It was during this already overworked sophomore year that I realized there was more to life than books. There was wine. There were women. There was song. As undergraduates we were invited to too many dances, and I decided I was going to go to every one I was invited to and have a good time at each. During the winter months I also went north to ski almost every weekend. In general, my life became a pretty big mess. I got very little sleep. More than once, I went into class wearing my tuxedo from the night before. Then in February I got a terrible cold. When I finally got around to seeing the doctor at the college infirmary, he sent me to bed for ten days. The day I got out of bed, there was a duplicate bridge tournament I wanted very much to play in. I played until three in the morning and never felt more tired in my life. I did pass all six courses that spring semester, but I didn't do particularly well in any of them.

Rheumatic Fever

During that summer of 1938, my pace never let up. Right after exams, I went down to New London for the crew races, then raced back to Boston in a friend's sailboat. I arrived back in Salem just in time to be an usher at my cousin's wedding. Two days later, I was aboard the good ship Columbus of the German-American Line, sailing for Plymouth, England, with my friends David Ives and Johnny Brooks. The itinerary called for me to meet my parents and brothers on the Continent after a bicycle tour of England with Dave and Johnny. The three of us didn't live a very healthy life on shipboard. We had almost the cheapest room on the boat, sleeping in a tripledecker below the waterline. It was so horrible in third class that we found a trick way into first class and from there into tourist class. The stewards in first class were always rather suspicious of us when they came to serve tea at five o'clock, but we stuck close to some girls who were traveling in first class with their parents, so the stewards couldn't kick us out. We met a second set of girls, who also provided cover for us, in tourist class. That was a lot of fun.

As soon as we got to Plymouth, we hopped on rented bicycles and went tearing off over hilly country, ending up in a little town called Launcestown. That night I was as dizzy as I had ever been and felt

terrible. The following morning I went to see a doctor who said, "Obviously you've had a strenuous crossing. Get a couple days' rest before you continue your travels." My condition persisted. After completing my itinerary in Great Britain earlier than planned, I parted company with my friends and headed for Berlin where I joined my Grandmother Bosson,' Mother, my brother Peter, my aunt and uncle, and some Bosson cousins. To get there, I flew across the English Channel, my first flight in a plane. Then I had a couple of days in Paris on my own, before getting on the Berlin train. I got in a taxi at the Berlin station and arrived at the Hotel Bristol without enough money to pay my taxi fare. Fortunately, someone in the family was there to bail me out.

I told my mother about my poor physical condition, and she insisted that I go to a doctor in Berlin. He told my mother, "Oh, he's fine. All this boy needs is some mountain climbing." Later that summer in Switzerland, where Father and Donny joined us, we did do some climbing. On one expedition, while roped together on a snowfield on our way up the Breithorn, I said that there was something very wrong. A guide took me back to the hotel, where my condition did not improve.

We went on to Italy where we spent two weeks on the Mediterranean. Then we sailed home aboard the Italian liner Saturnia. By the time we got back to Marblehead, the exhaustion I felt was indescribable. I slept all night and woke up feeling worse than when I went to bed. I went to see Dr. Cadis Phipps. He said that I had endocarditis, whatever that was, and that I should take it easy. Under his care, I found my third year at college very different from the other two. I could not exercise. If I went out and rowed a short distance, I felt weird. I continued to go north on weekends with my friends, but I couldn't ski. When I tried to, I got a very unpleasant disembodied sensation. So I took pictures instead. On the positive side, spent more time studying than I had during my sophomore year. As a result I finished up my final year at Harvard in 1939 getting good grades. I missed graduating with honors, but I did manage to complete my studies within the three-year period I had set myself.

1

Once, when sightseeing with us, Grandmother made a memorable pronouncement. While viewing a monument in what is now Innsbruck, Austria, one of us asked her what it was. She answered, “I don't know what it is, children, but it's very important!"

In the summer of 1939, following my third and final year at Harvard, I took a bus to a ranch in Montana. Once there, I knew I was in trouble and called Dr. Phipps. "You had better come home," he said. When I went to see him in Boston, he talked of endocarditis again and used other terms that didn't have any meaning for me or my parents. Then he said, "I think you had better have some real bed rest." I was put in bed for an indeterminate period of time.

This had quite an impact on how I viewed things. As far as I was concerned, I had had it. My life was going to be severely limited from then on. I would not be able to go mountain climbing or ski or play tennis ever again. People were very generous of their time, coming to see me and doing many thoughtful things for me, so that I got to know a lot of people better than before. I also did a lot of reading that I otherwise wouldn't have done. I had several friends in the medical profession who brought me material to read. I started thinking of shifting from engineering into medicine, assuming I would eventually be up and around again.

