Aleck Bell loved to invent, and he loved people. One of his employees had eight children and did not own a house. The man was astounded when Bell handed him an envelope containing the deed to a home as a Christmas present. Perhaps most of all, the inventor adored children. Bell met Helen Keller when she was only six years old, and, recognizing the child’s potential, he directed her to the Perkins Institute, where she came under the tutelage of Annie Sullivan. Later in life, Keller dedicated her autobiography to Bell to thank him for the help he had given her.
Bell was financially impractical, but his wife and friends ensured that he had the means to continue to invent and to indulge his generous dedication to science and humanity. However, he never allowed any of his medical devices to be patented as he felt it immoral to benefit financially from the misfortune of others. The inventor died at Beinn Breagh in 1922, and his wife followed five months later. Here they lie buried, their graves overlooking the misty inlets of Cape Breton which they loved so much.
George Burden
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Dr. Alfred Pain, a second-class passenger on the Titanic. COURTESY OF ALAN HUSTAK COLLECTION
THE PHYSICIANS
OF THE TITANIC
Millions of words have been written about the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912. Despite the monumental effort to try to make some sense of this horrendous tragedy, countless mysteries and thousands of untold stories of those who survived and those who did not continue to interest researchers.
For me, the nine doctors, eight men and one woman, now known to have been on that ill-fated ship represent a most fascinating conundrum. Although several of these physicians have received some attention, others remain notable only because they had the bad luck of being on the Titanic when it met its infamous demise.
Dr. William O’Loughlin was the White Star Line’s chief surgeon. Born in Ireland, he was an orphan who was raised and educated by an uncle. He proved to be a distinguished student and in 1869 should have received a medical degree. But this didn’t happen. Unfortunately for him, the Catholic university he had attended did not have a royal charter that would enable it to grant this kind of academic recognition. O’Loughlin, a devout Catholic, had refused to attend Trinity College, a Protestant university. This dogmatic stance cost him the chance to earn a medical degree. Instead, he received only a license to practise medicine, although subsequently he did become a licentiate of the King’s and Queen’s College of Physicians in Ireland.
Dr. O’Loughlin, who never married, had a passion for the sea. Ironically, he once declared that when he died he wanted his body thrown into the sea, which for him must have represented the “mistress” he loved very much.
Dr. O’Loughlin’s first responsibility, prior to the Titanic’s sailing, was to examine the crew and steerage passengers. His assistant, Dr. J. Edward Simpson, joined him in this important task. Heads were scrutinized for lice, and the doctors were also on the lookout for infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and trachoma, a highly infectious and potentially blinding disease of the eye. Any passenger with trachoma was unceremoniously ordered off the ship, since American immigration laws did not permit them to enter the country.
Dr. J. Edward Simpson, the assistant surgeon, was also Irish. Born in Belfast, he was the son of a doctor. He studied at the Royal University of Ireland, and unlike O’Loughlin, he did earn a medical degree from Queen’s University in Belfast. He was a member of the British Medical Association. Only thirty-seven at the time of the disaster, he was a married man and the father of a young son. Apparently, it was his poor health that had influenced him to pursue a “healthy” career at sea, and this decision led to his serving as a medical officer on several steamships.
The Titanic’s reign at sea lasted only a few days, and during this brief period of glory, its passengers experienced few noteworthy medical problems. One lady, who was a first class passenger, fell down a flight of stairs, breaking a small bone in her arm. One account reports that her arm was placed in a plaster cast by Dr. Simpson. Another states that she was treated by Dr. Henry Frauenthal, a distinguished orthopedic surgeon who was also a passenger on the ship.
Dr. Frauenthal was the founder of the New York Hospital for Joint Diseases. Born in Pennsylvania, he had a background in analytical chemistry, and he studied medicine at Bellevue Hospital Medical Clinic. Early in his medical career he became convinced that a hospital devoted entirely to chronic joint diseases was desperately needed. In 1904, he opened a small clinic. On the first day only eight patients were treated, but by the end of that year it had provided almost ten thousand treatments. Dr. Frauenthal quickly earned a reputation as an outstanding specialist, and during the same time he acquired a sizeable fortune. He, along with his new bride and his brother, were first-class passengers on the Titanic.
Dr. Alfred Pain was also a passenger on the ship. The young University of Toronto Medical School graduate was travelling in second-class accommodations. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, he had been an excellent student and a fine athlete. After spending a short time as a house doctor at the Hamilton City Hospital, he had gone to England to further his studies. Originally, he hoped to finance his journey home by finding a position as a ship’s doctor. When this couldn’t be arranged, he booked passage on the doomed Titanic.
Dr. William Minahan, a graduate of Rush Medical College, Chicago, was the third member of his family to enter the medical profession. In 1899, he established a practice in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, where he became a highly respected physician, well known not only for his surgical skills but also for the large amount of charity work he did. A first-class passenger, forty-four-year old Dr. Minahan was travelling with his wife, Lillian, and his sister.
Dr. Ernest Moraweck, an internationally known eye specialist, was a resident of Frankfort, Kentucky. A widower, he was returning home from medical business in Europe. He assisted a fellow passenger by removing a foreign body from her eye.
