Margaret S. Klapper
Well, Then I'll Be A Doctor, Too
by Cheryl Harris
My name is Margaret S. Klapper, and I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on May 23, 1914. My mother's name was Bessie Allen Cragin, and my father's name was William Robinson Strange. He was a physician. I was the fourth of five children, and I was born at home.
Childhood
When I think about the years of World War I (my father was gone for about a year and a half), vague terms remain in my mind. My mother bought a Ouija Board, and she tried to make it answer the question of where he was. The only answer that remains in my memory is the answer "the Balkans." I have kept that term forever, but I don't know exactly where he was. It was years before I knew which countries are called the Balkans. He did remain there after the war for a time in the army of occupation, and at that time he sent us each presents. I remember what my present was, a little French doll, which I was not allowed to play with but could look at. It was china and dressed like a French person, and I have kept it all these years—still have it. My husband framed it in a little shadow box, so I still have it on the wall. I could look at it as much as I wanted to. My older sister received a doll also, but it was made of bisque, and it deteriorated. Mine was made of china, and it never fell apart. I must have been four, so it is eighty years old.
I wanted to go to school very much, so when I was five and a half, they took me to school, which was just a couple of blocks from the house. I read very well, but I didn't write. I was put aside to be taught to write. I learned to write eventually, but I don't believe I was a highly coordinated child. I started in the middle of the year, and at the end of that year, I was put in the second grade—I had no trouble keeping up with the other children. I liked school. I wanted to learn.
Yes, I liked learning things, and I liked to ask my mother about babies and illnesses. I liked my mother to tell me stories about her brother and when he had polio, or whatever they called it then. I liked babies a lot. I liked baby dolls, not lady dolls. And I asked a lot of questions about babies. And I remember my mother telling that when I was still a baby and my younger sister just a few weeks old, the three older children had diphtheria. She had to stay in the room with them all of the time. She would only come out periodically to nurse the baby and to see me. During that time an inexperienced maid put me and my baby sister in a wagon, and it turned over and hit me in the head very hard. This was one of my parents' horror stories (you know how parents hang on to horror stories), and this was one of my mother's. The wagon turning over gave me a terrific wallop on the head. The maid apparently just put me in my bed. Nannie discovered me and called my mother and told her, "She's sleeping, and she shouldn't be sleeping." My mother came up and got very upset. My head did get infected and, according to my mother, had to be lanced a number of times. I have a permanent scar, and at times I was teased by my siblings, who said, "You were dropped on your head when you were a baby." I was about eighteen months old, and my sister was one and a half months old.
I used to like to ask my mother questions about such things. I remember my mother telling me that babies often died in their second summer. The milk was contaminated, so when they were taken off the breast they often died. My father was determined that his babies would not die, so he made all of our bottles himself. He had worked in public health when he was a medical student, and he was impressed by the things he learned. He scalded the milk and added things to it you wouldn't today. He boiled the bottles, and he boiled the nipples. He had three babies on bottles at the same time and kept us on them for two or three years, so he didn't lose any of his babies. I liked hearing stories like this, and I would say, "Tell me that again." My mother often said, "I liked to see my babies lying on the floor and nursing their bottles." It makes me wonder why women today want to get their babies off the bottle by the time they are a year old. I think it's from comparing their babies to their friends' babies. What's wrong with a baby taking a bottle longer?
But anyway, that's the kind of stories I liked, and I did well in school. I was a studious child. I preferred quiet games and reading to playing vigorously like my siblings did. I played some like that but not as much as they did. I very early began to follow my father. I don't remember when I first said I was going to be a doctor, but I said it so early that I have no memory of it. But I remember grown-ups saying, "Little girls don't become doctors." And I would say, "Well, are they ever doctors?" and they would say, "Well, yes. Some are doctors." So I said, "Then I'll be one, too."
My whole life has been built around babies. I wanted my dolls to be babies, not little girl dolls. And although I had little dolls that I made clothes for, I wanted my real doll to be the size of a new baby. I went around the neighborhood and found people with babies, and many would let me hold them very early. When I was about eight years old, some little children I played with down the street had a baby sister, and at that time babies were usually delivered at home, and a midwife stayed for a couple of weeks to take care of the family and the baby. One day my mother suggested that she and I go and call on Mrs. D. to see the new baby. We both got dressed up more than just casually and walked down the street to see the new baby. While we were visiting, my mother said, "Margaret is hoping to hold the new baby." The midwife replied, "Hold it! She has been here helping me bathe it for the past week!" I was afraid I had done something wrong. We were always cautioned not to get in people's way—not to bother adults. On the way home I told my mother, "I really didn't bother them. They said it was all right." She reassured me that she wasn't mad.
