Howard Morrow, M.D. succeeded Dr. Douglas Montgomery as Chairman of the Department of Dermatology at the University of California in 1911 and served in this capacity until 1939.  He was born and raised in San Francisco as a son of the owner of  the California Street Cable Car Company.  Dr. Morrow received his M.D. from the University of California in 1896, and took five years of post-graduate study in dermatology and syphilology in New York, London, and Vienna.  He served as President of the California Academy of Medicine in 1908 and was Chairman of the section on Dermatology and Syphilology of the American Medical Association in 1915.  He was President of the American Dermatological Association in 1918, of the California Medical Association in 1937, and of the California State Board of Health from 1933 to 1940.  He also served as Vice President of the American Medical Association in 1938 and was a charter member as well as a Director of the American Board of Dermatology and Syphilology and gave it faithful service until his resignation in 1938.

Dr. Morrow was famous for his lectures on small pox and leprosy.  The amphitheater was jammed when these lectures were given, not only by medical students, but by faculty members who returned year after year to hear these classics.  One faculty member in particular, Dr. Esther Rosenkranz, would sit down in front and was mercilessly kidded by Dr. Morrow.  She loved it and would not stay away.  She was the one who told me when I was a medical student that she would rather be wrong with Dr. Osler than right with the moderns, since she trained with Dr. Osler at Johns Hopkins Medical School.  I believe she felt the same way about Dr. Morrow.

Dr. Morrow was one of a quadrivimirate which had great power in the medical school.  It is idle to speculate that we might have had the most powerful and influential department of dermatology in the country early in this century if Dr. Morrow had willed, because he certainly had the influence.

Dr. Charles C. Dennie, Professor at the University of Kansas, told me that the Three Musketeers of the American Dermatological Association were Howard Morrow, William McBride of Rush Medical College, and William Mook of the New York Skin Cancer Institute.  Dr. Dennie was D'Artagnan since these four always went around together.  One midnight in Dallas, when a medical meeting was over and the four of them stood in front of the Adolphus Hotel admiring the Texas night, a landau turned into the street carrying a beautiful, curvaceous woman in her mid twenties.  She invited the four friends to a cocktail or two in her apartment.  Morrow declared it was too late, to which she responded that it was only a little after twelve o'clock.  Morrow's response to this was that it was twenty years too late. Stories about Dr.Morrow are legion and do not properly belong here.  He died in 1941 of a myocardial infarction.