Dr. Alice Leader, a fifty-five-year-old physician, practised medicine in New York with her husband, John. A first-class passenger, she shared a cabin with another woman.
Dr. Washington Dodge, also a first-class passenger, graduated from the University of California medical school sometime in the mid-1880s. In 1896, he left the medical profession and entered politics. Apparently he did extremely well in his new role and had become a very popular and affluent member of the political community in San Francisco. He and his second wife and their five-year-old son, Washington Dodge, Jr., were on their way home from a visit to Paris. They had been in Europe primarily for him to consider a prestigious position with an international banking firm. The doctor’s health seems to have been failing, and during his time in Paris he had consulted a specialist.
Almost nothing is known about Dr. Arthur Brewe, a physician from Philadelphia.
On April 14, 1912, all of the physicians on the Titanic must have spent the early evening hours feeling entirely safe aboard the majestic ocean liner. Early in the day, Dr. O’Loughlin had lunched with Tommy Andrews, the proud builder of the ship. That evening, his dinner companion was Bruce Ismay, the Managing Director of the White Star Line, the company that had audaciously built what it contended was a “practically unsinkable” ship. The fanciful deception was about to be shattered.
“Iceberg, right ahead!” cried the lookout high up in the Titanic’s crow’snest. It was approximately eleven-forty p.m. on Sunday, April 14, 1912. For many of the ship’s crew and its passengers, these words would soon translate into a death knell.
At the time of the collision, Dr. William O’Loughlin was probably asleep in what stewardess Violet Jessop described in her memoirs as his “magnificently appointed cabin.” He must have recognized very quickly that the ship was in real danger. Mary Sloan, another stewardess, encountered him soon after the collision. She asked if he knew what was happening. His words were far from reassuring: “Child, things are very bad.”
It seems that he was on his way to see a passenger, Mrs. Henry
Harper, on D deck, who had requested that he visit her cabin because she wanted him to convince her ill husband that he was too sick to get out of bed. Looking sombre, the physician passed on the bad news to the couple. “They tell me that trunks are floating around in the hold; you may as well go on deck.” His next movements are hard to trace, but a number of people remembered seeing him in the company of several crew members as well as with Dr. Simpson.
Around two a.m., shortly before the Titanic’s fate was sealed forever, one of the ship’s bakers discovered Dr. O’Loughlin rummaging through a pantry on B deck, the deck directly above the ship’s hospital. Apparently, not long after the last lifeboat had left the sinking ship, the physician had declared that he would meet his end indoors. He said he refused to die in freezing water surrounded by others enduring the same terrible fate. Instead, he had gone to the pantry looking for whiskey to dull his senses. He knew that when the ship reached a certain depth, his lungs would implode. “Not necessarily painless, but it has the advantage of being quick.”
Dr. O’Loughlin was eulogized as a true hero and a physician to whom “it made no difference whether the call came from a poor immigrant in steerage or a millionaire in the Royal Suite.” A memorial fund in his memory was established at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York, an institution he had generously supported. He also received, posthumously, the American Medicine Gold Medal Award.
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Dr. William O’Loughlin, senior surgeon on the Titanic. ENCYCLOPEDIA TITANICA
Dr. Simpson also lost his life in the sinking, and he, too, has gone down in the disaster’s history as a hero. Not only is he remembered as a very brave man but also as an Irishman who met death true to his heritage. Mary Sloan and another stewardess met him during the confusion that followed the collision with the iceberg. They both liked him because he had a marvellous sense of humour. This time there was nothing amusing about the situation, but Dr. Simpson, realizing the women were very frightened, led them to a nearby dispensary, where he poured each of them a glass of whiskey. When Mary asked him if he thought she would need the alcoholic beverage, he replied, “You might need it later on.” Hearing these words, the other stewardess began to weep. Mary, however, insisted that she was not afraid. Simpson’s response was to raise his glass and exclaim, “Spoken like a true Ulster woman!” His body, if it was recovered, was never identified, although one writer claims that Simpson’s medical bag was salvaged from the wreck.
Charles H. Lightoller, the Second Officer on the Titanic, miraculously survived the sinking. During his appearance at a board of inquiry, he vividly recalled a brief encounter he had had with doctors O’Loughlin and Simpson. He reported that they obviously knew the score and were “still assisting by showing a calm and cool exterior to the passengers.” Each of them had come up to him to shake his hand and say goodbye.
Survivors later reported that the conduct of the physicians on board had been exemplary, that they actively assisted passengers and had refused seats in the lifeboats. Only one of them will forever have shame associated with his name. He was Dr. Frauenthal, the noted orthopedic surgeon from New York. In a dramatic declaration of love for his wife, who had found a place in a lifeboat, he had screamed, “I cannot leave you.” Then, to the utter disgust of one of the crew members, he and his brother suddenly jumped into the vessel. Some say that Dr. Frauenthal was the bulky man who landed on a lady passenger, breaking two of her ribs. Ironically, fifteen years later, in 1927, Dr. Frauenthal committed suicide by jumping out of the seventh floor of his apartment building in New York. The medical examiner assigned to the case attributed his death to “a fall from a window due to mental derangement.”
