William Holmes Crosby, 90, a hematologist and a specialist in blood disorders, died Jan. 15 of congestive heart failure in Joplin, Mo., where he lived in retirement.
Dr. Crosby, formerly chief of the department of hematology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and chief of the cancer chemotherapy program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, also was an amateur poet.
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Dr. Crosby was the author of more than 500 research papers and developed the "Crosby capsule," a device to remove a tiny piece of tissue from the small intestine without intrusive surgery.
He was born in Wheeling, W.Va., and grew up in Oil City, Pa. He attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania on a full scholarship during the Depression, but his internship at Walter Reed General Hospital was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II.
He worked for two years as an instructor at the Army's Medical Field Service School at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio and then was assigned as a regimental surgeon with the 85th Infantry Division, serving in Algeria and Italy. He was awarded a Bronze Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters.
After the war, he spent a year at Queen Alexandra Military Hospital in London before returning to Walter Reed, where he established Army medical specialties in hematology and oncology.
During the Korean War, he was director of the surgical research team in the combat zone.
He retired from the Army in 1965 and became director of hematology at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston. Seven years later, he moved to Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in San Diego, where he established a training program in hematology-oncology. He returned to Walter Reed in 1979.
In 1983, he became one of 11 professors in the nationwide Distinguished Physicians Program of the Veterans Administration. He resigned from that post in 1985 to take up private practice in Joplin. He had lived in Silver Spring.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Dr. Crosby took on the daunting task of translating the French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire. Working on weekends and evenings, he translated the poet's two master collections, "The Flowers of Evil" and "Paris Spleen." They were published in 1991.
He was preceded in death by a son, Holmes Crosby, in 1999.
His marriages to Dr. Marian Crosby, Dr. Romana Chapman and Naomi Crosby ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife, Ann Crosby of Joplin; two children from his first marriage, Mary Blankinship of Damascus and John Crosby of Chesapeake, Va., and four children from his second marriage, Dr. Seth Crosby of St. Louis, David Crosby of Milan, Jonathan Crosby of San Francisco and Susana Perrin of Tigard, Ore.; a sister, Marian "Krispi" Wolke of Waynesboro, Va.; a brother, Forrester Crosby of San Diego; 14 grandchildren; and 13 step-grandchildren.
