University Times

D-Day was three hours old when James George waded out of the icy waters of the English Channel into the hell of Utah Beach. Everywhere around the graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine shells were crashing, men were screaming and running wildly in every direction. A few men who could not stand it any longer shot themselves so they could be evacuated.

As George moved up the beach, wounded men spotted the red cross on his arm and began waving at him and crying for help. Navy corpsmen were supposed to treat such casualties, but they were a mile down the beach. George began doing what he could for the wounded. Frequently, he had to dive into a foxhole while arresting a hemorrhage, splinting a leg or starting plasma.

"The surgeon's task was extremely difficult," George would later write, "trying to treat wounded men and mental patients, to encourage the men, telling them everything would be all right when the surgeon was scared himself was most trying…I've heard many descriptions of initial beachhead landings. I believe if all these were told all at once, while all the shell fire on the beach was going on, one might get an idea of the true happening on Utah Beach." As dramatic as was George's experience, it was not unique for Pitt-trained doctors during World War II. Dozens of medical school graduates served in every theatre of the war. They went to Asia, Africa, the South Pacific, Europe, the Philippines and Japan. They worked in aid stations, island hospitals, induction centers, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and on famous ships such at the Enterprise, Midway, Saratoga and Queen Mary. One Pitt doctor commanded the Army's last mule-drawn ambulance unit. Of that job he said: "I confess I learned a lot from this assignment, not the least important thing was the discovery that the four-legged variety of jackasses are a lot more practical than the two-legged one." During their time in the Army, Navy and Marines, University physicians even managed to conduct research: one discovered the cause of the legendary skin disease "jungle rot;" another developed a new way to remove foreign objects from the cornea, and another a way to treat shell shock with drugs.

Despite all of the drama and accomplishments, though, the story of Pitt medicine's involvement in World War II laid forgotten until recently. It was uncovered by Jonathan Trager, a graduate of the School of Medicine now working as a resident at the New York Hospital, Cornell Medical Center. Trager undertook a study of Pitt-trained and Pitt-associated doctors during the war out of curiosity about his school and its history. He revealed what he learned during last month's C. F. Reynolds Medical History Society Lecture.

"It's not a story that you can read in the history books because it has come from the personal accounts of the graduates themselves," Trager said.

Digging through medical school archives, Trager four years ago re-discovered a long forgotten newsletter called the Pitt Anatomy Snooze. Published from 1943 to 1949, the Snooze was created out of more than 1,000 newspaper clippings, cards and letters sent by medical school alumni to Davenport Hooker, chair of the anatomy department. Hooker and his staff used the material to keep Pitt medical men in touch with each other and what was happening at the school. It was sent to every graduate for whom a military address could be found.

Although many women health care professionals from the University also served during the war, none of the letters in the archives are from women, so Trager was unable to trace any of their experiences during that conflict.

"At its peak, it [the Snooze] reached a worldwide circulation," Trager said. "It was cherished by graduates and served as a vital link to happenings at the medical school and the adventures of colleagues around the world." The School of Medicine's preparations for war actually began five years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Preparations started in 1936, when Pitt's Department of Military Science and Tactics made two courses mandatory for all medical students eligible for the draft. One course covered map reading, military discipline, sanitation, first aid and combat techniques. The other course dealt with preventive medicine in the military.

As the war clouds gathered, the U.S. Surgeon General stepped up training by imposing a wartime schedule on all of the nation's medical schools. Students were forced to attend classes year-round under what became known as the "9-9-9 Program," according to Trager, because nine-month class terms succeeded each other with almost no time off in between.

Two classes also were admitted each year, which Trager found produced more doctors than were needed for the war effort. While many military physicians were overworked, letters to the Snooze reveal that others had absolutely nothing to do. One alumnus who was in charge of a hospital train in France wrote on captured Nazi stationery that he had done "very little professional work" in two and a half years. Another wrote that being in the Navy "meant undergoing medical stagnation amid the scenic pleasures of the Pacific." The military itself, according to Trager, recognized the problems associated with idle health care professionals. The Army even admitted in a 1949 report that it had drafted too many doctors, nurses and dentists during the war. Idleness among such highly trained professionals resulted in boredom the ranks and caused morale problems on the home front, where doctors, dentists and nurses were in short supply.

For every bored, stagnating physician, though, there was one who was horribly overworked and almost constantly had his ingenuity taxed to the limit, Snooze articles show. One Pitt graduate reported from the Philippines that he was seeing 6,000 patients a month, while another performed 41 emergency operations in a single 24-hour period. On Okinawa, a Pitt graduate was given a large dispensary building devoid of all equipment and personnel, and told to proceed as he pleased. Somehow, he got the dispensary up and running and managed to treat 2,200 Marines.

Supply problems resulted in some remarkable innovations that saved unknown numbers of lives. A Pitt graduate assigned to a PT Boat squadron performed an emergency appendectomy with a paring knife. Another invented racks for transporting litter cases on Jeeps and a litter on runners for moving wounded over snow. When his supply of X-ray film ran out, a Pitt graduate stationed in China turned to outdated photographic film. Such film required 20 times the exposure of regular X-ray film, making it dangerous to use, but there were far worse fates at the time. While they practiced their own medicine, the men also had opportunities to observe the way medicine was practiced in other lands. From post-war Japan, a Pitt physician wrote that sterile dressing techniques were so poor that roundworms could be seen crawling out of wounds and insects routinely buzzed dissecting vats.

