A medical doctor, Freedberg specialized in cardiology, and in the 1940s developed an early treatment for angina. But a medical mystery led him to study ulcers when he noticed that people who had them tended to have an odd bacteria in their stomachs. It had been assumed that the stomach was too acidic for bacteria to live there, and bacteria found in autopsies were assumed to have colonized there after death. But Freedberg had his doubts, and in 1940 procured tissue samples and proved that people with ulcers were much more likely to have the bacteria — including when they were alive. He and his colleagues, however, were unable to culture the strain, and his supervisor assumed Freedberg was incorrect about the bacteria in living people.
It wasn’t until 1983 that Drs. Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren of Australia isolated and cultured the bacteria — H. pylori — and proved that it was responsible for stomach ulcers, not the other way around, and that ulcers could be easily treated with antibiotics. Marshall and Warren received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005 for their work.
Dr. Marshall later met Dr. Freedberg, and said if Freedberg had been allowed to continue his research, ulcers would have been solved decades earlier, and Freedberg “would have won the Nobel Prize [in] about 1951, as I was getting born.” Dr. Freedberg later went into teaching: he felt modern medicine relied too much on expensive tests rather than the skill of doctors doing hands-on diagnosis, so at Harvard Medical School he taught hands-on diagnosis. He kept his medical license into the 21st century, and died at his home in Boston on August 18. He was 101.
Author’s Note: I dedicated an episode of my podcast to Drs. Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren and how they proved H. pylori was the cause of ulcers: The Deserved Death of “Doctor Knows Best”. Dr. Warren died 23 July 2024 at 87.