DR. WHITE OF PHILADELPHIA.
[TO THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR.”1
SIR,— A great American surgeon, James William White, the Philadel- phian, died on April 24th last in his house on the old Rittenhouse Square. Ho was a great teacher, a great consoler, a great fighter too, and a great athlete. Ho was known to every one in Philadelphia; to poor students at the University, to the innermost of Philadelphia society, to the frequenters of the clubs. Like Darwin or Galton, he began his active life with a voyage of natural history discovery, sailing with the famous Agassiz, when twenty-one years old, on the Hassler expedition which loft Boston in December, 1871, and called at the West India Islands, Patagonia, &c., ending up in August, 1872, at San Francisco. Ho retained all his life the broadened view which his adventures gave him, together with the physical strength that helped him see them through.
He had an iron constitution and high spirits. On one occasion he swam from Newport to Narragansett Pier, a distance of ten miles, in five hours forty minutes. He was the last man in Philadelphia to fight a duel with pistols, being narrowly missed by his opponent, whom he could well have thrashed for an insulting remark had he not refused to take advantage of his strength. He was surgeon, ranking as Lieutenant, of the City Troop, a corps d'ilite of Philadelphia's young men. In his maturer years he found an outlet for his energies in climbing, belonging to the older ac hoot of " mountaineers " and occupying in it an honourable place. A belief in outdoor exercise was with him a second nature, and this, combined with great sanity of outlook and a due appreciation of the secondary place of athletics in any proper scheme of life, gave him a unique position in the world of academic sport. At a time when well- meaning but misguided criticism of the game of football showed a tendency to sweep cer tain elements of the American public into the position of extremists his judgment was instrumental in guiding the movement into saner channels. It is even said that he was summoned by telegraph one day to the White House to give the President " a line " in things athletic. Certain it was that he believed in athletics so long as they embodied the ideal of sport ; and he served his LTniversity as an honorary adviser in all those questions which arise in connexion with " the games " in an age which tended to professionalize every branch of its activities. Cambridge men in this respect will see in him a kind of American Ben" Latham.
As with other strong characters, tho ordinary person allowed himself to be too easily mesmerized by the vigour of his personality, forgetting the unremitting intellectual labour and the solid output of his work, with which he never allowed a lucrative and engrossing private practice to interfere. A friendship with Lister, whom he first met in the "sixties," ranked him early as a pioneer of antiseptic surgery. As a resident physician of the Philadelphia Hospital, and teacher, professor, and later trustee at the University, as well as adviser to the civic authorities, he was provided with a school upon which ho could impress his views and which he could inspire with his ideals. As an author he treated alike the specific point of surgery, as can be seen from his tract upon Dislo- cation of the Tendon of the Long Head of the Biceps Muscle, as well as the more discursive subject : The Supposed Curative Effects of Opera- tions per ee was the title of another of his books. He acted too as editor, not only editor in name, of more than one epitome of surgery.
He was always at home in London. Ho liked its life, and enjoyed with the quick perceptions of an educated American the interests and friendships which it offered. Characteristically, while enjoying the hospitality of the Reform Club, he never failed to spend at tIth large windows overlooking Pall Mall an idle moment or two snatched from the ceaseless activity of his London visits. Was there something symbolical in this of a periodical craving in his professional and intellectual work to stand as it were' aloof for a few moments from tho crowd to which he ministered or lectured before rushing out to mix with it again ? Such questions arc always suggested by lives that draw their motor-power from ceaaeless overwork.
Ho was over in Europe just before the war broke out, and on his return he embodied in a pamphlet, afterwards expanded into a much fuller work, A Text-Book for Americans, his ideas as to the origin of the war and the ideal attitude of Americans towards it. This was followed by another book, Germany and Democracy, which has made perhaps a more successful appeal in England, and this again by article after article taking up every phase of the war, every argument of the pro-Germans, as well as every move of the United States Administration. Neither Americans nor Englishmen can quite understand the full meaning of his action through these months. To his own countrymen, even those of them most bitterly opposed to GerMany, the turbulent and boisterous expression of his views, well known and understood by those who had had experience of his controversial methods, seemed to rank him as a firebrand. Here was an irresponsible citizen using the prestige of a great professional and social reputation to embarrass the President at an epoch in the history of the United States which has never had its like for gravity. We Englishmen, on the contrary, sure of the justice of our cause and forgetful of the change in the position of the United States brought about by twenty months of war, are apt to take for, granted- the fearless expression of a prominent. American's approvaL Englishmen, again, little realize the respect in which Americans of German origin are held in the United States. With the honourable tradition of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" well known in Philadelphia, it needed an act of no small courage and a deliberate narrowing of friend- ships on the part of Dr. White to take the attitude he took-
That is the debt of England. To most Americans he is, however, con- nected even more with France. Always a generous man himself and a " good beggar " for a public cause, ho turned these qualities, which the University of Pennsylvania had cause to know, to the service of the suffering armies of the French Republic. Despite his professional and literary labours, he found time to collect the funds and find volunteers for the great American ambulance hospital which in the summer of 1915 he was able to set up in France. The activities of this hospital, its splendid equipment, the marvels that were wrought in it, have all been told elsewhere. Visitors to it sometimes had the honour to be escorted through it by its founder. They came away inspired by the burning faith in, and sympathy for, France in this hour of agony. There was nothing boastful in Dr. White's demeanour, though thero was much to boast about on every side. "It is the least we can do for France," ho said, and one knew the implication in the words of emphasis.
He left France in September. A fortnight after the landing in New York he developed the spinal disease which showed that his strength was overtaxed. Diagnosed first as mere neuritis, at the end of a month it had become clear that it was a spinal disease of a hopeless character. He kept it at bay for months, but as paralysis of the lower limbs set in he was confined first to his house and then to a recumbent position on a couch. His brain remained untouched, and he summoned to his bedside University or hospital officials and all those engaged upon the work ho had relinquished. So it remained from February to April, when pneu- monia set in. From that it was a question only of hours, and bn April 24th, at six o'clock in the afternoon, ho died in the sixty-sixth year of his life. The chief newspaper of his city, in speaking of his character, applied to him words written by himself of the master at whose feet he learned his surgery : " Chirurgus peritissimus, scriplor ct doctor clarissi- mus rir reneratus et carissimus." That is the tribute of men among whom he lived. We shall do well if in reckoning up the toll of those who gave their lives for freedom we do not omit from our list the name of William White.—I am, Sir, &c., Wason.
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