Hodes worked as an intern and resident at the
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia until 1935, when he moved to
Baltimore to take up a position at the Harriet Lane Home of
Johns Hopkins Hospital as the dispensary director. In 1936, he developed a method that used
ultraviolet light to reduce the infectiousness of viruses, a technique that later was used to create commercial vaccines against
rabies and
influenza. He became a
pediatrician at Johns Hopkins in 1938 while also serving as the medical director of
Sydenham Hospital for Communicable Diseases. During an outbreak of diarrhea in 1942, he isolated the first virus known to cause diarrhea, later identified as
rotavirus. The same year, he became the first to isolate the
measles virus from the brain of a child who had died from
measles encephalitis. While stationed in
Guam with the
U.S. Navy in World War II, he discovered that the
Japanese encephalitis virus was spread by mosquitoes. There, he studied
poliovirus and was involved in the development of the
polio vaccine. He established the Jack Martin Polio Respirator Center at Mount Sinai, the first center of its kind in New York City, in 1953. After helping to found the
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Hodes was appointed the first Herbert H. Lehman Professor and Chairman of Pediatrics in 1964. He retired from clinical practice in 1976, but remained an active researcher, focusing on
endotoxins. ==Death==