The field of Pediatrics recently lost a beloved researcher, clinician, teacher, and mentor. My father, William E. (Bill) Segar, MD, passed away on February 1, 2021 at the age of 97 years in the city in which he was born, Indianapolis, IN. With his father being the first pediatrician in the State of Indiana, there was little chance Bill was going to pursue anything else. Because of World War II, Bill completed his BS and MD degrees at Indiana University in a total of 5 years. Upon graduation from medical school in 1947, he undertook a rotating internship at Indiana, which he always claimed was the most enjoyable single year of his medical career. He loved to recall that, as an intern, the worst part of being on call every other night was that “you still missed half the pathology”. Following Pediatric Residency at Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, he was afforded the opportunity to undertake a 2-year fellowship at Yale University (1951–1953) with Dr. Daniel Darrow to study body fluid homeostasis and fluid and electrolyte therapy. His time in Darrow’s laboratory and the life-long friendships he developed with others at Yale set the course for his next 40 years in academic medicine. Most importantly, he met Julie Feld, nursing student at the University of Connecticut. They married in 1954 and remained so until Bill’s death. My father always acknowledged that nothing he accomplished would have been possible without his wife by his side, providing him unsurpassed love on a daily basis (Fig. 1).
Upon leaving Yale, Bill enlisted in the Army (Korean War) and, after initially being stationed in South Carolina as a pediatrician, was transferred to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC. At Walter Reed, Bill was introduced to peritoneal dialysis, which was as a novel therapy was being used on injured servicemen. Although he did not perform dialysis on pediatric patients at Walter Reed, knowledge of the therapy allowed him to be one of the first pediatricians in the United States to later apply it to pediatric patients. Following completion of his military service in 1955, he was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Indiana University. At Indiana, he and another young pediatrician, Dr. Malcolm Holliday, published their landmark article “The maintenance need for water in parenteral fluid therapy” in 1957, which outlined their formula for providing fluids and electrolytes to hospitalized children based on estimated caloric expenditure.1 This formula, the so called “4-2-1 formula”, has been used widely across the world for over half a century. Additionally, along with William Moore PhD, he published novel observations regarding non-osmotic control of anti-diuretic hormone (ADH), describing the importance of central blood volume in the regulating release of ADH.2 While at Riley Children’s Hospital, Bill also published what may have been the first series of infants treated with peritoneal dialysis, three infants suffering from boric acid poisoning.3
