William Murphy

William, Billy or Bill Murphy may refer to:

Politics

William P. Murphy

William Parry Murphy (Stoughton, Wisconsin, February 6, 1892 – October 9, 1987) was an American physician who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George Richards Minot and George Hoyt Whipple for their combined work in devising and treating macrocytic anemia (specifically, pernicious anemia).

Murphy was born on February 6, 1892, at Stoughton, Wisconsin. He was educated at the public schools of Wisconsin and Oregon. He completed his A.B. degree in 1914 from the University of Oregon. He completed his M.D. in 1922 from Harvard Medical School.

In 1924, Murphy bled dogs to make them anemic (work inspired by war injury work), and then fed them various substances to gauge their improvement. He discovered that ingesting large amounts of liver seemed to restore anemia more quickly of all foods. Minot and Whipple then set about to chemically isolate the curative substance. These investigations showed that iron in the liver was responsible for curing anemia from bleeding, but meanwhile liver had been tried on people with pernicious anemia and some effect as seen there, also. The active ingredient in this case, found serendipitously, was not iron, but rather a water-soluble extract containing a new substance. From this extract, chemists were ultimately were able to isolate vitamin B₁₂ from the liver. Even before the vitamin had been completely characterized, the knowledge that raw liver and its extracts treated pernicious anemia (previously a terminal disease) was a major advance in medicine.

Yale Murphy

William Henry "Yale" Murphy (October 11, 1869 – February 14, 1906) was an American baseball player and coach of American football and baseball. He played as a shortstop in Major League Baseball for the New York Giants. Murphy served as the head baseball coach at Stanford University (1900–1901), Columbia University (1902), and the United States Naval Academy (1905), compiling a career college baseball record of 24–27–1. He was also the head football coach at Fordham University in 1902, tallying a mark of 2–4–1.

Biography

Murphy was born in Southborough, Massachusetts. He attended Yale University, which is how he got his nickname, and played for the National League's New York Giants in 1894, 1895, and 1897. Also called "Tot" or "Midget", Murphy was small even for his era. He was 5 ft 3 in (1.60 m) tall and weighed 125 lbs. He and Dickey Pearce are the two shortest players ever to have a career in Major League Baseball. In 1894, there was a book written about him that was entitled Yale Murphy, the Great Short-Stop, or, The Little Midget of the Giants.