"Japanese hospitals for the most part are absolutely filthy," he reported to the Snooze. "When a patient enters the hospital, his whole family goes with him and sets up housekeeping in the room. The typical room has a charcoal burner in the corner where the family cooks the patient's food. The whole family lives right there in the room until the patient is discharged. The family even feeds the patient right after an operation." In addition to combat wounds, Pitt physicians treated an unbelievable variety of diseases and other afflictions, many of which they never expected to see outside of a textbook. The diseases facing the doctors included dengue fever, typhoid, malaria, TB, cholera, smallpox, ringworm, diphtheria, dysentery, leprosy, hookworm, beriberi, scabies, lice, and a "wheelbarrow full of scrotum," a mosquito- transmitted disease that caused the scrotum to swell to a horribly large size. Of the latter, one doctor wrote to the Snooze: "We saw many cases of a wheelbarrow full of scrotum. These cases had a more profound impression on our troops than the more deadly malaria and we took advantage of that fact in our malaria discipline program by stressing the fact that the same mosquito that transmitted malaria could give you a large scrotum." Venereal disease was one of the greatest problems faced by doctors during the war. A Pitt graduate reported from Japan that the "women and prostitutes are really all infected with VD." He stressed education, abstinence and condoms to the men, but knew his best chances were with the condoms, "since the men have gone wild with women easily available." From the aircraft carrier Midway, a Pitt physician proudly proclaimed: "Our VD rate soared to 10 times stateside figures, but it's still the best in the fleet due to a very active control program." In Virginia, a graduate reported treating 1,000 new cases of gonorrhea in one month, while from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba another informed the Snooze: "There are a few liberty towns across the bay where the enlisted men and a few officers go, but those places can boast of only two industries, saloons and houses of prostitution, the latter being run in conjunction with the former. What a place to send our youth. Supply them with…a pocket full of rubbers, then I step forth to talk to them on the dangers of venereal disease and tell them to stay away from the houses. Hell, when the liberty boat pulls away from the dock, it's loaded to the water's edge with sailors with only one thought in their minds and that's not going to Sunday school either. It's like giving my little children sticks of peppermint candy, and then telling them not to eat it." Atrocities were something else Pitt doctors encountered first-hand. Arriving in the Philippines shortly after Manila was devastated by the retreating Japanese, a Pitt graduate wrote to the Snooze: "There is scarcely a non-pregnant woman, the raping was so wholesale. However, a Filipino school teacher, herself pregnant, assured me that no Japanese [babies] lived, since the women killed them at birth." Pitt doctors served in dozens of different units during the war, but there were two units made up mostly of medical school graduates. They were the Navy's Mobile Unit 5 and the Army's 27th General Hospital. Both medical units were cited by the military for many accomplishments, according to Trager. Mobile Unit 5 was organized in 1942 and was part of the first convoy to cross the Pacific Ocean without losing a ship. Among the Pitt doctors who were part of it was George Burckley, a 1928 graduate, who would go on to serve as personal physician to presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Unit 5 set up operations on New Caledonia, an island about 1,000 miles east of Australia. While the hospital was still being built, wounded Marines from Guadalcanal were brought to it. The first buildings were prefabricated structures made to hold 500 men, a capacity that was later doubled then tripled. The doctors themselves helped to clear jungle and mix concrete to build the hospital.

The other mainly Pitt unit was the 27th General Hospital, which was organized in 1941 at the request of the Surgeon General. The 27th arrived in New Guinea in July 1944 and built a hospital in 10 days, according to Trager. It was one of the general hospitals closest to the front lines and in its first year treated more than 21,000 patients. Among the many honors that University members of Mobile Unit 5 and the 27th General Hospital earned was a Bronze Star that went to Charles Schmidt, who discovered that jungle rot was an allergic reaction to the anti-malaria drugs troops were being given. Other citations won by Pitt doctors included the Purple Heart, Legion of Merit and French Silver Medal of Honor.

Among all of the horror and honors, the Snooze also contains bits of humor. One medical school graduate wrote tongue-in-cheek that had been appointed the first and only proctologist to the Army's elite. His specialty resulted in a rapid promotion to captain and an assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center near Washington, D.C., where the "cream of the rear ends of the military was put in my hands." Even though they were noncombatants and had treatment readily available to them, several of the Pitt physicians were wounded and contracted the diseases they treated. At least a dozen also were killed while serving in the military, according to Trager.

Although nobody thought about it at the time, the fact that so many Pitt-trained doctors served in World War II changed the medical school forever. Prior to the war, the school essentially was a local institution that trained students almost exclusively from western Pennsylvania and returned them to towns in the region. "It held an inferior place as compared to some of the eastern schools in the state," a report noted after the war. "It was a great satisfaction to the graduates and Dr. Hooker and his staff to find that when faced with the stresses of war theaters, these men could more than hold their own."

–Mike Sajna