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This is the story of Dr. Arthur Guyton. So Guyton Hall holds the School of Education,
is actually named for Dr. Arthur Guyton's father, Dr. Billy Guyton, who was dean of
our medical school in the 1930s and early 1940s when it was still a two-year school
here on the Oxford campus. Dr. Billy Guyton is a hero in his own right, but that's another
story for another day. Dr. Arthur Guyton, his son, did his undergraduate years here
at Ole Miss and then went to medical school at Harvard. Was a very very bright and promising
physician. Finished medical school at Harvard and was doing a residency in surgery when
sadly he contracted polo, lost the use of his arm and leg and could not continue his
surgery residency because of his physical disabilities. He took a period of recovery
and then moved back here to Oxford and then eventually was offered the opportunity to
teach in the medical school and became the chair of the department of physiology, one
of the basic sciences in medicine. Now Dr. Guyton didn't have a degree in physiology,
he had a medical degree and it was unusual for somebody without a degree in physiology
to be placed in this important leadership role. But there he was as a young man handicapped
in a time when handicapped people typically didn't work in the workplace. He was disabled
in a very significant way, but he took on this responsibility of teaching physiology
and leading the physiology department right here on our campus down in what is now Guyton
Hall, was housing the medical school then. And his early lectures he kept notes and then
he was using a textbook of physiology that he didn't think really met the needs of the
students and so he took his notes and wrote a textbook and that textbook Guyton's textbook
of physiology has become not only the bestselling textbook of physiology used by medical students
but we believe that textbook has been used by more medical students around the world
than any other medical textbook. Dr. Guyton has put the University of Mississippi on the
map through his writing of that textbook of physiology. Now many years later that Guyton's
textbook of physiology is still being written by a University of Mississippi faculty member.
Dr. John Hall who chairs that department now on our medical center campus is the author
of that textbook and inherited that role from Dr. Guyton.