Fancy Meeting You Here

Abstract

I'm in the habit of buying used books, the cheaper the better. Of course, selecting books this way means I'm not up on the current bestsellers. Rather, I'm up on the bestsellers of 30 or 40 years ago, the books people want to get rid of today. Lately, I've discovered a nice by-product of this thrifty habit: names with which am familiar from one book pop up in others. For example, bought a copy of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1942) for a dime at our local library. It's the story of Cornelia Otis Skinner's and Emily Kimbrough's trip to Europe after their senior year in college in 1922. I'd read this classic as a freshman in high school and decided to reread it; it is just the kind of light reading enjoy for late at night. One of the incidents recounted here, all of which stress the absurdity of the situations, involves infectious disease. Cornelia was exposed to measles just before she left on her grand tour. The spots started to develop at the worst possible time, a couple of days before landing in England. Since the ship was going on to Germany, discovery of her contagious problem would mean quarantine in Germany, not the most attractive of possibilities just a few years after the end of World War I. During the voyage, Otis and Kimbrough had made friends with two young doctors-a convenient coincidence. Paul White and Joseph Aub came to Otis' rescue and her symptoms. But since Aub left the ship in France, it was up to White to help spirit Cornelia off the ship-heavily veiled and with gobs of makeup covering her spots. This rather questionable subversion of the quarantine regulations was abetted by a doctor who would later become well-known in a very different context. Paul White is better known, at least to older generations, as Dr. Paul Dudley White. For those of you who, like myself, remember the 1950s, Dr. White is probably familiar to you as President Eisenhower's heart specialist. had read White's biography a couple of years ago and did not get the impression from it that he was the type to be flaunting public health regulations and participating in shipboard romances. But was wrong. White admits in his autobiography, which bought for 49 cents in 1978 (I found the receipt in the book) but only read recently, that he was, in fact, the Paul White who treated Ms. Otis' case of measles. He also describes his reaction when he read an excerpt of her book in the Reader's Digest: I was appalled. Just as was beginning to attain an authoritative position in the medical profession, appeared in print as a youthful playboy, and as if that weren't bad enough, was distressed to think of what the legal consequences might be. But he adds that there were no untoward repercussions and that he had long since forgiven them the revelation of our reprehensible behavior. like this story because it reveals a very different view of a person known in another context. All the stories recount in this column have that in common: They all involve my surprise at encountering, in my reading, a person know from one context in a very different one. The image have of Paul Dudley White is of a gray-haired man with a neat mustache, just about the farthest thing imaginable from a dashing young man in shipboard attire. What discovered from reading both his biography and autobiography is that there was much more to this many-sided man than either of these images indicates.