Dr. Percy Bartlett '00m
IN 1897 Percy Bartlett came to Hanover to stay for three years as a medical student, returning after four years of medical study and practice elsewhere to begin the remaining 47 years of his life as doctor, teacher and resident of this town. During this period, 1897 to 1951, he saw tremendous changes take place in the medical school, in the conditions of medical practice and in the College and town.
The Medical School in his earliest years here received students directly from secondary schools, but shortly raised its requirements to at least three years of college preparation and changed the medical curriculum from three to four years' time. But in 1914 the last two years of this course were withdrawn and all students were transferred to other medical schools for the completion of their course, as is the case today. To the Old Medical Building were added the Nathan Smith Building, the North Medical Laboratories and more and more quarters and facilities for teaching in the evergrowing Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. This hospital, only four years old when Dr. Bartlett came here as medical student, grew from a building with accommodations for 35 patients to one caring for 160 persons, and before he died a new building was being erected to add 120 more beds, with facilities and services undreamed of in the earlier days. He worked under three presidents of the College and four deans of the Medical School. The College and the town grew similarly in this time, undergraduates increasing from five hundred to three thousand, as the town itself increased correspondingly. Among his own profession the three doctors of the early period grew to the number of about forty practicing physicians living here, with about sixty others connected with the hospital under a medical educational program.
PERCY BARTLETT, the man who lived amidst these great changes, was born in Ellsworth, Maine, on April 14, 1871. Left fatherless when nine years old, one of three children, he was brought up by his mother, hampered by limited means. Working summers during his college course at Bowdoin, in part as a railway mail clerk out of Portland, he majored in the classics, winning a prize in his Latin course, played football, joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon Greek letter society, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa by the time of his graduation in 1893 with the degree of A.B. To help repay the money he had to borrow to complete his college course, he taught school, first in Quechee, Vt., and later as principal and teacher of Latin in the high school of Thomaston, Maine. In 1897 he entered Dartmouth Medical School as a student, graduating in the class of 1900. During the next four years he was interne and then resident in surgery at the Haymarket Relief Station of the Boston City Hospital.
In 1904 after this excellent medical experience came the event which was to shape his remaining years. He was asked to come to Hanover to teach in the Medical School and become a member of the surgical staff of the hospital, as well as a practitioner of medicine in the town. This invitation was at the desire and request of two of his younger Dartmouth teachers, Dr. John M. Gile and Dr. Gilman D. Frost, who were his warm friends and who were anxious to, and did, befriend him in every possible way after he was installed in Hanover. His coming relieved both men in their heavy load of teaching and also in their medical practice, as he took over an ever increasing portion of surgical work, especially in the treatment of fractures, and as he carried on a growing general practice of medicine.
When he left the Boston City Hospital, Dr. Bartlett married Miss Jane Potter, of Pembroke, Ontario, a nurse, trained at that hospital, where she had assumed the position of a head nurse. The couple settled in Hanover and a year later their only child, Elizabeth, later to become Mrs. Kenneth N. Ogle, was born. In the earlier years in Hanover they lived in the combination stone, brick and wood house, then standing between the present sites of Wheeler and Steele Halls, and later destroyed by fire. In 1911 they moved to their own house, built by them in the northern part of town near Lyme Road, overlooking the Vale of Tempe and a part of the golf links.
During the first eleven years of teaching in Dartmouth Medical School Dr. Bartlett was instructor in surgery, anatomy, materia medica, obstetrics and therapeutics, but after the change in the status of the Medical School he confined his teaching to surgery and was made professor of that subject in 1915, a chair he occupied in active service until 1939, when he was made professor emeritus. The variety of subjects he taught indicates the range of his activities, not only in teaching but in their application to the general practice of medicine in the community and over an area increasingly larger, especially up and down the Connecticut Valley. With the gradual growth of the hospital in size and importance in northern New England, he was more and mote busy in surgical work at the hospital itself, and as time went on and others came to take up the load of medical practice he confined himself more closely to his chosen field of surgery.
Surgical practice was greatly increased for Dr. Bartlett at the death of the senior member of the surgical staff, Dr. John M. Gile, in 1925, but two years later there was formed the Hitchcock Clinic, with five founding members, of whom he was one, in which he continued until his retirement from active practice in 1936 at the age of 65. This change of status from newly made surgeon in chief of the hospital and oldest practitioner of medicine in town to one of five, carrying on group practice as partners, was a step deliberately accepted by Dr. Bartlett, even at what may have seemed to him at the time a financial sacrifice and loss of prestige. This was because he be- lieved in the idea, in the value of such a group in this area and in the qualities of the other men with most of whom he was to be associated for the remainder of his years of practice. With only a few subtractions, the addition of new members to make a group today of forty doctors shows that he was amply justified in his evaluation of the venture and of its initiating members.
