Wilfrid and Evan Shute: Life and Times

Evan Shute and his younger brother Wilfrid are remembered as the two doctors from London, Ontario, who claimed in 1946 that large doses of vitamin E could help people with heart disease, and who spent the next three decades treating patients and writing books on that idea. Before the vitamin E story, though, there was a farm on the Bruce Peninsula, two brothers at the University of Toronto, an obstetrician who learned his trade attending home births in the poor neighbourhoods of Chicago, and a decade of research on miscarriage and the complications of pregnancy.

This page tells the story of their lives as biography: where they came from, how they were trained, the obstetric research that came first, the foundation and clinic they opened in an 1882 house on Grand Avenue in 1948, the journal and the books, the poetry, swimming and Doberman Pinschers of their private lives, and the closing of the Shute Institute in 2010. The heart claims themselves are told on Vitamin E and the Heart: The Shutes’ 1946 Claims, and the science of the vitamin on Wheat Germ Oil and Alpha-Tocopherol. The main sources here are The Canadian Who’s Who of 1972, the University of Chicago Library’s finding aid for Evan’s papers, Eric Hutton’s long 1953 Maclean’s article “The Fight over Vitamin E”, and the brothers’ own indexed papers.

Table of Contents

  1. A Farm on the Bruce Peninsula
  2. Two Brothers at the University of Toronto
  3. Evan in Chicago: Obstetrics Under De Lee (1929–1933)
  4. Back to London, Ontario (1933)
  5. An Obstetrician’s Research: Miscarriage, Toxaemia and Premature Labour
  6. Wilfrid Joins the Work
  7. The Shute Foundation and 10 Grand Avenue (1948)
  8. The Summary and the Books
  9. Lives Outside Medicine: Vere Jameson, Swimming and Dobermans
  10. Last Years and the Institute’s Closing (1978–2010)
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections

1. A Farm on the Bruce Peninsula

The Shutes came from the Bruce Peninsula, the long finger of limestone and farmland that separates Georgian Bay from Lake Huron in western Ontario. According to The Canadian Who’s Who (volume 12, 1972), Evan Vere Shute was born on 21 October 1905 near Lion’s Head, a small harbour village on the Georgian Bay side of the peninsula. His parents were Richard James Shute and Elizabeth Jane Shute, born Treadgold.

Wilfrid Eugene Shute followed two years later. The same reference book gives his birth as 21 October 1907 at Berkeley, Ontario, to the same parents — the same day of the year as his brother’s birthday, an unusual coincidence that rests on that single source. Wilfrid’s entry lists their father as “Richard James, M.D.”, a detail that does not appear in Evan’s entry. (The 1972 Who’s Who spells his first name “Wilfred”; his own books, his indexed papers and almost every later source use “Wilfrid”, which is the spelling used on this site.)

The family farm near Lion’s Head is where the boys grew up. There was a third brother, Wallace, who also became a physician; the Wikipedia article on Evan, citing the 2005 book 100 Fascinating Londoners by Baker and Neary, describes the three brothers growing up on the farm. Wallace appears again in this story as Evan’s co-author on a 1945 paper about premature labour.

Evan was, by every account, a fast starter. Eric Hutton’s 1953 Maclean’s profile called him a child prodigy who entered high school at the age of nine and had his medical degree at twenty-one. Wilfrid’s schooling, according to Who’s Who, included the Collegiate Institute in Windsor, Ontario, at the far south-western corner of the province.

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2. Two Brothers at the University of Toronto

Both brothers studied at the University of Toronto, two years and a degree apart. The Canadian Who’s Who records Evan’s degrees as a B.A. in 1924 and an M.B. (Bachelor of Medicine, then the Toronto medical degree) in 1927. Wilfrid took his B.A. in 1929 and his M.D. in 1933.

Wilfrid’s university years were full of things other than lectures. His Who’s Who entry lists him as the university’s intercollegiate wrestling champion in 1932–33, the first “Keeper of the Prints” of the Hart House art gallery (Hart House is the University of Toronto’s student centre), and the official photographer of Hart House Theatre for three years. Maclean’s (1953) went further and described both brothers as wrestling and boxing champions at Toronto. Photography and competition stayed with Wilfrid for life, as the section on his Dobermans below shows.

