Joshua McCloud

AP English

February 3, 2004

Oral History Final Copy

Dr. Charles S. Sherwin: Surgeon

Mild-mannered surgeon and teacher, Dr. Charles S. Sherwin, this author’s grandfather, has lived a full life. He devoted nearly forty years of his life to the practice of medicine, and during that time wrote medical journal articles, taught medicine at St. Louis University, and raised a family of five children. He also filled many elected and appointed positions in the local and state medical societies. He is now retired and lives with his wife, Ruth, in St. Louis, Missouri.

[I could tell you a lot about my family.] We had ancestors—one line of family—my mother’s maiden name was Steelman; and her ultimate ancestor, we think, was a man by the name of Mannson and his wife was Stille. They were [in the American colonies] before William Penn arrived, and a lot of the Swedes—they were both from Sweden—were Anglicizing their names, so they adopted the name Steelman, which was my mother’s maiden name. We do know that [Mannson and Stille] had sons, and—uh—there was a very famous fur-trader in William Penn’s time by the name of John Hance Steelman [who we think was one of their descendants]. He traded a lot with the Indians.

Another source of ancestry was a family who had been in France. They were Huguenots and they were persecuted by the Catholic Church. So they left France, first going to England, and then to the colonies, here in what is now the United States, in Virginia. The family name was Tonnelier, the man was a cooper–a wheelwright, and [that name] was Anglicized also to Tunnel.

Now the Sherwins came to this country around 1850. The first known Sherwin ancestor was William Sherwin. He had a son, John, who would have been my great-grandfather. My grandfather was John Frederick—he was my father’s father. His wife was Mary Mathilda Davidson, who was my grandmother, and she died when I was two years old; so, I don’t remember much about her.

Charles Frederick Sherwin was my father, and my mother had been Lillie Belle Steelman. My mother had been a secretary and put my father through medical school—working as a secretary and stenographer. Dad had since then finished medical school and studied surgery, and was doing surgery for a living. I was born on September 3, 1920 [in] St. Louis, Missouri. [I had] two sisters. My elder sister was four years older–roughly–Mary Evelyn Sherwin. My younger sister was Ellen Louise. My elder sister died in 1998. My younger sister is still alive and kicking.

My first through eighth grade were at Wyman Elementary School, part of the St. Louis public school system. [It was during this time period that the Great Depression began.] I was nine years old. [I noticed the changes] very definitely. I know that spending decreased in our family about that time. And my dad was worried because he had lost some money on the stock market. And even the banks were skittish and actually were closed for a time under Roosevelt. Then because of the intense smoke in the St. Louis area [caused by burning coal in furnaces and locomotives], my father moved to Webster Groves–my parents, I should say. I went to Webster High School. The concern [about the Depression] was always there. We just didn’t feel that we could ask our parents to buy things for us the way [we] normally would have been able to. But I remember one time I mentioned to a friend of mine who was a teenager, as I was then, about needing a bike and he said, “Why don’t you get one for Christmas?” His family had a little higher income than ours, and, of course, [getting a bike] involved asking for one and bugging your parents until it happened, which I didn’t do. But finally, [I] was able to [get a bike; it] took a while, but it at least gave me a little mobility.

I got a job in a drug store, making ten cents an hour; and then later in a candy store, still as a teenager. It was difficult [to get a job], but it was not impossible. They were not very remunerative. [It was] very difficult [for adults to find work.] Many of them were losing jobs early in the game and being hired was a very slow, questionable process. My parents came from farm stock, and most of [my family were farmers]; both of my grandfathers had been farmers, and most of the sons continued as farmers right down the line. But uh, you know, the price of grain was low, the price of hogs was always low [and so] it was hard to make a living for a farmer as well.

[We celebrated holidays at the time with] family get-togethers. And also, we did get together with [some family friends]. They came out to our house for Thanksgiving dinner, and we went to their house for New Year’s Day. New Year’s Eve we stayed home in those days.

[Around this time I began] college. I took the streetcar to St. Louis U., which also included my first year of medical school. [I was going to medical school to become a surgeon. I had been inspired to follow in my father’s footsteps because when I was a child], I [would stand] for hours on a ladder making movies of my father doing surgery. In the first two years of medical school, I was at uh—we had moved back into the city by that time. The smoke abatement law had come into play, thanks to a professor at Washington U., Raymond Tucker—who had later become the Mayor Tucker. He arranged a law which would get rid of the intense smoke here in the city, including [banning the] burning [of] coal in furnaces and locomotives, and substituting gas. Through college and med school I really didn’t work very much. I went through summer school and finished my pre-medical school, which was the equivalent of four years, in three years plus multiple summers.

