life and Education
White's interest in medicine was sparked early in life, when he accompanied his father, a family practitioner, on rounds and house calls in a horse and buggy. A 1903 graduate of the Roxbury Latin School, his undergraduate education at Harvard College encompassed history and forestry as well as pre-medical courses. He graduated with a B.A. with honors in 1908 and went on to Harvard Medical School, from which he received his M.D. in 1911.
He then began his long association with the Massachusetts General Hospital through an internship in pediatrics and internal medicine. During that time he co-authored, with Dr. Roger I. Lee, his first scientific paper, on the coagulation of blood. The Lee-White coagulation time is still used today as a method of measuring the speed of blood coagulation. In 1913, White was offered a Harvard traveling fellowship to study cardiovascular physiology with Dr. Thomas Lewis in London. This experience, perhaps coupled with the earlier death of his sister from rheumatic heart disease and his father's death from coronary artery disease at age seventy-one, was to shape the rest of his medical career.
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