Anti-Diphtheria Man

Two events occurred in Manhattan last week which poignantly stressed the short span of modern medicine, 1) Dr. Harvey Gushing spoke about the pituitary gland before the Harvey Society at the Academy of Medicine. 2) New York University promoted Dr. William Hallock Park to the chair of preventive medicine.

Handsome Dr. Cushing's 37 years in medicine have included practically all that is known about scientific surgery of the brain.

At the end of a tenement-walled, children-cluttered street of Manhattan's lower East Side works Professor Park. For 38 years he has been a great Name in immunology. His New York Board of Health vaccines and serums are esteemed throughout the world. New York University medical students have learned bacteriology & hygiene from him since 1897. But somehow the man's personality has escaped the record.

Gynecology, his first medical love, made him a throat specialist. Laryngology made him a bacteriologist. Although he has done great work in the fight against all diseases, his pride is his anti-diphtheria record. Before his introduction of diphtheria antitoxin to the U. S. there were 150 diphtheria deaths per 100,000 of population each year, or about 600 deaths per 100,000 children. New York City used to have 100 deaths a week during the diphtheria season. During the last month, the community has had only four.

Dr. Park used to take his test tubes of germs to bed with him to keep them warm. One of his early laboratories was in the Criminal Courts building. The judges disliked his guinea pigs, drove him out. He found a corner in a municipal disinfectant plant, eventually got a regular building and a staff, which now numbers 250.

Dr. Park's own office looks over the East River. There he sits in a leather upholstered swivel chair, one leg across the other, hands locked behind his thin silvery hair, thinking or talking. He has a dry, brittle, rapid voice, smiles easily. His staff venerate him, play tennis with him (he was 69 last month) on the court adjoining the laboratory building. In summer he fishes in the St. Lawrence.

His first assistant, and collaborator ever since, has been Dr. Anna Wessels Williams, who will be 70 next St. Patrick's Day. Mused Dr. Park last week: "Thirty-nine years! I don't know what I would have done without her." Neither has married. Says Dr. Park: "The laboratory is my baby."

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