Talk:George Baker Leavitt Sr.

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	An editor has requested that an image or photograph be added to this article.

Alaska Mid‑importance

	Alaska portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Alaska, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the U.S. state of Alaska on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.AlaskaWikipedia:WikiProject AlaskaTemplate:WikiProject AlaskaAlaska articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Request for photo[edit]

Would be great to have a photo of this whaling captain to accompany the sketch if any wikipedians or family members might know of one. Many thanks in advance.MarmadukePercy (talk) 06:45, 10 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The search for cancer[edit]

It is also interesting to know that Stefanson, in his book Cancer: Disease of Civilization? An Anthropological and Historical Study‎, he mentions Captain George as "the man who started the search for cancer" among the Eskimos. He mentions Leavitt's rise to captain of his own vessel due to his medical training (on smaller ships manned with less than 50 men, the captain was usually the stand-in doctor) with help of his half-brother Dr Charles S Knight of Portland. It was Dr Knight who asked Capt George to look for diseases among the native populations of Alaska. While he first was interested in the lack of decayed teeth and symptoms of scurvy, Dr Knight's questioning led him more so towards cancer (or lack thereof) among the Inuit. The above book I didn't see available as 'full viewing' on google books, unfortunately. The pages related to George B Leavitt were copied from the book by a Leavitt relation. The27thMaine (talk) 15:32, 10 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I had seen Stefansson's mention of Leavitt's search for cancer as mentioned by Edward Jack Hoffman in his book Cancer and the Search for Selective Biochemical Inhibitors.[1] It was Stefansson's thinking that Leavitt believed that the Inuit's diet was a prophylactic against cancer. Many of Stefansson's books mention Leavitt, and you'll note that Stefansson hired Leavitt's chief guide. You are exactly right about ship's captains acting as doctors (for instance, Leavitt doing the amputations). On the matter of diet, Leavitt clearly had his hunches about cancer (much like the cases of scurvy, as you say). The man was clearly an extraordinary person. Incidentally, you'll note that in the reference provided to the Genealogical History of Maine families, the medical career of Capt. Leavitt's Knight brother-in-law is given in some depth, including his education at Harvard and his subsequent years-long service as assistant superintendent of City Hospital, Boston.[2] MarmadukePercy (talk) 18:56, 10 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I had provided a footnote to this letter from Leavitt in the text, but it's worth pulling it out separately. Leavitt's account of his medical service aboard ship is simply staggering.[3]Regards, MarmadukePercy (talk) 20:23, 10 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 3 external links on George Baker Leavitt Sr.. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 18 January 2022).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 09:47, 13 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]