The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Memories of Milton C. Winternitz

Priscilla Waters Norton

The following piece and its companion were given in the Beaumont Room of Yale Medical School as the opening lecture of the 2001-2002 Program for Humanities in Medicine on September 20, 2001. They deal with Milton C. Winternitz, Dean of the School in the 1920's, and speak for themselves. We have not edited them but present them as they were given.

  It has occurred to me that we would not be enjoying the special ambiance of this room if it hadn't been for Milton Charles Winternitz, one of those visionaries who saw the broad picture with the clear focus and minute detail of an Eliot Porter, or a Peter Breugel and this room is an example of how he planned and built this medical school. When he came to Yale from Johns Hopkins to be Professor and Chairman of Pathology in 1917, two of the buildings still in use dated from the Federal period and the only new building was the Brady Building now a fraction of the maze across Cedar Street and the general academic level was in keeping with the buildings. It was a dismal picture but Doctors Flexner, William Welch and a few people at Yale thought the medical school was worth saving. Dr Welch knew his man Winternitz had the ability, the energy and the vision to rebuild the pathology department at a time when pathology was the central discipline of medical research. Three years after coming to Yale, Winternitz was elected Dean, and fifteen years later he was riding the crest of phenomenal success, when his outstanding hand picked faculty revolted, forcing his resignation. The task we set ourselves was to find out why and what really happened and we are both comfortable with our conclusions. I can tell you from personal observation that Winternitz changed the neighborhood as much in fifteen years as it has changed since 1945 when I first laid eye on Cedar Street, and when he left the deanship the tail, (the Medical School) was threatening to wag the Bull Dog!

The last time Levin Waters, my first husband, and I visited Winter at Treetops he told us he had spent the summer going through his files, leaving us only what he wanted us to know. Those archives are here at Yale and I have been through them twice now. Naively thinking I could unscrew the inscrutable, I now think there were times when Winter must have asked himself "Why do I DO THAT?" We started our research in the usual way, by interviewing colleagues, family members and former students. Some of the stories were perfectly pitched to the tone of the man I knew.

  Winter was born in the Jewish section of East Baltimore and his father was a doctor. I don't think he enjoyed being a child or identified with his family, showing only a perfunctory sense of duty to his mother. He entered the freshman class at Johns Hopkins College at fourteen and graduated from the Hopkins when his contemporaries were starting medical school. He worked his way up in Pathology, Dr. Welch's department and by the time he came to Yale at age 32, he had a wife and two children. He had married one of his students (who was older than he and also a doctor), Helen Watson, a daughter of Thomas Watson the co-inventor of the telephone and he became very close to the Watsons, they were his chosen family, referred to as "Grandma and Grampa".

  Helen gave birth to three more children and Winter had been Dean for six years when she developed kidney disease, poor woman suffered, an invalid, for four years before she died. There are no known letters to Helen from Winter, that very important link is missing, but he saved her letters to him. There were enough to convince me that he confided in her as he did to no one else, and may even have reciprocated in her very loving language. She knew what was going on in the medical school and painted a picture of simple pleasures at home. I sent copies of a few of letters to his son Bill and daughter Mary. They couldn't imagine anyone calling their father Daddy Boy and signing herself Pie face. Then I was given a packet of Winter's letters to his secretary, Jean Barnes, who married Harry Greene, Winter's successor as Chairman of Pathology, they are the only letters in Winter's hand that express real tenderness. Some start with a rebus, some with a code word of sorts and close with an attempt at cute endings. The content is all business, but the spirit is uniquely personal.

  Winter's letters to Helen when he was in Europe in 1929 recruiting Fulton for physiology and Kahn for psychiatry were probably mostly business but still too personal to keep, he may even have told her what he was really thinking, then used them to write his reports of the trip, leading me to think Helen's death was the fork in his road, because she was his colleague and until her illness a true partner who had a steadying influence on him. A person studying the archives cold would have no clue that Winter's wife was ill before the last year of her life, but in the Angell archives, there is a letter to a member of the Corporation expressing President Angell's great concern for Winternitz whose wife was desperately ill with no family member to help with their five children. That year Winter sent the three eldest children away to school and added weekly news letters to his routine.

