BATH — Dr. William Dewey Blake died at home in Bath on February, 3, 2013, of cancer. He was 94 years old.
Dr. Blake led a remarkable life teaching and painting wherever he was. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1940. He spent summers doing scientific research at The Mount Dessert Island Biological Lab in Salisbury Cove, Maine. He continued this work while attending Harvard Medical School until the war intervened. During the war he worked at Goldwater Hospital in New York City doing malaria research. He did his internship, residency, and a fellowship at Presbyterian Hospital in New York.
Following his training he was invited to join The Yale Medical School Department of Physiology and later moved to become Associate Professor at The University of Oregon Medical School. In Portland, Oregon, he first showed his paintings in The Portland Museum of Art as he would later in local galleries in London and Rome while in residence there writing scientific papers.
The last 20 years of his professional life were at The University of Maryland as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Physiology. During his tenure there he was invited to lecture in many places including London and Prague, spent several months doing research at Uppsala University in Sweden and a year establishing a physiology research program and lab in Curitiba, Brazil. He always led and supported his staff in their research and teaching. He encouraged students to learn physiology and from that understanding develop problem solving skills to help in their research and clinical studies.
His major area of interest was the physiology of the kidney where he did some of the earliest and foundational research in the neural control of the kidney. He developed techniques which helped elucidate some of the basic principles in the renin angiotensin system of the kidney.
Dr. Blake leaves his wife Mary Anderson Blake after 72 years of marriage. He is survived by two children, Dr. Will Blake and his wife Halcyon of Bath, Pamela Blake and her husband Dan Jellis of Freeport, Maine, and Borrego Springs, California, five grandchildren, and two great grandchildren.
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