After their first degrees both men went on to postgraduate training in the United States and Canada. Who’s Who records Evan’s postgraduate study in Detroit, Montreal and Chicago, and Wilfrid’s as five years of postgraduate study in Chicago and Toronto.

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3. Evan in Chicago: Obstetrics Under De Lee (1929–1933)

The formative years of Evan’s training were spent in Chicago. The biographical note in the University of Chicago Library’s finding aid for the Evan V. Shute Papers (1933–1985) records that he worked under Dr. Joseph B. De Lee at the Chicago Lying-In Hospital from 1929 to 1933, as a resident in obstetrics and gynaecology. De Lee was one of the best-known American obstetricians of his day, and the Chicago Lying-In Hospital, which he founded, was a teaching hospital for childbirth.

From 1930, according to the same finding aid, Evan was part of the hospital’s home-birth team, attending women who gave birth at home in the poor neighbourhoods of the city.

Two milestones of his personal and professional life fell in these Chicago years. On 10 September 1932 he married Marian Roberta Miller, daughter of John Miller of Blacklands, New Brunswick; the University of Chicago finding aid places the wedding in Illinois, and Who’s Who records that the couple had five children. In 1933 he became a Diplomate of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American specialist qualification in his field. Two years later, in 1935, came his Canadian fellowship, F.R.C.S.(C.).

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4. Back to London, Ontario (1933)

In 1933 Evan returned to Ontario and settled in London, the city in the south-west of the province that would be home to his work for the rest of his life. The Canadian Who’s Who records that he went into specialist practice in obstetrics and gynaecology from 1933, and that from 1933 to 1939 he was Research Assistant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Western Ontario, the university in London with its own medical school and teaching hospitals.

According to Hutton’s 1953 Maclean’s article, Evan held a Banting Fellowship — research money named after Frederick Banting, the Canadian co-discoverer of insulin — to study the causes of miscarriage. Hutton reported that Evan concluded that an excess of the hormone oestrogen was responsible, and that vitamin E appeared to neutralise the action of the hormone. How that idea grew, and the wheat germ oil a London hospital doctor was preparing at the time, are told on Wheat Germ Oil and Alpha-Tocopherol.

The research work gave Evan a place in the professional societies of his specialty. His Who’s Who entry lists him as a Past President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Fertility and as a member of the Canadian Physiological Society, the American Society for the Study of Sterility, the British Society of Endocrinology, the American Geriatric Society (as a Fellow) and the American Society of Abdominal Surgeons, and as an associate member of the Royal Society of Medicine.

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5. An Obstetrician’s Research: Miscarriage, Toxaemia and Premature Labour

Evan’s early publications were the work of an obstetrician studying the problems of pregnancy he met in practice: miscarriage, bleeding behind the placenta, toxaemia (the high blood pressure of late pregnancy now called pre-eclampsia) and babies born too early. The titles and dates below are taken from the PubMed and Crossref records of the papers. The science behind them is told on the wing’s wheat germ oil page.

His work did not go unchallenged. In 1939 two biochemists at University College London, W. F. J. Cuthbertson and J. C. Drummond, published “Criticism of Shute’s serum test for vitamin E deficiency” in the Biochemical Journal, a sign that the young London, Ontario, researcher was being read abroad.

When Evan listed his own contributions to medicine in The Canadian Who’s Who of 1972, he named three: “Oestrogen Therapy of Eclampsia; Testosterone Therapy of Hyperemesis; Vitamin E Therapy of Cardiovascular Disease”. Eclampsia is the seizure stage of toxaemia, and hyperemesis is the severe, persistent vomiting of some pregnancies. Two of his three claims, in other words, were obstetric.

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6. Wilfrid Joins the Work

Wilfrid trained as a physician and is described in almost every later source as a cardiologist, a heart specialist; the 1972 Who’s Who simply calls him a physician. His entry there says he had been “assoc. with Dr. Evan Shute in clin. investigation of the functions of vitamin E in med. science since 1937”. The International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine’s profile of him gives an earlier start, saying the brothers began in 1933; the sources do not agree, and both dates are given here.

