George W. Corner

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George Washington Corner (1889–1981) was an American physician and embryologist who helped pave the way for the contraceptive pill. He played a key role in the discovery of progesterone and is often called the grandfather of sexual health and contraception in America. He also taught many important figures in sexual health, including William Masters, Mary Calderone, and Alan Guttmacher.

Corner received ten honorary degrees from various universities and was known as a medical historian and humanist. The Corner-Allen Test (for progestation) and the Corner-Allen Unit (a measure of progestational activity in rabbits) are named after him and Willard M. Allen.

He was born on December 12, 1889, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of George Washington Corner II and Florence Evans. He attended Baltimore’s Boys’ Latin School and then Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated in 1909 and earned his medical degree in 1913.

Corner taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1915–1919), then returned to Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor (1919–1923). In 1923 he was chosen as the University of Rochester’s first professor of medicine, funded by George Eastman and the Rockefeller Foundation, and began in Rochester in 1924 as director of the anatomy department after spending 1923–24 in Ernest Starling’s laboratory in England.

In 1940 he moved to the Carnegie Embryological Laboratory in Baltimore, where he worked until 1954. He delivered the Dwight H. Terry Lectures in 1943–44 for his book Ourselves Unborn. Corner served as the 27th president of the American Association of Anatomists (1946–1948) and was named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1951 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1955.

He died on September 28, 1981, at his son’s home in Huntsville, Alabama, and was buried in Tioga Point Cemetery, Pennsylvania. His obituary appeared in the New York Times.

Corner met Betsy Lyon Copping while volunteering at the Grenfell Medical Mission in Battle Harbor, Labrador, and they married in 1915. His legacy includes educating leaders in sexual health and contributing to important advances in reproductive science.