At Harvard Medical School, I recall being interviewed shortly before commencement by the then Dean who, in those days, was able to interview all of the graduating class, and even then remember telling him that I thought I would return to Worcester to practice medicine. So, my decisions to go other than into medical practice came considerably later than that. I took a residency in medicine at Beth Israel hospital in Boston, was very taken with the Chairman of the Department there, a cardiologist named Hermann Blumgart, was really a wonderfully compassionate and... physician and cardiologist and a man of... who did some very important work in... in the early days of heart... heart disease research. I went from Beth Israel Hospital to a Fellowship in endocrinology at Cornell New York... Cornell Medical School, New York Hospital and there became interested in... in bone disease and in the effects of parathyroid hormone on bone disease.
It was while I was there that the Korean War broke out. Since I had not... I'd left medical school... I'd graduated from medical school at a time when the need for physicians was over, I now was a candidate for... for military service, and I joined the Public Health Service at the invitation of a person who was in charge of the National Institutes of Health. He had known the head of the endocrinology program at New York Hospital where I was working and indicated that if I joined the Public Health Service, I would be then welcomed at the National Institutes of Health to carry on work similar to what I had been doing at New York Hospital.
The clinical centre at the NIH, where the research on patients goes on, was being built and during the time that, before its completion I was permitted to stay at New York Hospital. I was sent for a year to Elgin, Illinois where there was a public health research project going on at the Elgin State Hospital. It was a distressing experience. The study was of vitamin deficiency in patients hospitalized at this hospital, and because these patients were not consulted they were subjected to vitamin-deficient diets, and shortly after I arrived I expressed concern about that and was... I asked to be relieved of that, of that duty and shortly afterwards, was.
