Tobe malawista biography

Stephen Evan Malawista (April 4, 1934 – September 18, 2013) was an American medical researcher and Professor of medicine within the rheumatology department.
Scope and Contents.
Malawista spent nearly his entire career at Yale University, where he was chief of rheumatology for 21 years and where he oversaw the laboratory.

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More Notable & Famous Death

Stephen Evan Malawista was an American medical researcher and Professor of medicine within the rheumatology department of Yale University. Malawista is credited as the co-discover of Lyme disease and led the research team which identified the disease.
In 1975, Malawista and his Yale colleague, researcher Dr. Allen Steere, began work which would reveal Lyme disease as a new, distinct illness. Malawista and Steere had been contacted by the Connecticut Department of Public Health, which had been concerned about a mysterious cluster of similar illnesses and symptoms which had begun afflicting patients within the southeastern region of Connecticut. Malawista and Steere identified the illness, as a new bacterial infection spread by the bite of a tick. In 1977, Malwista and Steere identified the illness as a new infection spread by tick bites. Malawista initially named the new disease "Lyme arthritis." The name was later changed to Lyme disease after the illness was later shown to encompass a wide range of symptoms which were not limited to joint pain.

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Dr. Stephen Malawista

Dr. Stephen Malawista, Professor of Medicine and former Chief of Rheumatology at Yale University, who supervised the group that discovered Lyme disease and whose laboratory research on white blood cells led to seminal discoveries in a variety of inflammatory diseases, including gout, died on September 18, 2013 at his home in Hamden. He was 79. He succumbed to a 5-year battle with metastatic melanoma, his family said in announcing his death. Dr. Malawista was the son of Lawrence Malawista, a New York City real estate developer, and Ann Marlowe (later Straus), a theatrical producer and former chairman and president of the Board of the Berkshire Theatre Festival. He attended the Berkshire School in Sheffield, MA and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College. After completing his MD degree at Columbia University College of Physicians & Scientists, he trained as a house officer at Yale under Paul Beeson, an expert in infectious diseases and the origin of fever. Inspired to study inflammation, he interrupted his clinical training to spend two years un

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Stephen Malawista, a rheumatologist who led the research team credited with discovering Lyme disease in the 1970s and who helped show that the tick-borne illness could be treated with antibiotics, died Sept. 18 at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 79.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, said his wife, Tobe Malawista.

Her husband spent nearly his entire career at Yale University, where he was chief of rheumatology for 21 years and where he oversaw the laboratory that helped solve a medical mystery that began nearly four decades ago in the wooded town of Lyme, Conn.

In the fall of 1975, two women contacted health officials about a disturbing sickness that was afflicting numerous people in their families and their neighborhoods. One young man suffered attacks of leg pain so severe that he could not walk. Nearby, a young girl’s knees had become so swollen that she resorted to using a wheelchair.

Those cases and others — concentrated in the Connecticut towns of Lyme, Old Lyme and East Haddam — were initially suspected to be instances of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis