A World-Ranging Surgeon

The annual Award of Merit from the Dartmouth Club of Bergen County was presented to Dr. Spencer T. Snedecor '20 of Hackensack, N.J., at the club's annual spring dance on March 25. The citation, summarizing his distinguished career as surgeon and medical missionary, was as follows:

This award is presented each year to an outstanding Dartmouth alumnus from Bergen County. Such a man is selected on the basis of the breadth, depth and worth of his contributions to his fellow man.

Because you have not been content to rest upon the laurels of a preeminently successful career as a surgeon with an enviable local practice, but have extended your influence for good far beyond these confines and have left the mark of your personality literally across the world, you, Spencer Treadwell Snedecor, are most eminently qualified to receive this award.

As a member of the Executive Committee of the Christian Medical Council of the National Council of Churches, you have done much to encourage consultants in medicine and surgery to carry good medical practice to the common people at the far ends of the earth.

Endowed with the conviction that doctors have a world-wide responsibility and opportunity to serve their fellow man, you have combined an urge to travel with your services as orthopedic consultant in the retarded areas of the world.

From the Belgian Congo to Iraq, from Oman to Nepal, from numerous semi-civilized states in Central Asia to the little visited countries of South America, you have visited and offered your services there, and have demonstrated surgical operations so that doctors in the missions might learn to carry on when you were not there. Your work as a medical missionary has been a labor of love and without thought of financial remuneration.

You are remembered by your classmates in the Class of 1920 as an unassuming Navy student on the campus at Hanover. Later, when your country needed you, you served with distinction as Lt. Colonel in the Army. In the years of the country's great depression, you were appointed by the Governor as a member of the Emergency Relief Council of the State of New Jersey.

You have served as President of the New Jersey State Medical Society and as a member of the National Trauma Committee of the American College of Surgeons.

Church and College have also been recipients of your unstinting devotion. As an elder of the Second Reformed Church of Hackensack, and in numerous previous capacities, your wise counsel through the years has left its enduring mark. Your most recent effort for Dartmouth is to serve as head of the North Jersey area of the fund-raising committee which has already produced over $5,000,000 for the expansion of the Dartmouth Medical School.

Time does not permit even to list here your many other contributions toward a happier world. This award - a watercolored etching of Dartmouth Hall — is a token of appreciation for all your efforts so unstintingly given to the betterment of mankind.

Spencer Snedecor '20 receiving citation