Even more bizarre were the terms of Frauenthal’s will. He ordered that he be cremated and his ashes stored in the Hospital for Joint Diseases that he had founded until the fiftieth anniversary of the hospital’s incorporation. On that day, he requested his ashes be scattered from the roof “to the four winds.” This was done on October 5, 1955.
Dr. Alfred Pain, the youthful physician born in Hamilton, Ontario, had befriended a young Canadian woman he had met during the cruise. He made a point of finding her and encouraged her to hurry to find a place in a lifeboat. Later, learning of his death, she was heartbroken that she hadn’t taken the time to say goodbye. Tearfully, she explained that she had failed to do this because she believed the Titanic was “unsinkable” and that she would soon see him again.
“Be brave. No matter what happens, be brave!” were Dr. William Mina-han’s last words to his wife as he helped her into lifeboat number four. The Wisconsin doctor’s body was identified by his personal effects, including a clinical thermometer. When news of his death reached his colleagues, they had only positive things to say about him. “Dr. Minahan was an untiring student, a clever diagnostician, a kind physician and a wonderfully pleasing man socially.”
Dr. Ernest Moraweck from Kentucky also perished. The young lady who had dined with him the evening before the sinking had passed him on her way to the lifeboats. Dr. Moraweck told her he was trying to find out what was happening. He was never seen again.
Dr. Alice Leader from New York City was among the twenty-eight people who found safety in lifeboat number eight. Three crewmen had managed to join the twenty-five women on the boat, allegedly to serve as oarsmen. To Dr. Leader’s great concern, it was quickly discovered that “none of the seamen knew their place.” In fact, one of the women had to tell a steward to put an oar in the oarlock. “Do you put it in that hole?” he asked. “Certainly,” she replied. Dr. Leader practised medicine in New York for another twenty years. She died in Florida on April 27, 1944.
Dr. Washington Dodge also survived, and on April 19, while still in New York, he published the following message in the San Francisco Bulletin: “Please extend through the columns of today’s Bulletin to all inquiring friends, whose telegrams were handed me aboard the rescuing steamer Carpathia, my affectionate greetings and my undying gratitude for their loving messages. My family, thank God, were all saved, being one of the very few where this was the case. As soon as able to resume our Journey, which I trust will be in a few days, I shall start for my beloved city. Sincerely yours, Washington Dodge.”
Arthur Brewe, the doctor from Philadelphia, was among the six physicians who lost their lives when the Titanic went down.
Not enough is known about most of the physicians who experienced the Titanic catastrophe, but we do know the doctors who died in the sinking went to their deaths with dignity and with the clear understanding that they were sacrificing their lives to save others.
Dorothy Grant
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The table on which Titanic victim John Jacob Astor was embalmed, now in the collection of the East Hants Historical Museum in Selma, Nova Scotia. GEORGE BURDEN
A DREADFUL TASK
THE UNDERTAKERS AND THETITANIC DISASTER
A chilling announcement appeared in The Acadian Recorder, a Halifax newspaper, on April 27, 1912. It stated: “John Snow & Sons have made arrangements whereby all the bodies arriving on Monday aboard the MacKay-Bennett will be embalmed by them and their staff, assisted by nearly every embalmer in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. The Funeral Directors Association of the Maritime Provinces allow only experienced men and embalmers to become members, and about forty of these members are either in Halifax or on their way there.”
In fact, about forty-three undertakers answered the call, and only when they arrived in Halifax would they have begun to comprehend the horrendous task they faced. Even for the most experienced, it must have been heartbreaking to face the devastating task of embalming the many victims of the Titanic catastrophe.
In keeping with the male-dominated business world of the time, only two women were included in the group. They were Mrs. Elizabeth Walsh and her sister, Annie O’Neil, from Saint John, New Brunswick, who were considered to be the most appropriate individuals to assume the sensitive responsibility of embalming women’s bodi
es. Mrs. Walsh apparently also embalmed the body of a baby that was among the first to be taken from the sea and the only child that remained unclaimed.
The White Star Line that owned the Titanic had arranged to obtain hundreds of caskets from manufacturers all over the Eastern provinces, and Snow & Sons had contacted a coffin company requesting that its staff work night and day to supply a large number of its product. As the coffins arrived in the city, many were taken to the wharves that have nuzzled the edges of Halifax’s magnificent harbour for hundreds of years. It was not the first time such grim reminders of death rested on the docks, but never had there been so many destined to become final shelters for bodies recovered from the frigid waters of the Atlantic.
The White Star Line had chartered several vessels to search for victims of the disaster. One of them, the cable ship MacKay-Bennett, recovered many bodies found floating in an area that extended over several kilometres surrounding the location where the majestic ship had gone down. In a strange twist of fate, the crew encountered bodies floating together in large numbers. They described the scene as being strangely reminiscent “of witnessing a flock of seagulls in the fog.” But unlike seagulls whose liberating wings enable the birds to free themselves from the grasp of a greedy ocean, these were the ship’s dead, whose life jackets had kept their doomed bodies rising and falling for several days at the mercy of the waves.
Amazing Medical Stories Page 6