When I was about ten or eleven, I suppose, there were two bookcases in our living room. In one were my father's books, and we were not supposed to go into that bookcase, but the other bookcase had books collected by my parents throughout their lives, and we could go in there and read anything we wanted. One day Elizabeth, my older sister, showed me some pictures in a book that came from Daddy's bookcase, all pictures of a baby in the uterus. Later I learned the pictures were from an OB-GYN book. Then she told me not to tell anybody because we were not supposed to bother those books. I was cagey enough not to mention the book outright. Instead I inquired of my mother how babies got out. I simply asked, "How does the baby ever get out of the mother?" She tried to tell me, seeing that I knew enough to ask. She must have talked to my father about our conversation because it wasn't long after that he told me I could read any of the books that were in his bookcase if I wanted to. He would suggest books that he thought I might enjoy. These were big books for little kids. I suppose I was about twelve. He gave me Gray's Anatomy, which was the first book he had used in medical school. It was way over my head. He told me if I couldn't follow it, I could at least look at the pictures if they interested me. I don't think he realized how serious I was about being a doctor. My family heard me talk about it from time to time, although I was not a terribly talkative child. He tried to answer any questions I had. It was not until I was in high school and after other things had happened in the family that he began to look seriously for ways for me to get to college.
Teenage Years
My teenage years were very turbulent. The family came under a great deal of difficulty. Money became much shorter, and my father's health began to suffer, which they thought was largely due to shell shock as a result of World War I. He became very, very nervous. He was in his early forties. He drank more than he should have, trying to block it out. My mother's health had never been good after the flu epidemic of 1918. She had been terribly sick at that time, as had my oldest brother. Her heart was said to have been affected. Throughout my childhood she had suffered periodically from an overactive thyroid. The treatment at that time was iodine as Lugol's Solution. Her health would improve after a course of Lugol's, but she was always nervous and easily upset emotionally.
When I was somewhere around the age of thirteen to fourteen, it became necessary for my father to go into the hospital. He went into the VA Hospital in Gulfport, Mississippi. He was there for quite a few months. His uncle helped us get moved into the basement rooms of my grandmother's home. It was fixed up well enough for my two brothers, the three of us girls, my mother, and her aunt to all live there. It was the large basement in a raised house like so many of them are in New Orleans. Nannie had a room upstairs, but the rest of us lived downstairs. Aunt Pet lived with friends in Gulfport, Mississippi.
During the time Daddy was in the hospital, Mother's health worsened. She no longer responded to Lugol's. When Daddy came out of the hospital, he said the first thing we had to do was take care of Mother and try to get her well. At the same time he was trying to resume a medical practice. The year was about 1929. They attempted to operate on my mother and remove the thyroid gland in steps, but as soon as they reached the third step, she went into what I now know is a "thyroid storm." So much of the thyroid hormone got into her system that her temperature became very high, and for several days she hovered between life and death. When she got a little better and was able to come home, she was treated with radium needles, which resulted in a terrific burn across the front of her neck. This took practically all summer to heal, and I shared a large part of taking care of her at that time. My older sister did more of the housekeeping. In the fall of that year, my mother died. She was forty-two years old, much too young. She wouldn't die today. It was the beginning of my third year of high school.
This was a very difficult time for us, and I began to spend even more time following my father. He would take me with him. When he would go to the County Health Association Meetings, I would offer to go with him. He seemed to take pleasure in introducing me to some of the doctors.
Then a little bit more than a year later, my older brother Billy, who was working in New Orleans, took sick suddenly with lobar pneumonia and died one week later. Again I helped take care of him during that week when I was not actually in school. After three or four days, it was necessary to hire a nurse to come be with him until his death. He was twenty-one years of age.
In April of that year, my father married a woman who had grown up with my mother and who had visited us from time to time when we were small. We called her Aunt Stella. Her last name was Darden. This was a few weeks after we had moved from my grandmother's home into a rented home. Aunt Pet came back to live with us, too. When my father remarried, I was delighted. I knew Aunt Stella, and somehow I was perceptive enough to know my father needed to marry again. He was in his early forties. My two sisters resented his remarriage, I think, in different ways. But we were not a family that shared our feelings with each other. Situations like this were never discussed with the children, and we tended to be more reserved about such things.
Medical School
Louisiana State University had a medical school in New Orleans, and so I applied to both Tulane and LSU medical schools. About this time I learned that one of the people I met at the open house two years before was on the board at Tulane, and she was the only woman on the board. Somehow a scholarship to Tulane was found. I lived at home and went to Tulane for four years. Clinical students were not allowed to work at that time. I had the feeling that if I didn't study 100% of the time, I wasn't justifying all that I was getting, so I studied all of the time. It was hard, and it was time-consuming—still is. I probably studied more than was necessary, but then I think I have always done more than what was required in whatever I was doing. I graduated from medical school in 1939, and I got the usual honors: Phi Beta Kappa as an undergraduate at Newcomb and Alpha Omega Alpha, the honorary medical society at Tulane. I tied for first place, so I got the Dean's Medal.
