Frank Fairchild Wesbrook

Wesbrook, Frank Fairchild

Frank Fairchild Wesbrook, physician, educator (b in Brant County, Ont 12 July 1868; d at Vancouver 20 Oct 1918). Having obtained his arts and medical degrees at U of Man 1890, he did postgraduate work in London, Dublin and Marburg, Germany. Elected to a studentship at Cambridge in 1892, he spent 3 heady years amid brilliant fellow students in the laboratory of the eminent physiologist Michael Foster. He was then asked at age 27 to occupy the chair of pathology at U of Minn. Dean of medicine by 1906, he began publishing hard-hitting papers on medical and general university education. With his postgraduate student Moses Barron he was a forerunner of Frederick G. BANTING in the field of DIABETES as it relates to changes in the pancreas. In 1913 Wesbrook was invited to Vancouver to become founding president of UBC. The ensuing 2 years were occupied in selecting a faculty of international distinction, in trying to extract from a debt-ridden provincial government a basic budget, and in developing "the Promised Land" at Point Grey as a campus. Despite the outbreak of WWI and recurrent illness attributable to Bright's disease, he established the vigorous university that is his legacy.