Edward Huth, M’47, a former faculty member in Penn’s School of Medicine’s department of medicine, passed away on November 2, 2021, from complications of vascular dementia. He was 98.

Dr. Huth was born in Philadelphia and graduated from Haddonfield Memorial High School in 1941 and Wesleyan College in 1943. He obtained a medical degree from Penn’s School of Medicine in 1947, then completed his internship and residency at Penn in internal medicine. In 1948, he joined Penn’s faculty as an assistant instructor in pharmacology, then three years later accepted a position as a staff physician in Penn’s department of Student Health. From 1952 to 1961, he was an assistant instructor, then an instructor, then an assistant professor in medicine.

In 1960, Dr. Huth took a job as an associate editor for Annals of Internal Medicine, which is published by the Philadelphia-based American College of Physicians. From then on, he steadily rose through the ranks at the Annals, helping to revolutionize the field of medical publishing in the process. He dispensed with medical journals’ practices of printing summaries of complex issues in layman’s terms, and instead printed detailed new clinical research and influential peer reviews, reasoning that if non-specialist editors simplified issues for their audiences, the simplified pieces could not be considered trustworthy. While at the Annals, Dr. Huth standardized procedures for submitting manuscripts and created guidelines for how medical writers should handle authorship, conflicts of interest, industry influence over their content, and other issues that had largely gone unaddressed. Before retiring in 1990 as editor-in-chief, he published important pieces about hepatitis, Legionnaire’s disease, and AIDS before many other journals.

While he was busy at the Annals of Internal Medicine, Dr. Huth scaled back his involvement with Penn, holding several visiting and adjunct associate and assistant professorships at Penn during the 1960s and 1970s (as well as a brief appointment at Penn Vet). He taught a popular class at Penn during the 1980s about the process of publishing research papers. He also held an appointment at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, now Drexel University College of Medicine. Dr. Huth retired from Penn in 1989. He cofounded the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, edited style manuals for the Council of Science Editors and others, and published several books on writing and editing medical literature, including the influential How to Write and Publish Papers in the Medical Sciences (1982). He was an early proponent of online publishing; after his retirement, he worked in the 1990s as editor-in-chief of the Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials.

Dr. Huth is survived by his wife, Carol, and two sons, James and John. A memorial service was held on November 20, 2021. Donations in his name may be made to Harriton House, 500 Harriton Rd., P.O. Box 1364, Bryn Mawr, Pa. 19010.