  They were typed and mimeographed by his secretary then sent to all the family, saving a copy for his files. They never say what he is thinking or elaborate on what he is doing, only what he has accomplished. He refers vaguely to projects he is working on, interesting discovery in the lab. The children hated them and rightly dubbed them the "Weekly Bores." What Winter really loved was teaching and his former students were happy to share their recollections. Some were afraid of him but most of them said he was an outstanding teacher whom they never forgot. The class was lucky when there was someone like Max Taffel among them who enjoyed matching wits with the Professor, then they were treated to a verbal sparring match when Winter would say "Tolliver, up front!" (He had nicknames for most of them). More often than not some students were intimidated and forgot what they knew, then he became sarcastic and was even known to throw an organ at a person he thought wasn't paying attention. One woman not only caught the fresh organ but threw it right back at him. He liked that sort of spirit.

  His students told about Winter's terrifying teaching methods. I remember that his voice easily reached the back row, but he was a showman. Holding up a test tube he knew was filled with pea soup, he would discussed puss, how puss forms, why it forms, the texture and color of puss focusing on that test tube and at the end he would drink it! Shocking!, but unforgettable. There was a similar scenario for teaching the clotting factor with current jelly standing in for a blood clot, or he might paint a student's glasses with red ink to illustrate his point. He was well known for getting fresh animal organs to impress upon the class the need to really see what they were looking at and assume nothing.

  Then there was the time Winter had ten minutes to spare before a student interview. (For years he picked the class, no admissions committee.) Taking off his tie, he put on a lab coat and crossed Cedar Street to check something. A young man in a flashy convertible with a pedigreed dog hailed Winter, thinking he was a janitor, asked him to watch his dog while he went for an interview with the Dean. Winter said sure, he'd take good care of the dog and directed the man to the Sterling entrance. Then he and the dog headed for a side door. (Remember, he helped design the building.) When the man, Carlson was his name, appeared for his interview he was surprised to see his dog comfortably ensconced in the Dean's office and a little dark man wearing a bow tie and jacket sitting behind the desk. It was tempting to say the dog had a better chance of being accepted than his master, but this story has a surprise ending I only learned recently. The applicant to medical school was a man with a birth injury which made him quite spastic except when he was completely focused. He applied to Yale because of the Yale system initiated by Winter.

  Winter thought students should be treated as junior colleagues, believing that by the time they reached medical school they should be motivated enough to study without the interruption and stress of tests, free to pursue an idea on their own. The students were examined at the end of the second year at which point should they not pass they had an extra year to make up deficiencies before proceeding to the last two years when they took their National Boards. With such a system Carlson thought he might get through medical school and help other spastics. He was accepted in the 1920's and went on to a very productive career, even writing a book about his life. He appreciated the way Winter showed him no special favors. Winter once told him flat out that he was nervous because he didn't know the answer. When he knew the answer he'd have no reason to be nervous!

  The Yale system did not require attendance at lectures. Max Taffel found pharmacology dull and strictly textbook stuff, a waste of time, so he skipped those lectures. The professor told Winter he was going to fail Taffel for non- attendance so Winter called Taffel into his office to tell him it was time to hit the books, letting him know that he was aware that pharmacology was not being well taught. Taffel scored the highest mark in pharmacology in the country that year.

Now, for vintage Winternitz, one of the letters we received quoted Winter as saying "the synovial fluid lubricates the joints just as oil lubricates the cylinders in your father's Rolls Royce, What? your father doesn't have a Rolls Royce! I thought the only reason we let you into this medical school was because we thought your father had a Rolls Royce." On hearing the trash cans being emptied into a truck, right outside the window as he was talking, he'd cock his head toward the window and say "Last year's class." He didn't tolerate fools, but firmly believed it took the best teachers to teach the poorest students and that the brightest students only need guidance, they should be free to work and study. I should add that he taught his full course in Pathology all the time he was Dean and even did his fair share of autopsies while he was Dean. Dunham Kirkham of the class of '37 wrote that he liked to assist when Winter was performing an autopsy because "At the table he was calm, not terrifying and we learned more than at the lectures. He was more patient explaining things and answering stupid questions."

