Blake Colburn Wilbur (May 29, 1901 – March 10, 1974) was a surgeon and one of the co-founders of the Palo Alto Medical Clinic.
Wilbur grew up in Palo Alto, California with his sisters, Jessica and Lois and brothers, Dwight and Ray Lyman Jr.
Blake graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1919 and entered Stanford University that fall.
He attended summer school at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California and met his future wife, Mary Caldwell Sloan, a Stanford Zoology major there in 1920.
Sloan (Nov 9, 1901 – Mar 22, 2002) was the daughter of Mary Brown and Richard Elihu Sloan, a lawyer and American jurist who served as Associate Justice of the Arizona Territorial Supreme Court, a United States District Court judge and as the 17th and final Governor of Arizona Territory.
Wilbur received his AB in Physiology and graduated from Stanford with a Phi Beta Kappa Key in 1922.
Wilbur became a surgeon at Southern Pacific Hospital in San Francisco and opened an office at 490 Post Street.
Wilbur's medical friends in San Francisco advised against being a "country doctor".
[4] In an interview about the early years of PAMC, Lee explained that the founding partners divided up their profits informally.
Each person was asked to suggest the amount that he or she deserved for the year, "It had this effect: They were modest about what they put down" Lee added, "The group was greatly helped by the generosity of Dr. Blake Wilbur, who willingly gave up a significant portion of earnings from his lucrative surgical practice to the rest of the group.
He was unique in that he listened and treated everyone with the same regard: doctor, patient, university president, orderly, it made no difference.
In turn, he commanded an enormous respect from all his patients and all the doctors, nurses and staff."
In addition to PAMC, Wilbur was a clinical professor at the Stanford Medical School from 1930 to 1966.
Dr. D. Vernon Thomas approached Wilbur with the idea of inserting a gastrostomy tube in an infant's stomach while the baby was in the ventilator.