The partnership became public in 1946. That year Evan and a London physician, Dr. A. Vogelsang, published a short letter in Nature on the effect of vitamin E in coronary heart disease (Wilfrid was not an author of the letter), and the claims that followed are the subject of the wing’s heart page. Wilfrid’s own earliest sole-author item on PubMed is from the same year: “Three cases of acute nephritis treated with vitamin E” (1946), on a form of kidney inflammation.

From then on the brothers wrote together. Wilfrid is first author of the 1947 Medical World paper “Vitamin E in heart disease; the anginal syndrome”, and of the 1949 Annals of Internal Medicine paper on “the physiological and biochemical basis for the use of vitamin E in cardiovascular disease”. In 1952 the two published “Peripheral thrombosis treated with alpha tocopherol (vitamin E)” in the American Journal of Surgery, with Crossref listing the second author in full as Wilfrid.

The work cost Evan his place in his own specialty, as he told it. Hutton’s 1953 article quotes him: “I have not been called in for consultation on my specialty — obstetrics — since 1946”. Wilfrid, asked about the brothers’ combative reputation, told Hutton: “If we hadn’t, vitamin E would have been dead and buried long ago.”

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7. The Shute Foundation and 10 Grand Avenue (1948)

In 1948 the brothers founded the institution that carried their name for six decades: the Shute Foundation for Medical Research, with its clinic — known as the Shute Medical Clinic and later the Shute Institute — at 10 Grand Avenue in London, Ontario. The Canadian Who’s Who records Evan as Medical Director of the Shute Foundation for Medical Research from 1948, and Wilfrid’s entry calls him a co-founder.

The house they chose had a history of its own. According to the Canadian Register of Historic Places, “Waverly” at 10 Grand Avenue is an 1882 Queen Anne house designed by the London architect George Durand and built for Charles Goodhue; it was later owned by Thomas Smallman, and, in the register’s words, “later became well known as the home of the Shute Institute which pioneered the medical appreciation of Vitamin E”. The city gave the building municipal heritage designation in 1996, and it is now a retirement home.

The foundation was set up as a non-profit body. Hutton reported in 1953 that it was headed by a clergyman, Canon Quintin Warner, and that the two brothers were its salaried employees rather than its owners.

The brothers’ own figures for the clinic’s work are reported on the heart page: about 10,000 patients in seven years of vitamin E treatment, by their account in 1953, and more than 30,000 by the time it closed.

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8. The Summary and the Books

From 1949 the Shute Institute published its own journal, The Summary. The University of Chicago finding aid explains why: other medical journals would not publish the research. The brothers also went on sending letters and papers to established journals, among them the Canadian Medical Association Journal, into the 1970s.

The books came in a steady stream. The titles below are confirmed from library catalogue records; their contents are described on the other pages of this wing only where a fetched source supports it.

Evan also wrote outside medicine. His Flaws in the Theory of Evolution appeared in 1961 according to Who’s Who (Wikipedia lists a 1966 edition); the same reference names American archaeology and evolution as his recreations.

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9. Lives Outside Medicine: Vere Jameson, Swimming and Dobermans

Evan the poet. Under the pen name Vere Jameson — built from his own middle name — Evan published poetry and children’s books from 1945 to 1971. Titles listed in Who’s Who and Wikipedia include Moths After Midnight (1945), Hy-Brasil (1952) and The Little Black Bag (1963). His home, “Heronspool”, was at Arva, just north of London, according to the 1972 Who’s Who.

Faith. The sources differ on the brothers’ church. Hutton’s 1953 article describes Evan as an ordained minister of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; the 1972 Who’s Who lists Evan as “Protestant” and Wilfrid as a member of the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints. Time’s 1946 account of the vitamin E story says that Evan’s first heart patient was a man from his church.

Wilfrid and an Olympic swimmer. Wilfrid married Dorothy (“Dot”) Prior, the Canadian breaststroke swimmer who competed at the 1928 and 1932 Olympic Games, as Maclean’s reported in 1953; her Olympedia entry records her married name as Shute.

The Dobermans. Wilfrid’s great passion outside medicine was dogs. The Canadian Who’s Who calls him “Canada’s leading breeder of Doberman Pinschers”, and he was also a dog-show judge and a photographer of dogs. The Doberman Pinscher Club of Canada records that he started a Doberman club in the 1960s and was Honorary President of the national club when it was founded in 1968. The wrestler and theatre photographer of the Hart House years had found new outlets for both.