During the 32 years of his active practice Dr. Bartlett was Medical Referee for Grafton County from 1913 to 1918. He served during the First World War with the rank of captain, later major, in three army hospitals, during the last year and a half of which he was Chief of the Surgical Staff at Camp Merritt, a debarkation point for returning soldiers, in New Jersey.
Dr. Bartlett was a member of various medical organizations, including Grafton County Medical Society, New Hampshire Medical Society and the American Medical Association. He was also a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and, in its earlier years, of the New England Surgical Society. During these years for some time he served as a trustee of the Church of Christ in Hanover.
FOLLOWING his withdrawal from practice in 1936 and from teaching in 1939, Dr. Bartlett retired from medical activities to his home, where he busied himself in his garden, which he had gradually developed to a state of beauty and excellence that were a great source of pleasure and satisfaction to himself and his family. When not in the garden he was usually to be found with his books, lifelong friends, never relinquished during his entire life, and always a deep source of satisfaction to him. Among his reading material he favored most of all, until almost the very last, the classics, especially Greek, with Latin not far behind. As a hobby he collected Bibles, in French and in Greek, as well as books of other types. A Greek or Latin lexicon was often to be seen, close at hand as he read, by his friends as they dropped in to see him. Dickens and Scott were also among his favorite writers. Another interest, pursued alone and with a fellow expert, Dr. Gilman D. Frost, was the study of genealogy, and he included in these researches the early Bartlett Family which went "down" to Maine in the eighteenth century and was responsible for considerable history in his native state.
On July 6, 1951, following an illness of eight days, Percy Bartlett died in the hospital to which for 35 years he had given the best of his skill and ability.
Dr. Bartlett was a quiet and unassuming man, seldom bringing himself to the fore by act or by word, not greatly interested in his profession as a means for the accumulation of wealth or prestige among his fellows, but regarding medicine as a duty and a privilege, whose demands and possibilities he never assumed lightly, and which he met with all the knowledge, experience and devotion he could muster for every case coming under his care. With his fellow doctors he was equally modest. He ordinarily volunteered but little in their meetings, but when asked to give his opinion in any case where he was acting as a consultant he left no doubt as to what he thought, holding fast to his opinion, which he firmly defended with usually convincing reasons. His kindness and fairness with his medical associates were always to be counted upon, and more than one doctor counted him a close friend, gladly confessing his debt to "P," as he was often called, for help and straightforward advice on important occasions. If he ever lost his temper, such a situation was hardly imagined among his friends, even when they heard the story of the somewhat aging Dartmouth professor, whose wife was expecting her first and belated addition to the family. The husband felt his responsibility very keenly for the events so soon to come and Dr. Bartlett had already suffered from his unceasing insistence. After a busy day's work the doctor was awakened one night at three o'clock by the ringing of his telephone, to learn that the speaker was this same prospective father, who had suddenly realized that he was in the midst of painting his house and that turpentine might become a serious menace to his wife's condition, and should he immediately leave the offending house? The answer is not known, but it is believed by Dr. Bartlett's friends that the patience he always showed must have been sorely tried on this occasion.
In his teaching over a term of 35 years, Dr. Bartlett impressed his students with his complete mastery of whatever subject he taught, his deep love and respect for his profession and first concern at all times for the welfare of his patient, whose interests transcended every other consideration in the mind of his doctor or his student, the doctor-to-be. This feeling of confidence in the thorough knowledge and deep interest of his teacher helped to offset in the mind of the student a possible feeling of the need of greater stimulation than that offered by the quiet and undramatic character of Dr. Bartlett's classroom procedure. That he was faithful in determining whether or not the student had applied himself to the lesson at hand was never in the least a matter of doubt to the student.
The later years of his life were lived in retirement, apparently in peace and quiet, but were saddened by the poor health of his wife, and it was with regret, as well as satisfaction in their success, that he saw his daughter and son-in-law with the two granddaughters leave their home close to his own, to carry on their lives in Rochester, Minn., where Dr. Ogle is continuing his research in physiological optics at the Mayo Clinic. All these members of his family survive Dr. Bartlett and there are many persons, doctors, former patients, neighbors and close friends, who miss his quiet and reassuring presence among us.
PROFESSOR PERCY BARTLETT
PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY, EMERITUS
