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Revision as of 18:00, 18 December 2017
Gordon Bostwick Maurer
Eulogies
The Catskill Mountain News eulogy was also used as Dr. Maurer’s epitaph.
MOUNTAIN DEW
Thirteen years ago there came here a city chap, trained in one of the great universities.
The other members of his class went to big towns.
He, with the best records of them all, wanted to begin the practice of medicine in a country village.
He had compiled a list of prospective communities. He looked over several and chose us.
An untried city college boy—with magic hands, a keen vision, and uncanny knowledge of both the human body and the soul which activates it.
Soon after arrival he was called upon to care for a life given up as lost. He saved it.
He began to save others. He worked day and night. When he did not have proper apparatus or appliances he built some. When the snows kept him from patients he constructed a snowmobile.
Neither storm nor night nor mud nor snow kept him from the sick.
He took people into his home. It became a veritable hospital.
The fame of the boy spread throughout the section. Men and women from all walks of life asked for his attention.
The community built a hospital that he and others might the better care for those who needed care, medication and operation.
He continued. When a tired body all but gave up, he took a year out and returned to Yale for special work that he might come home and serve better.
He had tired of city pastimes. The lure of the country had been breathed into his soul. Camp, rod and gun, open fires, life in great outdoors gave zest, relief, happiness.
He loved our hills, our mode of life; he knew our ambitions, he smiled at our shortcomings.
He gave freely. Much of the work he did was without charge. Few knew the extent of his help to those who needed help. He served as few had ever served here before.
He was physician, parson, priest, confessor—we told him both our physical and mental troubles and he put us back on the road to reason and living.
Thirteen years he served. It was a life work worth while.
Today our hearts are numb at his loss, our senses befogged to know how to live without him. May we turn from the tragedy of the golden Indian summer morning that knew his death
And in the bleak days of the approaching Thanksgiving season thank god for those thirteen years.
Yours truly, The Mountaineer. ― Clark A. Sanford (editor and publisher), Catskill Mountain News
Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine
From Vol. 11, No. 3 (January 1939). Written by Samuel Clark Harvey, MD – Surgical Department Chair, Yale University School of Medicine.
Gordon Bostwick Maurer, M.D. 1899–1938 — Yale, 1923
It is of common report in this time of the rapid development of the science of medicine that teacher and student alike are no longer infused with that skill in the application of knowledge which is spoken of as the art of medicine nor are they sensitive to the traditional relationship of physician and patient. It is presumed that the scientific method, while it enlarges knowledge, limits the skill of its application and dulls the sensibilities of the practitioner. No longer, so the complaint goes, and every generation repeats it—no longer do the schools turn out those skilled and devoted physicians with whom we were familiar in our youth. There is always that longing for the physician of the past,—a nostalgia for the Doctor of the Old School.
The truth is, of course, that such are present in every generation but only recognized when time and the adversities of life have turned youth into age and made it venerable. Now and then this process is fortuitously interrupted, and we suddenly become aware that we have been unwitting witnesses of a tradition in the making, that we have been entertaining a prophet unawares.
Such was the case with Gordon Maurer of the class of 1923 of the Yale University School of Medicine, who at the age of 39 suddenly and accidently met his death last November. Those who knew him well and were familiar with his work during his preparation for the practice of medicine were early aware that here was a rare mind, seriously searching a scientific understanding of this field. He laid out a program of several years of post-graduate study, at the end of which he anticipated a life-time of work in surgery, preferably in a teaching institution. Toward this end he had completed a year in pathology and an interneship in surgery, when, much to the distress of himself and of his friends, he was forced by circumstances arising at the moment to abandon further study and start in the practice of medicine. At this stage, this meant for him general practice and, inasmuch as it was essential that he be financially independent from the first, in a relatively small community where there was an obvious need for a physician. After canvassing the possibilities in a characteristically thorough manner he entered upon practice in 1926 in Margaretville, New York. From the beginning he was extraordinarily successful,—so much so that his friends in New Haven saw little of him, save when occasionally exhausted by his work he would seek a few days’ respite in a visit to his school and hospital. Once, a few years ago, realizing that he was of necessity assuming responsibilities for which he had not adequate training, he spent the greater part of a year in New Haven seeking by study and observation to further perfect himself in surgery. It was characteristic of him that during this time he perfected an instrument for doing intestinal anastomoses which obviated the necessity of an assistant, not always at hand in his practice.
As he endeared himself to his patients by his skill and devotion, he also came to occupy a position of respect and influence in the community. Most tangible evidence of this was the raising of adequate funds by a “drive” for the building of a small hospital, of which he became superintendent and for which he for the most part assumed the responsibility of maintenance.
In this brief 13 years, Gordon Maurer became so valued and beloved a physician that his untimely death. fell with the weight of a major catastrophe upon the town and countryside which he had so faithfully served. This doctor’s last journey, like that of “Weelum MacLure of Drumtochty” was the occasion for such a spontaneous expression of appreciation and loss as comes only with the passing of “A Doctor of the Old School.”
The spirit of this is well and feelingly expressed in the following elegiac lines by the local columnist, who calls himself “The Mountaineer”:
[the Catskill Mountain News epitaph in its entirety.]
New York State Medical Journal
From the April 1939 issue.
A Physician Appreciated
Gordon Bostwick Maurer, M.D., a physician in Margaretville, N.Y., was instantly killed on November 12, 1938, by the accidental discharge of his shotgun while hunting partridges. Dr. Maurer was graduated from Yale in 1923, interned at the New Haven Hospital, and located in the little New York village in 1926. His death caused great distress to the people in his community.
The Catskill Mountain News, the town’s weekly paper, not only devoted more than half of its first page to Dr. Maurer, but there were seven different items in the issue in connection with the lamentable death of this brilliant young physician.
The finest testimonial of a medical man in years was published in a column “Mountain Dew” and signed “The Mountaineer”. In this day of proposed state medicine, its proponents should read this encomium and ponder well.
The following is quoted verbatim from the News:
[the Catskill Mountain News epitaph in its entirety.]
