The More Things Change … (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Dr. Alan R. Moritz with skeleton at Harvard Medical School's Department of Legal Medicine, circa 1946.

My husband is working on a biography of his grandfather, Dr. Alan R. Moritz, who was a pioneer in forensic pathology before it was sexy. Last week we spent a couple of days prowling through the archives of Harvard Medical School, where Dr. Moritz was hired to set up the first Department of Legal Medicine in the late 1930s.

Dr. Moritz’s life story deserves to be told, starting with his childhood in Nebraska, where growing up with German-speaking grandparents gave him the language skills needed to continue his studies in Nazi-era Berlin. He was an ambitious young man, exceptionally well-educated compared to, say, my grandparents, who were lucky to complete the eighth grade in north-central Arkansas.

Box after box, folder after folder, page after page were filled with reminders both of how much our technology has changed in the past eight decades and how little human nature has. Dr. Moritz relished research — my father-in-law remembers his dad deliberately burning his forearm when a military grant was funding a study of flamethrowers — but much of his decade at Harvard seems to have been spent dictating formal letters about administrative minutiae. The letters required to straighten out the department’s accounts after a $70 invoice from a photographer was inadvertently paid twice were frustrating all these years later.

If your accounting office gets snippy over sloppy paperwork, imagine the frustration of the clerks who were keeping ledgers on paper.

The Department of Legal Medicine was unfailingly polite in its external correspondence but candid internally. One of the files full of incoming correspondence is labeled “Quacks.” (The department rejected entirely the idea that diseases like diabetes could be diagnosed from fingerprints.)

Dr. Moritz received a long letter from a female funeral director offering to apply her skills in cosmetic reconstruction to the problem of an unidentified skull found in the Boston area. He forwarded the letter to the dean with a request that he find some gentle way to “get rid of her.” I must confess to kicking a few emails up to my boss for disposition over the years, but I got the feeling this woman’s primary shortcoming was the fact that she was a woman who claimed some expertise.

As head of the department, Dr. Moritz also served as medical examiner for Suffolk County, Massachusetts, an arrangement that benefited both the school and the citizenry. As the department was getting established, he conducted as many as 300 autopsies per year, and his annual reports contrasted the suspected manner of death going in with the official determination based on the autopsy. Along with homicide, suicide, accident and natural causes, a routine category was “abortion.” The only official records kept of illegal abortions were those that were fatal to the mother.

While he was at Harvard, Dr. Moritz’s first professional employer, Western Reserve University at Cleveland (now Case Western Reserve) tried to lure him back. He did eventually return to WRU in 1949, having grown weary of administrative duties. But in a time-honored tradition that continues in private-sector employment to this day, he used every job offer as a way to get a raise.

I had been to Boston only once before, on our honeymoon in 1989. This time we did not do as many touristy things, although I did insist on eating lobster. Instead, we got acquainted with the neighborhood near Harvard Medical School (which is actually in Boston, not at Harvard’s main campus in Cambridge).

If you want to feel old and unhip, a Facebook friend told me, go to Boston. Or you can disguise yourself as a local by carrying a backpack at all times, preferably equipped with a metal water bottle.

While national tempers flared over the Trump administration’s new policy of using vulnerable children as hostages to push through funding for a border wall that the Mexicans were supposed to pay for, it was impossible not to notice just how many of the people around us were immigrants. Obviously, foreign accents are not unusual back home in Little Rock, but it’s nothing like Boston.

We used Uber three times in Boston, and every driver was an immigrant. The first two were almost completely silent, unlike the Uber drivers at home, who won’t shut up. The third, Patrick from Uganda, knew nothing about Arkansas except Bill and Hillary Clinton, whom he appreciates very much because he was a beneficiary of a microlending program they helped establish in his home country.

He also thinks Bill Clinton was Monica Lewinsky’s victim. Now, Patrick, you’ve gone too far.

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.