Some early Academy personalities

Abstract

professional accomplishments of the officers and board members who served during the first 10 years of the existence of the American Academy of Dermatology were of the highest order. These men made indelible impressions on those who were young physicians at that time. Howard Fox, the first president, was the son of the great George Henry Fox and was determined to equal or surpass his father's accomplishments. He certainly did this, and his personality and dress were commensurate with a dignified proper New Yorker. He must also have had nerves of steel. One day one of his preceptees mistakenly treated a child with tinea capitis twice in the same day with epilating doses of x-ray. Dr. Fox showed no sign of being worried that the child's hair would regrow, which it did. Earl D. Osborne of Buffalo, New York, the first Secretary for 10 years, was a man of tremendous energy. During the annual meetings he was in perpetual motion, and he exemplified the theory that the best committee is composed of one person who is the chairman. He often said The Academy is my baby, which it was in the early years. How he and Gerry Feeney could have accomplished so much for the Academy with very little extra help nobody will ever know. Martin Van Studdiford was everything one would expect a jovial Louisiana southern gentleman to be. At one meeting we were listening to a lecture by a boring but probably dedicated dermatologist when Van Studdiford turned to me and said, You know that man takes himself and life too seriously. I doubt if he knows how to have any fun. What he needs is a little New Orleans treatment. Those who took the treatment with him never forgot it. Everett S. Lain from Oklahoma City was a large man who looked like the type who would have driven a covered wagon to the West. When his two sons-in-law, Onis Hazel and John Lamb, practiced with him, they treated as many squamous cell carcinomas of the skin as any three men before or since. Dr. Lain was known as pop, and when he laid one of his ham-sized hands on a patient and said Son you are going to be just fine, it was the equivalent of a clergyman with good connections doing the same thing in Oklahoma. Clark W. Finnerud was a master clinician who always liked to tell young dermatologists how he managed his large private practice in Chicago. His first principle was to have new patients pay cash on the barrel for a routine first visit charge before he ever laid eyes on them and thereafter as well. His second principle was to take the money received to the bank himself at lunch time. To avoid writing out prescriptions, he had many different professionally printed ones kept in file boxes in each examining room. Most of these had to be compounded but were not particularly complicated. One day a young fool asked him if when he was in a hurry he ever picked out the wrong prescription from so many in the file boxes, lie answered, Young man, time has taught me that when that happens sometimes they work even better. Paul E. Bechet of New York City (pronounced Bachea) was a very pleasant man who was particularly interested in the lives and accomplishments of early dermatologists in the United States. Without his efforts and publications much of the history of our specialty might have been lost. He would talk about C. J. White, Pifford, Stelwagon, and others as though they were his best friends and even knew about their favorite prescriptions. One person, whom I knew well, began to lose his hair at 24 years of age and reasoned that since Dr. Bechet had a full head of hair and knew about