January 2011

The first issue of the New York Morning Herald hit the streets of New York City on May 6. Its editor, James Gordon Bennett, was a cantankerous, cross-eyed Scotsman possessed of a supreme indifference to public opinion. He set out to break the journalistic traditions of his day. “Our only guide,” he wrote in that first issue, “shall be good, sound, practical common sense, applicable to the business and bosoms of men engaged in every-day life.” Unlike most of the other fifteen papers then published in the city, the New York Herald would not be “kept”: “We shall support no party, be the organ of no faction or coterie, and care nothing for any election or any candidate from President down to a Constable. We shall endeavor to record facts on every public and proper subject,” Bennett wrote. But when New Yorkers discovered what he deemed proper to record, he was ostracized. Businessmen and competing editors took to assaulting him on the street, and eventually several attempts were made on his life.

In Walter Havighurst’s choice of the event he wished he had seen in your December issue, he mentions “Lincoln’s old friend, Chief Justice David Davis.”

Davis never was Chief Justice of the United States. He was appointed Associate Justice by Lincoln in 1862 and served under three chiefs—Taney, Chase, and Waite. He resigned his seat in 1877 to accept a position as a United States senator from Illinois.

Coincidentally, he already had been mentioned as the proposed fifteenth member of the electoral commission in the Hayes-Tilden controversy. Whether his reluctance to serve on the commission was the impelling motive for his retirement from the bench has never been definitely established.

Greatest season performance by Major League pitcher? One hundred years ago last summer, Charles Radbourn won 60 and lost 12 for the Providence Grays of the National League. He won so many games, not only because he was very good, but also because, for the second half of the season, Radbourn had pitched and won almost every game that Providence played. During 35 days in August and September, he pitched 22 consecutive games for Providence, and he won 18 straight within the space of a month. Providence won the National League pennant in a walk and was challenged by the New York Metropolitans, champions of the American Association, to a best-of-five play-off that was, in effect, the first World Series. Radbourn finished his work for 1884 by beating the original Mets in three straight games on three consecutive days. You can look it up.

In “A Confederate Odyssey” by Charles Hemming (December 1984), the young Confederate lands near the St. Mark’s Lighthouse. The lighthouse is still there, and the Battle of Natural Bridge, which decided that Tallahassee would be the only state capital not taken by Union forces, is still reenacted each year in the swamps of Wakulla County. Only fifteen years ago ammunition stored by the cadets in Tallahassee was unearthed on the Campus of the Florida State University, having been left when they marched off to battle.

In the same issue, the moving story by Everett Wood on the effect of Stephen Vincent Benêt on an Alabama ensign reminded me of my own introduction to that poet and storyteller. At that time I was stationed at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, with the 87th Infantry Division in the spring of 1943. Since passes into town were infrequent, I was fortunate to discover that the post library was close to our company street.

Something important was missing from the special section on American medical history that appeared in the October/November 1984 issue. The distinction between the history of the medical profession and the history of health care was not made clear.

Physicians aren’t the only professionals engaged in healing. In this century, nurses, psychologists, dentists, nutritionists, physical therapists, and a host of other health care professionals have all made important contributions.

It remains easier to market palliatives, alcohol, and tobacco in American society than it is to implement a full agenda for disease prevention and health promotion. Still, in a decade in which Americans are demanding more and more from physicians and hospital care, it’s important to understand that personal behavior, family income, and the nature of the environment are still the prime determinants of health status. There are limits to what medicine can accomplish in health care.

What a flood of almost forgotten memories ‘The Aero View” (December 1984) brought back on the VCR of my mind! The overhead photography of the Atlantic City shoreline shows Heinz Pier, scene of my first job out of high school. I was probably in the attic projection booth showing Seeds of Service , the company film, when the picture was taken.

Then, next from the top (and unmentioned), Garden Pier Theater, which one June afternoon prompted a buddy and myself to play hooky and attend our first burlesque show. That was before sex education in the schools.

Next came Steel Pier with its “fifty attractions for the price of one”—and if you arrived before 11:00 A.M. they threw in a free steamboat ride down the coast for the fifty-cent admission.

Most of us find maritime art pleasantly modest, direct, uncomplicated, explicit. It follows no cult, its language is free of the clamor and exclusivity of recent art movements; it undertakes unblushingly the task of pleasing the viewer instead of illustrating the artist’s inner turmoil. It may not always be J. M. W. Turner or Winslow Homer, but it is art nonetheless: it deals with elemental and universal subjects, and in viewing a good example, one sees and feels something more than the literal scene, just as with an Edward Hopper picture of an urban street.

As a victim of tuberculosis in 1935, I can testify to the accuracy of Richard Cabot’s statement in “The Genealogy of Mass General” (October/November 1984) that before the discovery of isoniazed, tuberculosis was “curable in the rich, incurable in the poor, while in the moderately well-to-do the chances are proportionately intermediate.” Of thirteen of my roommates at the sanitarium, ten were dead in five years—some from faulty diagnosis, others from lack of care after leaving the hospital. Many an arrested lunger had to take jobs totally unsuitable in order to support themselves and their families. Poverty was the greatest cause of recidivism.

I am a fourth-generation Memphian and, as a child, heard some of the horrors described in “Epidemic” (October/November 1984).

For my paternal grandfather, as for so many, it was a very sad time. He had taken his family, including his recently married younger sister, from their Memphis home out to his father’s farm. My grandfather’s new brother-in-law was a doctor, and there was a great demand for his services. Like so many doctors, he remained in the city. Some time later word came to the farm that he was ill. Amelia, my grandfather’s sister, rushed to her husband’s side.