George Foster Herben

George Foster Herben (17 March 1893 – 17 March 1966) was an American physician. He spent his career in New York, predominantly treating tuberculosis. After interning at Brooklyn Hospital, Herben worked at the Loomis Sanitarium by Liberty, and then at the House of Rest at Sprain Ridge, a tuberculosis hospital and preventorium in Yonkers. At the House of Rest he variously served as physician in chief and as medical director. Herben developed and published several new treatments during this time, including a replacement for conventional iron lungs. Herben was the son of Stephen J. Herben and Grace Foster Herben, a Methodist minister and missionary, respectively. His father's influence occasioned a number of high-profile acquaintances, from meeting President Theodore Roosevelt as a boy to knowing his father's friend Thomas Edison. He was the older brother of Stephen J. Herben Jr., a professor of philology at Bryn Mawr College. Early life and education George Foster Herben, who went by Foster, was born on March 17, 1893. His father was Stephen J. Herben, a minister and editor, and a close friend of Thomas Edison who conducted the service at his burial in 1931. George Herben's mother was Grace Foster Herben, an educator and missionary. He was the older of two children; Stephen J. Herben Jr., who became a philologist at Bryn Mawr College, was born four years later. They were the great-great-great-grandsons of Henry Batton, a sergeant in the American Revolutionary War, a fact that occasioned George Herben's later membership in the Sons of the American Revolution.