[Late in the Depression] ’39 or thereabouts [I first heard about the European War.] I thought that Hitler was obviously a tyrant; and frankly I felt that sooner or later he would be defeated. I was sure we’d get into it, whether we liked it or not. And of course, Pearl Harbor came in 1941—December 7, 1941—and people began to get jobs in war work of some kind, including building ships, building, not automobiles, but building military equipment.

[I heard about Pearl Harbor while with] a group of youth at church. Somebody who came while we were there had heard it on the radio; we were shocked, of course. [At the time, I felt] distrust for the Japanese because the story was that they were negotiating in good faith, which obviously they were not, and—uh—some of us felt that the negotiations on our side had not been as far-reaching as they could have been, or they might have picked up this problem.

At the time, I didn’t have any intense feeling particularly [about the internment camps]; except, you know, I thought that we probably were, maybe overdoing it a little bit. I will say this, though, that in 1940, I think it was, I was able to take a trip out to British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, and the people there were talking about Japanese gardeners and so-forth taking pictures all over the place of whatever they could find. Now of course, I learned later that this is a habit of Japanese—taking pictures—and I’m not sure that it really had any bearing on the emperor’s intent—Hirohito—on his intent as far as the war was concerned. I have the feeling that it probably had no bearing at all on what was going on in his mind.

[During World War II] there was a lot of rationing, of course. You couldn’t buy a tire, you were allowed three gallons [of gasoline], unless you had special needs. My father had what was called a C-Card with which you could get as many gallons of gasoline as you might need because he was practicing surgery at the time, and they felt that he would probably need it. But uh, he didn’t abuse that. During my last year of medical school, Dad bought me a Model A Ford for which he paid a hundred and fifty bucks. I was able to go out and do deliveries into patients’ homes on a moment’s notice, and I ended up with an A-ration, which was the one which would allow you three gallons per week, I think.

I was in the Naval Reserve from the second year to the end of my medical school days. Then [I served] a nine month internship—which was a general study or a study of general medicine, including obstetrics and internal medicine, as well as psychiatry, surgery for a very short period of time; usually the internship was a year. During the war the semesters had been cut down to nine months instead of a full year, and so I had a nine month internship.

[My wife, Ruth and I] were married the week, as a matter of fact, one exact week after I finished medical school, which was 1943, November 24. [Married life] was brief in a way because I was sent overseas within a year after we were married. I was assigned to active duty in the Navy and went to San Diego for two months; then [I] was assigned overseas, serving in the Philippine Islands. I had been to New Guinea and then Australia on the way to my duty station. My first duty station was aboard ship; it was aboard a tanker. The next was a duty station at a small naval air station in the Philippine Islands. This was called Jinamoc Island. These pilots were responsible for patrolling the Chinese coast, up and down, and destroying Japanese shipping. This was late in the war when I went into active duty, so the big battles were pretty well over by this time; nevertheless, we did have some periods of questionable safety. One time, the tanker I was on was at anchor in Lingayan Gulf, which is part of Luzon; and a solitary plane was—uh—flying over the gulf, and one ship after another took shots at this plane, and finally somebody got him. We never knew whether it was American or Japanese. We suspected it was Japanese.

Charles Sherwin during World War II.

[During the war,] we [did have] some very friendly experiences, particularly in the Philippines. I was land-based over there on Luzon, with a Seabee outfit, and we made some Filipino friends. And I did feel that they were, you know, down-trodden by the Japanese.

[While I was overseas], my mother fell in the house and struck her head at the bottom of the basement stairs, and died as a result of that fall. I didn’t hear about it for almost two months. The first mail that we got also contained the Red Cross advisory of the accident and what eventually happened. And after I’d gone through my mail, then the skipper onboard ship called me; [he] just blandly said, “Your mother is dead,” and that’s all he said. He was kind of a coarse individual.

