The Gold-Headed Cane

A tall, active man as heavy with honors as with years (82) lolled in a wrought-iron chair on the breezeway of an apartment in Naples, Fla. last week and fiddled with a 10 1/2-ft. cane fishing rod. Peering through the thick glasses he has needed since an operation last year for cataracts, he fussed with the black and yellow flies' that he had tied himself. He ruminated for a moment, then said: "I'm glad I won't be there. It would be embarrassing."

By "there" he meant the Chicago meeting of the American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists, which was awarding its highest honor, a gold-headed cane, to George Hoyt Whipple. The award had to be made in absentia because Dr. Whipple, allergic to the pollens of Northern elms and oaks, refused to leave his Florida retreat.

Born in New Hampshire, the son and grandson of physicians, Dr. Whipple got his M.D. at Johns Hopkins under such great teachers as Sir William Osier and Harvey Gushing, and soon became a teacher and investigator in their tradition. After getting a medical research unit started at the University of California, Dr. Whipple was lured East to be the first dean of what was, in 1921, little more than a scar on the face of the earth: the University of Rochester's new School of Medicine and Dentistry. In his 32 years as dean, Dr. Whipple made it one of the top U.S. schools, competing with Harvard, Cornell and his own Hopkins.

Unlike most administrators, Dr. Whippie never gave up research. He shared a Nobel Prize in 1934 for the basic discovery that simple anemia can be corrected with some meats and dried fruits, and that even pernicious anemia (previously always fatal) would yield to liver and its extracts. He has picked up many other honors -- among them, having a digestive disease named for him.

Last week's ceremony of the gold-headed cane harks back to 1689, when Dr. John Radcliffe, physician to the co-sovereigns William and Mary, carried a 40-in. Malacca cane, topped by a crutch-shaped gold head. At Radcliffe's death, the cane was passed on to the first of four eminent successors in the practice of royal medicine. Now a museum piece, it has a hollow head, which may have been used as a vinaigrette, holding aro matic salts to ward off infection. U.S. pathologists revived the tradition of the gold-headed cane in 1919, and its replica was awarded in 1923 to William Henry Welch (1850-1934), another of Whipple's great teachers at Hopkins. Dr. Whipple is the tenth recipient.

During pollen-free months, Dr. Whippie goes back to Rochester on emeritus status, still works from 9 to 4. He gave up teaching pathology a year ago, but only to give younger men a chance, and still lectures on the history of medicine. Practicing what he preaches, Dr. Whipple eats liver at least once a week.

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