Dr. Robert H. Williams served as a resident physician at Vanderbilt University Hospital in 1938-1939. An internationally known endocrinologist, he was editor and co-author of the well known Textbook of Endocrinology which was first published in 1950 and went through several subsequent editions. He was born in 1909 in Savannah, Tennessee, and received his undergraduate degree Washington & Lee in 1930 and his medical degree from Johns Hopkins in 1934. Before coming to Vanderbilt he served a residency in pathology at the Boston City Hospital. Following his residency at Vanderbilt he returned as a fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital and later served as a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School. In 1948, he left Harvard to become the first chair of the department of Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle where he served with distinction for the remainder of his career. He died on November 4, 1979.