Franz J. Ingelfinger
German-American physician
Franz Joseph Ingelfinger (August 20, 1910 – March 27, 1980) was a German-American physician, researcher and journal editor. He served as Chief of Gastroenterology at Evans Memorial Department of Clinical Research, part of Boston University School of Medicine. He also served as Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) from 1967 to 1976. His work was influential in the field of science journalism.
Life and career
Ingelfinger was born in 1910 in Dresden, Germany, the only child of Eleanor Holden and Joseph Franz Ingelfinger. He came to the United States with his family in the early 1920s to live in his mother's home town of Swampscott, Massachusetts where his German father established a general practice as a physician. After initially wanting to enter the business world, faced with dwindling job opportunities after the Wall Street crash he decided to follow in his father and go into medicine. Ingelfinger earned diplomas from Phillips Andover Academy, followed by Yale University in 1932 and Harvard Medical School in 1936.
The Ingelfinger rule is named after him. In 1969, one of Ingelfinger's first acts as editor of NEJM was to draw up rules for authors forbidding prior submission or publication of their work in other media.
“Franz J. Ingelfinger” enters the record as german-American physician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Franz, Ingelfinger and German-American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5492816. VIAF identifies the subject as 91813877. The Library of Congress control number is n50027126. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1910, 1980, 1967 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Franz J. Ingelfinger” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.