Edward J. Huth (1923–2021)

[excerpted from The Philadelphia Inquirer online obituary
Although Dr. Huth graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine in 1947 and worked for years in Philadelphia as an internist, researcher, and professor, his curious mind and a passion for journalism and education eventually led him to spend much of his career as an editor and writer. Beginning in 1960, when he took a job as an associate editor for Annals of Internal Medicine, which is published by the Philadelphia-based American College of Physicians, until he retired in 1990 as Annals' editor-in-chief, Dr. Huth overhauled and updated the medical publishing industry.

Dr. Huth discarded the traditional summaries of complex issues and convention recaps that many journals had been publishing, and printed detailed new clinical research, compelling peer reviews, and editorial comment by his staff and notable contributors. To increase that trust, 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.

Out of the office, he taught a class at Penn in the 1980s about publishing research papers and held more than 200 medical editing seminars and workshops around the world. 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.

Dr. Huth championed the use of computers for writing, publishing, and storing information long before the internet. He won several awards for his work and was a member of many medical and journalism organizations. After he left Annals, he worked in the 1990s as editor-in-chief of the Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials.