Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [27]
He did, and breezed through Knox College in Galesburg in two years, then started Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago at eighteen. He earned his M.D. four years later, in 1918.
“We were sixty strong,” Loyal wrote of his freshman class at medical school. “There were two Jews and two Negroes. One of each was liked and Early Nancy: 1921–1932
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accepted totally by the class; the other two were wholly disliked. It was not a question of racism; it was character and personality.”52 Of the two Jewish students, he noted, “Morrie Mazel . . . had been a chronic irritant to the whole class throughout our four years. Pushing, aggressive, confident, and smart, he pre-empted a front-row seat in every clinic. Being picked up and bodily passed back over the heads of his fellow students to a rear row didn’t stop Morrie. The next time he’d take a front-row seat, grinning and inviting battle. The other Jewish boy in the class was jolly, fat Meyer Chapman; well-liked, quiet, friendly, and one of us.”53
Loyal was just as sanguine in describing himself as a medical student.
For part of his time at Northwestern he boarded at the house of a classmate named Howie Goodsmith, who was the son of a doctor but an in-different student. Loyal records Dr. Goodsmith telling him “that Howie had a sense of humor, a personality that attracted people, the ability to relax, all of which, he said, I didn’t possess but should try to develop.”54
After marrying Pearl and completing his internship, Loyal took his bride home to Galesburg and set up a general practice with a Northwestern roommate, Robert Gunning. The return to small-town life lasted one year and one month. Loyal was eager to specialize, so in August 1920 he and Pearl moved back to Chicago, where they rented a one-room apartment on the South Side. Pearl went to work as a filing clerk,55 while Loyal spent the next three years earning his master’s and doctor’s degrees in surgery at Northwestern. At the same time he served as surgical assistant to the distinguished Dr. Allen B. Kanavel, the chairman of the department of surgery at Northwestern, who became his lifelong mentor.
In the fall of 1923, on Kanavel’s recommendation, Loyal was taken on as a voluntary assistant to Boston’s legendary Dr. Harvey Cushing, generally considered to be the great pioneer of modern neurosurgery. The move to Boston worried Loyal: “I was concerned about how Pearl would occupy her days; I hoped she wouldn’t work and we could live on my fellowship income. Maybe she would become more interested in my professional education and training.”56 Loyal now had a fellowship from the National Research Council, which provided a stipend of $166 per month.
Cushing was a forbidding figure, both professionally and socially. Born in Cleveland in 1869, he was fourth in a direct line of a family of physicians, at a time when doctors were close to the top of the American social scale. He graduated from Yale in 1891, from Harvard Medical School in 4 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House 1895, and did his residency at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. When Loyal Davis met him, he had been surgeon-in-chief at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for more than a decade. Three years later, his Life of Sir William Osler, the great nineteenth-century medical educator, would win the Pulitzer Prize in biography. His three daughters would become famous for marrying well: Minnie, the eldest, was the first Mrs. Vincent Astor; Betsy wed James Roosevelt, one of FDR’s sons, and later the polo-playing Long Island multimillionaire Jock Whitney; Barbara, the youngest, known as Babe, struck it rich with her first husband, Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer, then reigned over the international jet set as the wife of William Paley, the head of CBS. “Babe’s father was brilliant but austere—disconnected,” Kay Meehan, a close friend of the Paleys’, told me. “The mother ran the show.”
“Dr. Davis was tremendously influenced by Dr. Cushing,” said