We regret the passing of John B. Blake, PhD, former chief of the National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Division (HMD) on September 24, in Adamstown, Maryland. He was 83 and had pancreatic cancer.

A familiar figure at HMD, where he was chief from 1961 to 1982, Blake was a passionate, widely published medical historian. Among his honors were the NLM Director’s and Regents’ Awards, and the NIH Merit Award. In 2001, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine in 2001.