John A. Hartwell

It was at the other end of a famous All-American Yale line from Frank Hinkey—that Paul Bunyan of American football in the mythology of the game—that John Augustus Hartwell first swept to glory. Those were tough days in varsity competition. The later restrictions which held teams to an undergraduate status were unthought of. Hartwell played his best football while studying in the Yale Medical School. If anyone thinks that such desperate athletics exhaust the young, he was himself the complete answer. To the end of his long, busy, able and successful life, he overflowed with energy and courage, following not only the heavy daily round of an active surgeon, but exploding into countless other activities of service to his profession, of service to the public, of sport, of friendship.

The forty-seven years of his career as a surgeon and teacher of surgery began in 1893. In 1898 he joined the faculty of the Cornell Medical School, becoming Clinical Professor of Surgery in 1910 and serving as director of surgery at Bellevue Hospital from 1914 to 1928. He was also a consulting surgeon at many other hospitals in New York City and in Westchester, where he made his summer home. As president of the New York Academy of Medicine for two terms he was active in developing its influence and an outspoken advocate of the highest ideals in the practice of medicine. Fee splitting received his blunt denunciation. While he stoutly opposed the socialization of medical service through governmental control, he was equally staunch in insisting that no one should be deprived of hospital care for lack of means. In an age of specialization he saw clearly its dangers, and spoke out forcibly in praise of the old-fashioned family physician with his broad judgment and human wisdom. When the police arrested the physicians and nurses in the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, he uttered the protest in the name of the Academy. In his last years he assumed the post of associate director of the American Society for the Control of Cancer and gave his still vigorous mind and energy to these important labors in the public cause.

Illness restrained his activity but could not depress his spirit in the last years. An embolism kept him in hospital for weeks with his leg in the air. No one who saw him then, with the mighty limb of an All-American end returned to a cradle, could forget the zest for life, the hearty friendship, with which he lived on joyfully and unafraid. On the Admissions committee of the Century he was a particularly faithful member, hobbling to its sessions despite the protests of his game leg. Shooting waterfowl was perhaps his favorite sport, both as a recreation and a cause. He served as the first president of Ducks Unlimited, an organization designed to stimulate the propagation of wildfowl. As he would have desired, the end came suddenly, outdoors on Long Island, as he was about to enter a blind for a day’s shooting.

Geoffrey Parsons
1940 Century Memorials