  Bill Winternitz and his sister Mary Cheever were both under the impression that the conspiracy to oust Winter from the Deanship was behind Winter's back at the time their grandfather was dying in Florida. It did happen late December 1934, when Mr. Watson was dying, but Winter was in New Haven and in constant communication with President Angell, John Fulton, C.E.A.Winslow, Cushing, and even Bayne-Jones who succeeded him as Dean. It is also clear that Winter was in agreement that Bayne-Jones should succeed him. The ironies are that there was a similar meeting fifteen years earlier to displace Dean Blumer, we found pencil notes on a sheet of yellow lined paper "The meeting held at Mr. Stokes" in the archives, the handwriting is not Winter's but the issues, and the wording convinced us that Winter was the ringleader! The second irony is that Winter brought Bayne -Jones to Yale.

  So what did he do wrong? I think it boils down to two serious flaws, he didn't always keep his word, he would agree with the consensus in committee, then go right ahead with what he wanted to do. Two, he wooed an outstanding faculty with evangelical zeal promising great opportunity and freedom then paid them poorly and treated them like children. No wonder they were fed up. He accomplished great things but was not universally liked as a person, admired but not liked. I am sure Howard has a more profound explanation.

  The students on the other hand, loved him, They gave him a party refusing to invite any other faculty, it was on Valentine's Day 1935 and a real love fest. They presented him with this watch, so of course I wore it today. Winter was no longer Dean but he had his department a textbook to finish and since 1932 a very colorful and social second marriage and four step children. More important, Hitler was already threatening peace in Europe by 1935.

  Winter had worked on poison gases right after coming to Yale in 1917 and wrote a very fine book on the subject. He was still our best expert on poison gas in 1941 when he was tapped to organize research and training in war gases by the National Research Council, and to rebuild Edgewood Arsenal. He became one of the key players in wartime and post war medicine in Washington. His knowledge of classified chemical substances put him in a position to orchestrate and facilitate early chemotherapy research and trials. For instance he knew that nitrogen mustard destroyed lymphoid tissue in mice and he told Goodman and Gillman who were at Yale to work on it. The tumor registry and the Atlas of Pathology were started by him.

  For nine years he divided his time between New Haven, Washington D.C. and traveling about the country. Bill Winternitz told me that Winter brought back the first penicillin from England in 1942. I know he visited and had long talks with both Florey and Fleming and brought back voluminous notes but I found no written confirmation that he was carrying penicillin in 1942, however I am sure some of you here know more about that than I do.

  I met Winter in June of 1945 and had many chances to observe him in action. He developed a genial public persona, leading me to think he learned to tone down his abrasive ways with his peers. A letter to Polly, his second wife dated August 1944 tells her, "It is taking all I have in energy and intelligence but there is a satisfaction in it that has been lacking in most of the work here in New Haven for some time. And so I am entirely content to go on and do whatever is possible for the Emergency and for the period now under consideration, that is the post war planning, on rather a broad National scale." That was what he liked to do best aside from teaching. His last brainchild was a plan for universal public service after high school including a plan that would encourage young people to stay in school until they graduated by giving them school credits for work in the public sector, he was particularly interested in developing a steady supply of nurses.

His retirement from Yale was in June, 1950. A well lubricated dinner was held in this room. Avrill Liebow presented him with the Samurai sword he brought back from the Pacific at the end of the War. When Winter saw it he said, "By God I'm going to leave my mark on this place" whereupon he was lifted on the shoulders of the tallest men to scratch his initials over that door. And there they are ! Thank you .

Published: October 11, 2001