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10. Last Years and the Institute’s Closing (1978–2010)

By the early 1970s the brothers were working apart. Evan remained in London as Medical Director of the Shute Foundation, with his office at 10 Grand Avenue, while Wilfrid, according to the 1972 Who’s Who, lived and practised in Port Credit, Ontario, on Lake Ontario west of Toronto. Wilfrid’s books of the 1970s carried the vitamin E message to a general readership. Evan’s honours from this period include, according to the orthomolecular writer Andrew W. Saul, a Fellowship of the American Society of Angiology in 1969.

Evan died in London, Ontario, in 1978, aged about seventy-two; the exact date was not found in the sources consulted. Wilfrid died in 1982; neither the date nor the place is given in the sources consulted. Evan’s memoir The Vitamin E Story followed in 1985, and his papers, covering 1933 to 1985, are held by the University of Chicago Library, the institution where he had trained.

In 2004 both brothers were inducted into the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame, kept by the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine. Linus Pauling had written of them in 1986, in a passage quoted in the Wikipedia article on Evan: “there is no doubt that Wilfrid Shute and Evan Shute were convinced that vitamin E is the most important substance in the world. I confess to having the same feeling about vitamin C.”

The Shute Institute outlived both its founders by more than a quarter of a century. According to the University of Chicago finding aid, it closed in 2010 after treating more than 30,000 patients. The house at 10 Grand Avenue, with its heritage designation recording the Institute’s place in its history, became a retirement home. What happened to vitamin E research after the Shutes is told on After the Shutes: Vitamin E Trials and Legacy.

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Key Research Papers

  1. Shute E. Resistance to proteolysis found in the blood-serum of aborting women. BJOG. 1935;42(6):1071-1084. DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-0528.1935.tb12170.x
  2. Shute E. The relation of deficiency of vitamin E to the anti-proteolytic factor found in the serum of aborting women. BJOG. 1936;43(1):74-86. DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-0528.1936.tb12384.x
  3. Shute E. The early diagnosis of abruptio placentae and its treatment with wheat germ oil. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 1937;33(3):429-436. DOI: 10.1016/s0002-9378(37)90209-6
  4. Shute E. Wheat germ oil therapy. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 1938;35(2):249-255. DOI: 10.1016/s0002-9378(38)90117-6
  5. Cuthbertson WF, Drummond JC. Criticism of Shute’s serum test for vitamin E deficiency. Biochem J. 1939;33(10):1621-5. PubMed PMID: 16747074
  6. Shute E. Vitamin E in habitual abortion and habitual miscarriage. BJOG. 1942;49(5):534-541. DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-0528.1942.tb05750.x
  7. Shute W, Shute E. The prevention of premature labour. J Obstet Gynaecol Br Emp. 1945;52:570-4. PubMed PMID: 21011024
  8. Shute E. Non-eclamptic late toxemias treated by vitamin E. Am J Surg. 1946;71:470-8. PubMed PMID: 21020172
  9. Vogelsang A, Shute EV. Effect of vitamin E in coronary heart disease. Nature. 1946;157:772. PubMed PMID: 21064771
  10. Shute WE. Three cases of acute nephritis treated with vitamin E. Urol Cutaneous Rev. 1946;50(11):679. PubMed PMID: 20284846
  11. Shute W, Shute E, Vogelsang A. Vitamin E in heart disease; the anginal syndrome. Med World (New York). 1947;160(2):91-6. PubMed PMID: 20288337
  12. Shute E, Shute W. Peripheral thrombosis treated with alpha tocopherol (vitamin E). Am J Surg. 1952;84(2):187-91. PubMed PMID: 14952638
  13. Shute EV. The prevention of congenital anomalies in the human: experiences with alpha tocopherol as a prophylactic measure. J Obstet Gynaecol Br Emp. 1957;64(3):390-5. PubMed PMID: 13449663

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Shute+EV%5Bau%5D
  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Shute+WE%5Bau%5D
  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=vitamin+E+habitual+abortion
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=tocopherol+history

Further Reading

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Connections

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