George Huntington

Who was George Huntington?

George Huntington was an American physician who contributed a classic clinical description of the disease that bears his name -- Huntington's disease.

Huntington described this condition in the first of only two scientific papers he ever wrote. He wrote this paper when he was 22, a year after receiving his medical degree from Columbia University in New York. He first read the paper before the Meigs and Mason Academy of Medicine in Middleport, Ohio on February 15, 1872 and then published it in the Medical and Surgical Reporter of Philadelphia on April 13, 1872.

Huntington's father and grandfather, George Lee Huntington and Abel Huntington, were also physicians in the same family practice. Their longitudinal observations combined with his own were invaluable in precisely describing this hereditary disease in multiple generations of a family in East Hampton on Long Island.

In a 1908 review, the eminent physician William Osler said of this paper: "In the history of medicine, there are few instances in which a disease has been more accurately, more graphically or more briefly described."

In 1874 George Huntington returned to Dutchess County, New York to practice medicine.