William B. Bean, M.D.
A Brief Biography

(November 8, 1909-March 1, 1989)

UI College of Medicine
Peer Review Status: Internally Reviewed
Creation Date: September 2001
Last Revision Date: September 2001

A Brief Biography

"I suspect we all share an uneasy feeling born of the recognition that the great eclectic clinicians of the past are fading from the scene…. But there are still a few giants left--reminders of a more relaxed, more elegant era in medicine."
--Dr. Robert Moser, "Festschrift for Dr. William Bean," Annals of Internal Medicine (November 1974).

William Bennett Bean was born in the Philippines in 1909, but grew to manhood in Virginia. His father, Robert Bennett Bean, was a physician of note, a resident under William Osler, for many years professor of anatomy at the University of Virginia, and also a devoted anthropologist. William Bean’s parents hoped that he would become an Episcopal minister; instead, after earning his B.A. in 1932, he chose to follow in his father’s footsteps in medicine, receiving his M.D. from the University of Virginia in 1935. "I often shudder to think what might have happened to the Church had I not deflected myself into a career in medicine," he said years later.

William Bean interned at Johns Hopkins and held residencies at Boston City Hospital--where he found the "Chiefs too high and the Indians [residents] too low"--and at Cincinnati General Hospital. In 1940, Bean became an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati but soon after was inducted into the U.S. Army for wartime service, where his assignments included research in nutrition and dehydration. From the first, his military research displayed the keen insight that would prove to be his hallmark. Given the task of formulating field rations for American troops, for example, he contended that the rations should be not only nutritionally sound but also appealing to the palate. Of what use, he asked, were nutritionally complete rations that GIs would not eat?

In 1946, William Bean returned to the University of Cincinnati, with promotion to the rank of associate professor, where he remained until offered a position in 1948 as head of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa, a department that had operated under interim leadership since the death of Fred Smith in 1946. Those who recommended William Bean for the Iowa job noted that he was very bright, very ambitious, and--at least in some respects--very different. In retrospect, they were right on all counts. When a delegation from the University of Iowa came to Cincinnati for a preliminary interview, they encountered the candidate dressed in U.S. Army issue parka and boots. Similarly, Dr. James Clifton remembers Bean’s eccentricities in his first years at the University of Iowa. Bean’s office door, Clifton recounts, was "always open to faculty, house staff, and students and to the curious gaze of patients or anyone else passing by." Inside, Bean could be found, like as not, "sitting tilted back in his chair with feet propped up on the desk, smoking a corncob pipe." In all, William Bean’s informal leadership style and intellectual acuity represented a "breath of air" in a department that had been decimated by the loss of key personnel during the war and had been without a permanent head for two years.

For University of Iowa President Virgil Hancher and other key figures within the university’s central administration, the hiring of a new head of Internal Medicine was an opportunity to inject new vigor and new vision into a department that had clearly fallen upon hard times, and William Bean did not disappoint those hopes. Upon his arrival in Iowa City, Bean immediately set about modernizing his department, beginning with an aggressive recruitment effort that boosted faculty numbers from 11 in 1948-49 to 43 in 1959-60 and to 65 in 1969-70, a good many of those selected from among promising medical students and residents. Just as important, the Bean era recruits--a list that included Dr. James Clifton (1953), who succeeded Bean as department chair in 1971; Dr. John Eckstein (1954), dean of the College of Medicine from 1970 to 1991; Dr. Francois Abboud (1961), who led the department from 1976 to 2002; and Dr. Allyn Mark (1969), longtime head of the Department of Medicine’s Cardiovascular Division and currently associate dean for research and graduate programs--were major factors in the department’s burgeoning reputation for research, teaching, and patient care. In Dr. Clifton’s recollection, one of William Bean’s principal gifts was his ability to ask the right questions and to inspire younger faculty members "to greater heights of achievement than most dared dream they would attain." In truth, Bean saw the department chair’s role as chiefly that of mentor and cheerleader, while, by his own admission, his taste for routine administrative tasks was sorely limited. In private correspondence, Bean once candidly remarked, "For administration in the ordinary sense, I not only have no taste but an active revulsion."

As biomedical research became a major enterprise during the early post-World War II decades, Bean was renowned as a prodigious physician-writer, the author of hundreds of scientific papers, editorials, and book reviews. He was also a tireless editor, overseeing several medical journals during the course of his career, including the Archives of Internal Medicine, where he was book editor from 1959 to 1963 and general editor from 1963 to 1967. In a 1989 eulogy, one of Bean’s many admirers recalled a scene from the 1960s, when a colleague shouted, "Bill Bean arrived today!" as he waved the latest copy of the Archives. William Bean was also dedicated to medical education, and, as a champion of what was known in the 1950s as "psychosomatic medicine," he stressed the application of humanistic principles in medical care. In teaching physical examination skills, for example, Bean emphasized the importance of patient contact and simple observation. "I always look at people’s nails," he once noted, because "this means I’m holding their hands and finding things." In a similar vein, he often said that he wanted students to approach diagnostic problems as if "the electric current were shut off."

William Bean was revered for his broad and eclectic learning. He was a voracious reader and meticulous in his reading habits, noting in each book the date that he last read the work, listing page numbers of salient passages, and, over time, compiling a file of some 10,000 note cards containing particularly memorable quotations. In turn, Bean sprinkled his publications with literary quotations and allusions, and he frequently bestowed favorite volumes--often classical works in medicine--upon friends and colleagues. In 1974, three years after retiring as department chair, Bean left the University of Iowa to become director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, Texas. In 1980, however, he returned to Iowa and in 1982 published Walter Reed: A Biography, celebrating the life of one of his personal heroes.

William Bean was also celebrated for his ready wit and his taste for whimsy. He was noted for the limericks--composed on the spot--with which he routinely closed sessions of grand rounds. He also penned occasional playful pieces. One example was "Omphalosophy, An Inquiry into the Inner (and Outer) Significance of the Belly Button"; another was a tongue-in-cheek research paper titled "Nail Growth: 30 Years of Observation," a piece in which he jokingly proposed a new unit of measurement, the "nail-second." In all, William Bean was much beloved as physician, mentor, scholar, and humanist. Reflecting on his manifold interests, Bean once drew upon Robert Frost’s poem, "The Road Not Taken," to explain that his only regret in life was in "not being able to march astride two forks in the road." For such a larger-than-life figure, two roads were perhaps not enough.

William B. Bean Quotation Database

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