Wilbur, Ray Lyman (1875–1949)

US physician, educator, and public official. As a prominent Republican physician, he attended President Warren Harding on his deathbed in 1923. President Herbert Hoover appointed him secretary of the interior (1929–33), after which he returned to being president of Stanford University (1933–43) and then its chancellor (1943–49). He is credited with turning Stanford into a major university, establishing graduate and engineering schools.

Wilbur was born in Boonesboro, Iowa. After gaining a BA and an MA from Stanford University, he went on to get his MD in 1899 and began practising medicine in San Francisco, California. From 1900 he would become associated with Stanford for most of his career – with time out for government service – as a professor (1900–16), dean of the medical school (1911–16), and university president (1916–29). During World War I he assisted his former Stanford classmate and friend, Herbert Hoover, as administrator of food supplies; Wilbur coined the slogan ‘food will win the war’ for the US war effort in 1917.