Arthur Brooks DuBois, former professor of physiology and medicine at Penn, died in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 24. He was 96. 

Born in New York City, Dr. DuBois attended Milton Academy, Harvard College and then Cornell University Medical School, receiving his MD in 1946. He interned at New York Hospital, where his father had retired in 1941 as chief of medicine. He served in the United States Navy from 1947 to 1949 at St. Albans Naval Hospital in Brooklyn and the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. After earning a fellowship in physiology at University of Rochester, Dr. DuBois served as senior assistant resident in Medicine at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. 

Dr. DuBois moved to Philadelphia and began his two decades-plus career at University of Pennsylvania in the early 1950s, becoming assistant professor of physiology, then associate professor and then associate professor of medicine before becoming a full professor of physiology and professor of medicine. 

While at Penn, Dr. DuBois developed the body plethysmograph, “a highly sophisticated device [that] measures exactly the resistance to breathing in the body’s airways and the volume of air in the chest cavity. It is so sensitive [that] it can readily detect the effects on the airways of smoking a single cigarette.” In 1969, it was used by the University Hospital’s then-new pulmonary research laboratories to study the effects of air pollution on asthma sufferers; to test the effects of drugs in the treatment of asthma and bronchitis; and to establish effects of surgery on emphysema (Almanac January 1969). 

Dr. DuBois left Penn and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1974 to direct the John B. Pierce Foundation, a position he held until 1988. He also maintained lifelong associations with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Dr. DuBois co-authored several editions of The Lung, between 1955 and 1986, and Body Plethysmography. 

Dr. Dubois was briefly survived by his wife, Roberdeau C. (Robin), though she died just three days later; children, Anne, Brooks (Mary Salerno), and James; grandchildren, Laura, Brooks Michael and Marian; and many nieces and nephews and their children. 

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