Those Aching Feet

When 118 men and women lifted their eyes and hands from their patients' feet long enough to form the National Association of Chiropodists in Chicago back in 1912, they took a long step from simple corn-cutting toward professional status.

Last week, as 1,000 (out of 8,100) members gathered in Washington for their 5Oth anniversary meeting, the chiropodists stood under the more elegant name (adopted in 1958) of the American Podiatry Association.* And to attest the importance of foot health, there were concurrent gatherings of such satellite groups as the American College of Foot Surgeons, American Association of Hospital Podiatrists, American College of Foot Roent-genologists, American Academy of Practice Management for Chiropody-Podiatry, and the National Board of Chiropody Examiners.

In this gathering of foot-minded men, the man who represents hope of relief from corns, calluses, bunions and fallen arches to most of the footsore world got a strangely ambivalent reception. Dr. William M. Scholl, one of two surviving founders of the association, got a special Golden Anniversary award. And his exhibit for Chiropody Supply Headquarters, Inc., which he owns, was a mecca for even the most self-consciously professional podiatrists who were shopping for good equipment. But because his name is plastered across the 101 Dr. Scholl's Foot Comfort Shops in the U.S. (and 423 overseas), and because it appears on millions of yellow packages of corn pads, medicated disks, bunion pads and arch supports that are sold annually, Dr.

Scholl himself was treated as if tarred with commercialism.

Toes in His Pocket. Though podiatrists view him as a purveyor of do-it-yourself foot care, and therefore of doubtful benefit to their profession, William Mathias Scholl, 80, has done more than any other man in history to make America, and most of the civilized world, conscious of its feet. By emphasizing the need for many changes of well-fitted shoes, he has benefited the footwear industry as much as podiatry.

One of 13 children raised on a La Porte, Ind., dairy farm, Billy Scholl learned cobbling at home. He began to practice his trade when the making of different shoes for left and right feet was relatively new (it developed in the Union Army, spread to the general population after the Civil War), when there was no standardization of shoe size, and shoes were made in only two widths (wide and narrow).

From his home-town cobbler's shop, Billy went to Chicago, where he worked in a Madison Street shoe store at night so that he could attend Illinois Medical College by day. He had no intention of practicing general medicine; all he was interested in One Corn. In those days, he recalls, customers would often try on several pairs of shoes and find the process so painful that they would have to return a day or two later to make a choice. Dr. Scholl campaigned to have sizes standardized (done in 1905) and get manufacturers to offer a greater choice of widths (there are now more than a dozen in some lines). In 1912, during one of 65 trips he has made to Europe, Dr. Scholl fitted arch supports for Kaiser Wilhelm II. He hand-made special supports and built them into running shoes for Paavo Nurmi, "the flying Finn." In 1933 Dr. Scholl opened a nationwide shoe-store chain. By that time, most customers thought his name was only a trademark and that the man behind it must be long dead.

This week Bachelor Scholl trotted around the meetings and exhibits as energetically as ever in his 10 1/2B shoes. He practices what he preaches, changes to a different pair two or three times a day, and boasts that only once in his life has he had a corn. That was when his luggage got lost in Singapore, a local bootmaker made him up a pair of shoes overnight, and the left one pinched. But the pain was soon relieved: Dr. Scholl knew just what to use on the corn.

-- *Though the origin of the word chiropody is disputed, it probably represents a contraction of the Greek words for surgeon and foot. Podiatry is healing of the foot.

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