Research and teaching in otolaryngology at the Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary started slowly in the early 1800's as isolated efforts by interested individuals. An early example of cooperation between a surgeon (Clarence John Blake) and a teacher of the deaf (Alexander Graham Bell) led to the invention of the telephone. In the years between the two World Wars, multidisciplinary research included a team made up of Moses Hymie Lurie, an otolaryngologist, S.S. Stevens, a Harvard psychologist, Hallowell Davis, a Harvard Medical School physiologist, and Robert Jones, a Harvard physicist. This team studied hearing and contributed to our knowledge of how sound can damage the inner ear and how the ear can be stimulated directly by electricity, a forerunner of today's interest in cochlear prostheses.

After World War II, it became clear that true progress in treating diseases would be hastened by research into the underlying physiological mechanisms, and a group of otolaryngologists recruited Dr. John W. Irwin to set up a Microcirculatory Laboratory. He quickly realized the need to include basic scientists, and with Dr. Francis Weille, an otolaryngologist, began discussions with Dr. James Killian, then president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), that resulted in a collaborative effort in which the Infirmary would house and support basic scientists from MIT. Thus was created the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory, which began with one investigator, Nelson Yuan-Sheng Kiang. He selected auditory physiology as an area in which the interests and expertise of the two institutions intersected. Today, the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory has over 65 members, and remains committed to being a basic academic laboratory in a clinical setting.

How did the laboratory get its name?

In the early 1950s, Dr. Francis Weille, an otolaryngologist at MEEI, treated two distinguished patients: Miss Amelia Peabody of Dover, Massachusetts, and Dr. James R. Killian, Jr., then MIT's president. Dr. Weille discussed the possibility of a collaborative effort with Dr. Killian in which MEEI would house and support basic scientists from MIT. Miss Peabody, a renowned Boston sculptor and patron of the arts, provided the generous support needed to establish the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory in 1956. Dr. Killian provided the necessary brainpower to staff the facility, and Dr. Nelson Y.S. Kiang of RLE's Communications Biophysics group became the laboratory's first appointment.

EPL's namesake and benefactress, Amelia Peabody, was born in 1890. A proper Bostonian who described herself as "one of the Kidder Peabody Peabody's" (her father was banker Frank E. Peabody, MIT class of 1877), Miss Peabody was known for her wide range of civic activities. She served on the boards of many Boston organizations and contributing generously of her time and wealth to the different causes in which she believed. A farmer, huntress, horticulturist, and humanitarian, her interests and creativity were far reaching. In 1948, she also sponsored experiments for the first solar-heated house. The Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund of Boston has carried on her good works since her death in 1984. William Storer Eaton, it was discovered, was her mother's second husband, and it was Miss Peabody's request to bestow the two prestigious names on the newly formed laboratory.

Taken from RLE currents Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall 1997)