Part one of a five-part series
“A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.”
Forty-four years ago, we moved to Harvard. My neighbor two doors up raised chickens and sold eggs. My neighbor to the rear began raising sheep and Black Angus on the fields where new condominiums stand today. It was safe enough for my daughter and her friend to ride their ponies into the town center and tether them to the front porch when they came in for a snack. It was indeed a rural town. Everyone knew everyone else well enough to smile and greet politely.
It was also a time when the delivery of medicine was about to change dramatically, but no one knew by how much or could guess how quickly.
A dapper man in Bermuda shorts
Other than our near neighbors, we were still too new in town to know more than a handful of people. So it came as a surprise to me, as I was wandering around the Common on the day of an event, to spot a dapper man in Bermuda shorts, knee-highs, and tweed jacket. More to the point, I recognized him. It was one of those moments of recognition that cause one to ask, “Where have I seen that man before?” I smiled at him and he cheerfully smiled back with a head nod one might get from the local vicar who doesn’t know who you are but isn’t going to insult you if he is supposed to know you. He wandered off his way, and I mine, before it hit me: Dr. Paul Dudley White, Eisenhower’s doctor!
I soon learned he owned two of the prettiest little houses in town, straddling Poor Farm Road where the stream runs past. We never had more than a nodding acquaintance, but when he politely nodded, I knew who he was even if he never knew me.
Dr. Paul Dudley White became famous to the public as President Dwight Eisenhower’s personal physician when he ministered to the stricken leader after a heart attack. The headlines with his full name in bold type filled the newspapers for days: “Dr. Paul Dudley White declared the President fit to return to work.” That was big news then. That a doctor would declare someone fit enough to return to work was not uncommon. However, to declare a world leader fit enough was newsworthy.
Practicing what he preached
Although Eisenhower’s heart attack introduced Dr. White to the general public, his colleagues in medical circles already knew him very well. His influence reached beyond his own profession and his recommendations, although newsworthy in 1955, have become every health-care professional’s mantra.
When you learn a new word, it suddenly appears in everything you read. Once I knew who he was, I saw Dr. White often. He was easy to spot because, consistent with his own preaching, he walked or rode his bike—and always in jacket and tie. Once I spotted him effortlessly pedaling by with a light topcoat flowing behind him, like Mary Poppins. (At least I couldn’t imagine anyone else riding about that way.) His simple sermon of preventive medicine included a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet; no smoking; maintenance of normal weight, blood pressure, and blood sugar; and exercise.
Beginning his career as a pediatrician, Dr. White also believed that many of our health characteristics are inherited from our parents. If your parents lived to be 80, it is likely that you will, too.
His own father was a family physician who taught medicine at Tufts while maintaining a practice that included house calls to tend to his patients, traveling by horse-drawn buggy. At the age of 71, the senior Dr. White died of coronary artery disease.
Father of American cardiology
As the first pediatric intern at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Paul Dudley White became intrigued by the occurrences of congenital heart disease. He examined the hearts of an elephant and a whale as a way to study mammalian physiology. It has been written that he wanted to dissect the heart of the earth’s largest mammal, the grey whale. If he had not been such a preeminent physician, his seeming obsession with the hearts of whales would have been considered odd.
Dr. White came to be called “the father of American Cardiology” because he was instrumental in the establishment of the National Heart Institute. He was its executive director and spent much of his time raising funds for heart research. A beneficiary of his dedication was the National Heart Institute (now known as the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute or NHLBI) that in turn conducted the Framingham Heart Study, an ambitious project in health research.
At the time, little was known about the general causes of heart disease, but the death rates for coronary vascular disease had been increasing steadily since the beginning of the 20th century and had become an American epidemic. The Framingham Heart Study became a leader in research.
The second generation of the Framingham study patients is well under way, with sons and now daughters of the original participants joining in the study. Women were finally added to the cohort of participants when it was at last agreed that their physical makeup is not the same as men’s.
Dr. Paul Dudley White died in 1973 of a stroke at the age of 87 and is buried in Bellevue Cemetery.