My parents refused to be disheartened. They set about finding the best cardiologist available. Dr. Phipps was a good doctor, but by this point we knew he wasn't our doctor, because he couldn't explain to us in a helpful way what was going on. After a lot of investigation my parents found Dr. Paul Dudley White, one of the great cardiologists. When the King of Sweden had a heart problem, he called on Paul White. But how to get him to come from Boston to Salem to see me? By sheer coincidence our next-door neighbor, Dick Wiswall, had been Dr. White's roommate at Middlesex School. Through him we got a house call.

I asked my parents not to tell me what day Dr. White was coming, because I was sure that it would worsen my condition by making me apprehensive. I wanted him to see me under the best possible conditions.

On the walls of my room, I had pictures I had taken of friends skiing and sailing. When Dr. White came in at long last, he began by commenting on them. I responded by saying, “I guess I'll never be able to do that sort of thing again."

"Well, how do we know?" he said. “Let's take a look." He took out his stethoscope and listened. "That's a really peppy-sounding heart," he said. He had some tests run. Soon he had diagnosed my condition as rheumatic fever. He did not prescribe any pharmaceutical or surgical remedy but rather encouraged me to slowly get myself up

and about. Dr. White's optimism, combined with my confidence in him, changed my life. Soon after that visit, I was able to get up ten minutes a day, then fifteen minutes, then twenty. After a month I was able to go up and down stairs once in a day. It was not long before I could walk out the front door, then walk to the Wiswalls and back. I finally reached the amazing day when I walked all the way around the block by myself. What a wonderful feeling: I hadn't had so much freedom, exercise, and fresh air in months!

After a half-year of recuperation I was mobile again, and I went to the graduation exercises of my Harvard class in June 1940. By early in the summer, I seemed pretty well cured, and I found I could be quite active again, with Dr. White's blessing. I played a little bit of tennis. I was able to sail with no ill effects. Every time I tried something new and got away with it, I thought, "This is terrific. I never really thought I was going to be able to do this again.” I went back to Harvard that summer to take courses in biology and botany, prerequisites if I was going to pursue my new interest in medicine. It was a pleasant experience. I particularly enjoyed the course in biology.

Gene

I had other pleasant experiences that summer, all stemming from an encounter the previous fall, while I was recuperating in bed. I had received an invitation to the coming-out party of Rosemary Merrill, who summered at her parents' Prides Crossing home known as Avalon. Mother, who had known Mrs. Merrill since their days together at Miss May's School, called for me to say that I would be unable to attend. Not long after that, I got word that Mrs. Merrill was coming over to see me. Little did I know that a very beautiful nineteenyear-old by the name of Rosemary was coming along. Romey, as she was called, was very striking-with black hair, a lovely face, and a lot of bounce. Within the next few months, she visited me two or three

2 Years later, I ran into White's assistant, Dr. Conger Williams, who showed me the file cards White had kept on my case. "We weren't really sure what to do with you,” he confessed. Evidently Dr. White almost decided to put me in a hospital and run catheters into my heart to determine what was going on. In those days that would have been a pretty extreme measure, although it's common practice today.

more times. Her family returned to their winter home in Washington, D.C., and we wrote each other a number of times.

The following summer I thought I would go down and see where the Merrills lived. Anyone else would have called ahead, but I didn't. I was driving around in the area in my old Dodge and headed unannounced up the Avalon driveway. It was considerably longer than I had expected, and the house was bigger. Adolfo, the butler, came to the door and asked what I was doing. I said I was there to see Miss Rosemary Merrill. He let me in. Romey was notified but didn't recognize me when she came down the big circular staircase. She had never seen me standing up! Mrs. Merrill was alerted and very cordially invited me to sit down in the extensive living room. Eugenia, Romey's younger sister, who was known as Gene, was called in. She was dressed in a paint-spattered smock. She had her own studio in the house, devoted exclusively to her painting. As we sat there chatting, I didn't have the finesse to excuse myself after a moderate time. So what else could Mrs. Merrill do? She asked if I would like to stay for lunch. "That would be wonderful!," I said.

Unfortunately, Romey had to leave to go racing in Marblehead; so I had lunch with Gene and Mr. and Mrs. Merrill. Afterwards, I was asked to join them on the porch.

"Sure!" I said. They asked if I had ever played Chinese checkers. I had; so we had a game and a cup of coffee. Finally I did leave, never realizing how displeased Gene had been to have left her paints in deference to an uninvited stranger.

Mother was very curious about such social encounters, and when I got home she asked me about my visit. Didn't Romey have a sister? Had I met her? What was she like? I said, "Well, she's a little bit plump and quite young." I really didn't have a very clear impression of Gene after that first visit, but when I was invited to Avalon on a couple of occasions later that summer, I came to realize that my first observations of her were inaccurate, to say the least.

Postgraduate Studies

When September 1940 rolled around, I had to make a decision on my future. I talked to my old undergraduate advisor, Professor Haertline,