[I vaguely remember hearing of Roosevelt’s death.] I didn’t care for Roosevelt, to put it mildly. I felt that many of the things he did labeled him as untrustworthy. Some of the so-called improvements that he made were tremendously costly as far as the government was concerned. I think ‘34 was the first time [he was elected and] it was still a number of years before the Depression began to wane, and it was part of the change during the war that brought about the end of the Depression. Frankly, I’d been dubious that he should have taken the fourth term because a lot of us felt that he was not going to live long, and at the time that he was elected, I certainly did not trust Truman, namely because he had come from Kansas City; and the machine over in—the political machine—over in Kansas City was very active and very untrustworthy. We identified Truman with [it], a lot of us did. I have since felt that Truman probably did a pretty good job as president, even though he had the bomb dropped.

[I remember when he had the bomb dropped.] I was aghast, frankly, at the power of the thing. Later, after the war, I flew from Tokyo to Shanghai, and the pilot flew us—it happened to be on Christmas day—over Nagasaki so we could see the pillage, the terrible damage that had been done there. The other thing [that] concerned me, though, was since the United States, which had never done anything such as this before, had done this, this would leave us open to a lot of possible terrorism, which I think we’re beginning to experience now. [One other thing about when the bomb was dropped was that] the Seabee outfit I was with was scheduled to go up to Japan at D+9, in other words, nine days after D-Day in Japan. So that was deferred because of the bombing. In a way, I had relief. I was just absolutely astounded by the damage and the number of people that were killed as a result of the atomic bomb.

[After the war ended], we former servicemen did get a stipend from Uncle Sam for our education, which included our residencies and post-graduate training, and this helped us live. While I was overseas, Ruth [my wife] had been working in my father’s office and she had been through Harris Teachers’ College, here in St. Louis; and she got a position teaching school out in the county. [She] stayed there for something like four years during my residency training.

In 1951 I had gone into practice with my father and it turned out that Dad had been helping black physicians become surgeons here in St. Louis; and as a result, had been invited down to Tuskegee Institute for a meeting called a John A. Andrew Clinical Society. In ‘51, when I first joined Dad, nothing would do but that I would come down there with him for the John A. Andrew Clinical Society, and Dad was elected president of the society that year.

[During these early years of my practice, I encountered a very rare problem involving the duodenum.] The duodenum is the part of the intestine just barely below the stomach, and it’s normally not anything important, but I had two or three of these [cases]. I couldn’t find any report in the literature at all of these things. I finally reported these things. And very few of the elder surgeons had got any [cases like this]. [But] I found another man who had done an autopsy on one. And I found a consistent pattern in the situation here. [We got] the thing into print and [published] it in a one of the journals, and I enjoyed doing that. [I published other articles as well, but despite encountering such rare diseases, the greatest difficulty in being a surgeon was the] pure and unadulterated stress.

[A few months after that, Ruth and I had our first child,] Ann Margaret. Ann was born in June of 1951. [Ruth and I] had been married since age twenty-three, and we were over thirty when Ann was born. So [Ann] wasn’t a real surprise; but, you know, we were hoping for youngsters. I would say [we were not hoping for children since the time we were] married because I was overseas for not quite two years. And furthermore, you know, income was low; in those days I was getting, as an intern, fifteen dollars a month, and as a resident for all but the last year I made twenty-five dollars a month, and the last year it went up to thirty-five. So we were not making a heck of a lot of money. I did get G.I. Bill pay during the last three years, I guess it was which helped; but it was still less than I had made in the Navy, which still was not a heck of a lot of money.

[I was teaching at St. Louis University at that time]–teaching residents, primarily [and] to a lesser extent, medical students, [but] primarily interns and residents who were all out of medical school by that time. Every surgeon in my generation and prior to my generation had their own little preferences in terms of techniques and that sort of thing; and each of us tried to convey that to the residents that were in training.

My father died in 1953. [This was two months before his presidency of the John A. Andrew Clinical Society] was to begin; and so I had to take over the job, totally unprepared, or rather minimally prepared. This was really presiding over the one meeting. Other than that there were no particular duties.

[One month after that, my wife had our first son,] Larry Robert Lawrence who was born on May 16, 1953. The next was Paul Frederick who was born on October 15, 1954.

