Murphy, William Parry (1892-1987)

US physician who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1934 with George Minot and George Whipple for his work on the treatment of pernicious anaemia by increasing the amount of liver in the diet. Pernicious anaemia is a disease that reduces the number of red blood cells and lessens the blood's oxygen-carrying capacity.

Murphy and Minot worked to find an effective treatment for pernicious anaemia. The disease affects people in middle to old age and was invariably fatal.

Whipple, while working on dogs that he made anaemic by regularly drawing their blood, demonstrated that more blood had to be drawn to keep the animals anaemic if they were fed liver, beef, or spinach than if they were fed salmon and bread. In 1925, Minot and Murphy performed a clinical trial in which they fed patients half a pound of lightly cooked beef liver every day, which resulted in an astonishing regeneration of the red blood cells within a single week and the continued good health of the patients while they remained on the diet of liver.

Murphy was born in Stoughton, Wisconsin, USA, and studied medicine at the University of Oregon and later at Harvard Medical School. In 1925, Murphy went into private practice as a physician while working part-time in a research programme with Minot at Harvard.