Brief History on George M. Kober

Nominations for the George M. Kober Medal for 2026 are being accepted until December 13, 2024. Please provide a brief cover letter highlighting the major accomplishments of the nominee along with an updated nominee CV. AAP members may submit a Kober Medal nomination through the member portal.

George M. Kober was a Prussian Immigrant who crossed the Atlantic alone at the age of 16. He lived with his sister in New York until he joined the Army and worked as an orderly until he was assigned to work in Washington at the Library of the Army Surgeon General, just down the street from Ford’s Theater. He attended Georgetown School of Medicine in night school and graduated in the late 1873. He was passionate about public health and prevention and wrote and published while pursuing a career in the US Army Medical Corps, a precursor of the early Public Health Service in California. He was stationed on Alcatraz and allegedly he also invested wisely in gold mining stocks and accumulated personal wealth. He returned to Washington for the centennial Celebration of the University in 1889 and vowed to do good things in his life for his Alma Mater and public health. That would have been approximately his 15th reunion. Dr. Kober became dean of the Georgetown School of Medicine in 1901, in which capacity he served until 1928, marking the longest tenure in the history of the deanship at the time.

He was active in the early days as a leader of several national organizations including the Association of American Physicians – an early organization founded in the 1885 by seven Physicians (including William Osler) an organization which promotes:

“the pursuit of medical knowledge, and the advancement through experimentation and discovery of basic and clinical science and their application to clinical medicine…”

That organization honored Kober and continues to honor him by giving their highest award to an honoree(s) every three years with the Kober Lecture and the Kober Medal every year that is minted for them. Those speakers have included at least 13 Nobel laureates to date. The first Kober Medal was presented at the Annual Meeting in 1925.
Kober also was active in the early AAMC and the Council of Medical Education at the AMA- Where he chaired a committee that advised to visit all medical schools and standardize the curriculum.

GEORGE M. KOBER LECTURE ELIGIBILITY
This award is given to an AAP member for outstanding research contributions which have extraordinary impact on patients. This award is given every three years.

GEORGE M. KOBER MEDAL ELIGIBILITY
This award is given to an AAP member whose lifetime efforts have had an enormous impact on the field of Internal Medicine (or the specific member’s discipline) through the scientific discipline they have brought to the field and the many outstanding scientists that they have trained. This award is given every year.

GEORGE M. KOBER LECTURESHIP

• 1925: John J. Abel, Baltimore
• 1928: Simon Flexner, New York
• 1931: F.G. Novy, Ann Arbor
• 1934: W.B. Cannon, Boston
• 1937: Ludvig Hektoen, Chicago
• 1940: W.G. MacCallum, Baltimore
• 1943: Eugene L. Opie, New York
• 1946: Peyton Rous, New York
• 1949: Homer F. Swift, New York
• 1952: Arthur L. Bloomfield, San Francisco
• 1955: J.H. Means, Boston
• 1958: Homer W. Smith, New York
• 1961: Rene J. Dubos, New York
• 1964: Frank L. Horsfall, Jr., New York
• 1967: Francis D. Lukens, Pittsburgh
• 1970: Robert A. Good, Minneapolis
• 1973: Lewis Thomas, New York
• 1977: Arno G. Motulsky, Seattle
• 1980: Grant W. Liddle, Nashville
• 1982: Bengt Samuelsson, Stockhom
• 1985: Oscar D. Ratnoff, Cleveland
• 1988: Anthony S. Fauci, Bethesda
• 1991: Philip W. Majerus, St. Louis
• 1994: Bert Voeglstein, Baltimore
• 1997: Mark Keating, Salt Lake City
• 2000: Francis Collins, Bethesda
• 2003: Stanley Korsmeyer, Boston
• 2006: Robert Lefkowitz, Durham
• 2009: Michael Welsh, Iowa City
• 2012: Barry S. Coller, New York
• 2015: P. Frederick Sparling, Chapel Hill
• 2018: Helen H. Hobbs, Dallas
• 2021:  Jean Bennett, Pennsylvania
• 2024: David Ginsburg, Ann Arbor

GEORGE M. KOBER MEDAL