[That same year] a friend of mine who was an EMT man called the house one time [and] asked Ruth [if] he could put me up at the nomination committee meeting at the medical society. And he put me up for a member of the council, of which there should be four elected, and they were all elected on a plurality. In those days they had a—I’ve forgotten what they call it—but a group of people who would be put up for the council; a group of four who were traditionally put up, and I happened to be number five; but in terms of the plurality, I was number two of the five. So, one of the four [originally-nominated members] was not elected, and I was one behind the man that got the highest number of votes. When it came time to look for a presidency to oppose somebody else [that] they did not want to have elected as president [a few years later], they looked at the plurality of the number of votes people got and decided that I stood [a pretty good] chance of beating this guy, which I did; two to one!

[Our fourth child] was Mary Helen, who was born on August 25, 1956. [Our final child] was Charles Walter, who was born in—I can barely remember the year, but 1961, I think, and it was–I think the date was January 22. I made it a point to try to get home for lunch once in a while with the kids, and did, which was something I enjoyed. [I] tried to make time for each of the kids, and particularly for the boys, ‘cause I felt they needed it.

During the presidency of the medical society, we had the polio vaccination of everybody—the oral vaccination, and President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas two days before the initial vaccination was to take place, and that was to be an all-city wide affair, including the county. We had a lot of hassle over whether we were going to proceed with the vaccination; but the vaccine was here, it was ready to go and so really had to go ahead with it. During the actual vaccination, the so-called assassin—and I’m not sure they ever proved that he did it—was assassinated himself, and we saw that on T.V. in these schools where the vaccination was taking place. That was a little disturbing, to put it mildly.

In some respects [the offices I was elected to] were thankless jobs. We were expected to do things that no human being could accomplish. And a lot of people who were interested in what was going on would not take part in the nuts and bolts of really managing the situation, but expected the elected officers to do the job all by themselves, which was [a] total impossibility, frankly.

[I continued going to the John A. Andrew Clinical Society meetings, and it was at one of these that I met Dr. Martin Luther King.] This [meeting really] amounted to shaking hands, and mutual greetings back and forth; and then while we were waiting for the people to really get the show on the road, get the meeting started, we were just standing around waiting. I could tell that he was impatient, not at all happy about having to wait. His message [that day] was whatever you do, do your best at it.

[Thankfully, the Vietnam War] didn’t bother me, except for the fact that two of our nephews, Frank and Charles Wood, were both in service—Frank in the Army, and Charlie in the Navy, although maybe it was the other way around, I’m not sure. [My children] were not old enough [to serve]; either that or too old, I’ve forgotten which.

As the kids grew, of course, Ann went on to college, and then Larry went on to college, and then Paul, and finally [Mary Helen]. The one thing that happened during—um—the last year of Ann’s college work was a strike of teachers here in town. So when it came time for Charlie to go to high school, Ruth was very concerned about this because she was afraid that they would strike again, which they did, and [consequently] Charlie would be deprived of some of his high school work. So she wanted to send him to Clayton High School, and this was expensive as far as tuition was concerned, and a little bit of a problem. Charlie wanted to go to Rolla to study Computer Science in those days. And one thing led to another, and he started coming home on weekends. After the first two semesters [he] dropped out of Rolla. Finally, before you knew it, Ruth had put in five years in the library as an assistant at Washington U. — Olin Library—so at the time [because] she had five years in, he could go there tuition free, which was nice.

I had [by that time] joined another man as a partner, and in 1968, just prior ‘70, we incorporated, and we had a corporation from then on, which we called Clayton Surgical Group. That made life a good deal easier from some civil standpoints. I could cover him and he could cover me and it turned out very well, really. [Previous to this,] he [had] left the States to move to India and teach at, New Delhi, and train Indian people in surgery. When he left, why, I suspected that we would be moving in together in our partnership after he came back; and that’s what we did. And that was in the late sixties. No! He left, I guess, ‘64.

I retired in 1989 from surgery. 1990, I quit all office attendance. In 1990, I started to work at the VA [center] on Eighteenth Street, and continued that for eight years. It turned out to be a nice, resourceful group of people. I was working with an older surgeon who had [worked] down at Barnard Skin Cancer Hospital, when it was down there; and we had a pretty good relationship together.

[Since that time, I have done] nothing professional whatsoever; [although], I have kept up my license. [Looking back, perhaps the best advice I could give is] take good care of yourself.

*This interview was conducted by Joshua McCloud on December 25 and 28, 2003, and February 3, 2004.