Finland, Maxwell

Maxwell Finland (MF), Director of the Second and Fourth Medical Services and the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory (TML) at Boston City Hospital (BCH), and George Richards Minot Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), was an infectious diseases specialist, academic physician, and ethicist who studied the safety and effectiveness of antibiotics. He was born 15 March 1902 near Kiev, Russia, to Frank and Rebecca (Povza) Finland. His family emigrated to the West End of Boston when he was four years old, and he graduated from the Boston English High School in 1918. He graduated from Harvard College, cum laude, in 1922, after earning his way through school giving Hebrew lessons. MF received the MD from HMS in 1926.

Following graduation from HMS, MF served briefly as an assistant resident physician at the Boston Sanitorium, before joining the staff at BCH in 1927 as a house officer with the Second Medical Service. He became Physician-in Chief of the Fourth Medical Service in 1939, and Director of the Second and Fourth Medical Services in 1963. When MF began treating patients at BCH in the late 1920s, nearly half of patient deaths were caused by pneumonia. Finland began treating his patients with pneumonia anti-sera; a few years later he was evaluating the use of sulfanilomides, and shortly after began many years of work on penicillin and subsequent generations of antibiotics. Over the course of his career, MF supervised the treatment of over 20,000 patients with pneumonia and other infections.

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