George W. McCoy, M.D.
Brief Bio
George Walter McCoy (1876–1952) was the ninth president of the American Association of Immunologists, serving from 1922 to 1923. An international authority on leprosy, McCoy was the director of the U.S. Hygienic Laboratory [renamed the National Institute of Health (NIH) in 1930] from 1915 to 1937
McCoy received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1898. After interning at City Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, for two years, McCoy joined the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) in 1900 and was assigned to the U.S. Marine Hospital in San Francisco, where he first became interested in leprosy. He quickly established himself as a capable administrator, serving as director of the U.S. Plague Laboratory in San Francisco (1908–1911) and of the U.S. Leprosy Investigation Station at Kalawao, Molokai, Hawaii (1911–1915), before being appointed director of the U.S. Hygienic Laboratory in Washington, DC, in 1915. He retired from the USPHS and from his position as director of the NIH in 1937, one year before the NIH was relocated to Bethesda, Maryland. McCoy was professor and head of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans from 1938 to 1948, when he was named emeritus professor and retired to his home in Washington, DC.
AAI Service History
Joined: 1915
President: 1922–1923
Councillor: 1918–1922, 1923–1924
Awards and Honors
Institutional/Biographical Links