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Abstract
When [Horace W Davenport] Davenport was a Rhodes Scholar in 1937, "the Examiners of Oxford University put me firmly in the second Class in the Final Honour School of Animal Physiology", he wrote in 1985 in an essay titled "The Apology of a second Class Man" in the Annual Review of Physiology (47:1-14). For a "second-class man", Davenport managed to accomplish a great deal in physiology. Working with Charles Code at the Mayo Clinic beginning in 1962, he defined the gastric mucosal barrier, elucidated how various events would break the barrier and allow damage to the stomach, and identified the role of carbonic anhydrase in the parietal cells of the stomach. The work would pave the way for treatments such as H2-receptor blockers and proton-pump inhibitors, according to Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine and of paediatrics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, who knocked on Davenport's door in 1982 and would spend 25 years being mentored by him.
When [Horace W Davenport] Davenport was a Rhodes Scholar in 1937, "the Examiners of Oxford University put me firmly in the second Class in the Final Honour School of Animal Physiology", he wrote in 1985 in an essay titled "The Apology of a second Class Man" in the Annual Review of Physiology (47:1-14). For a "second-class man", Davenport managed to accomplish a great deal in physiology. Working with Charles Code at the Mayo Clinic beginning in 1962, he defined the gastric mucosal barrier, elucidated how various events would break the barrier and allow damage to the stomach, and identified the role of carbonic anhydrase in the parietal cells of the stomach. The work would pave the way for treatments such as H2-receptor blockers and proton-pump inhibitors, according to Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine and of paediatrics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, who knocked on Davenport's door in 1982 and would spend 25 years being mentored by him.