I knew I was not terribly interested in becoming a surgeon. I didn't think I was aggressive enough to go into surgery, even though I knew I was going to have to go through a rotation. I was more interested in the things that pertained to medicine—the non-surgical aspects. At the end of that year, you could go into practice if you wanted to, and I decided to apply for a residency in internal medicine. I decided I didn't want to limit myself to pediatrics. I was awarded a residency in internal medicine, and I spent a year focusing on the specialties of internal medicine. Of course, everything was segregated, so some treatment was on white males, some on black males, some on white females, and some on black females. The responsibilities were now greater. There were other residents to back you up, but you didn't expect them to back you up for trivial things.
Residencies
My first assignment as a resident was the contagious hospital. It was a good year, and I saw a lot. There were four men and myself assigned here, and all of the men were named Bill. We had a big time together. One of us would have to stay there at night. The diseases that we were apt to see in the people, who ranged from infants to the elderly, included about sixty cases of typhoid fever from across the river. Each of the five of us had a group of patients with typhoid fever. And then we had diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough. We had newborns with gonorrhea opthalmia, which they had contracted during delivery. We had quite a few people with syphilis, primary or secondary syphilis. The sulfa drugs didn't come out until 1938, 1939, or 1940. Penicillin came out in about 1941. I would have to check to be sure of those dates. Prior to that there were no specifics. We treated syphilis with arsenic and bismuth. And those were to be used for two years in courses.
Of course, now there is a vaccine for whooping cough, tetanus, and diphtheria, which came out in 1936 or so. I remember that they decided to immunize the toddlers at the baby home the second summer I was there. The doctor came out and brought a couple of medical students. The children had just gotten up from their naps, and we had their faces washed and their clothes on. We put them all out on the screened porch. One at a time we would pick a child up, wrap our arms around it, and take the child into another room where one of the medical students would shoot it. It happened so fast that the children didn't know what had happened. Afterwards the doctor was talking to her students and commenting on how well the babies behaved. If one cried, the child only cried a minute or two. A month later the doctor returned to give the children their booster shots. Well, the children were waiting on the screened porch, and when they saw a car drive up and those same people get out, they wrapped themselves around whatever was next to them. We had to carry each one kicking and screaming in to get a shot. The children were a lot smarter than we were.
I had an internship from 1939 until 1940, and I had one year of residency from 1940 until 1941. Then I got married. William Lamar Bryan, who was from South Carolina, was a Fellow at Tulane. He and I met in January and were married in May. We moved to South Carolina to work at the University of South Carolina. He was in charge of the Department of Public Health, and I was a student physician. I was to take care of the ailing students, and we were to share some responsibilities. We were very enthusiastic about our first attempt to earn our own living fully by ourselves. We started out, as I said, with much enthusiasm. He and I were to both teach a course in sex hygiene to senior students, he the males, and I the females. Often William and I discussed with each other the questions that had come up in these classes. Within a few months he became ill with a recurrence of Bright's disease, which he had had once in medical school. This was the name given to kidney disease. Today we would biopsy him, find out what the problem was, and give him a transplant. He failed rapidly and died in December of 1941, a few days after Pearl Harbor. We had been married six months.
Late in 1945, I met my second husband, Clarence E. Klapper, a professor of anatomy at LSU, and we married in April of 1946. I met my husband through a friend of mine, also named Margaret, who was a physician whom I had treated for a number of years for asthma. She had been dating him but had become engaged the night before to someone else. She said she wanted me to meet him before she turned him loose. So I met him. We began going out together, and he never got loose. I was living with my sister and her child at the time. The first gift he brought me when I invited him to dinner one time was a handful of washers to go in all of the faucets because they all leaked. Remember that this was during the war, and we lived in a small, empty house where repairs went undone. Each week after that he brought a part that enabled him to fix something around the house. My sister said that if I didn't think I liked him I still shouldn't let him go until he had fixed a few more things. He was known as my handy man, and he remained that throughout his life.
I met Clarence in December. During that time I was preparing for my boards in internal medicine, so from Christmas until the exams came in late March, we courted by him coming over and fixing things around the house and me studying until 10 or 10:30 p.m. On Saturdays we would go out to a movie and to a lounge afterwards for a drink. By the time the exams came, he was talking about getting married. I told him that if I still had the knots in my stomach after the exams, then I would know I was in love. When the last of the examinations were over, we decided we would get married. We were married in April of that year in New Orleans in the Trinity Episcopal Church, where I had grown up.
During the winter there had been considerable turmoil in the Department of Anatomy. The head of the department also functioned as dean of the school. He read in the newspaper one morning that he had been replaced. In response, the rest of the faculty resigned in support of him. They were persuaded to stay on at least temporarily, but all began looking around for new positions. Ted told me that he was going to Alabama to look at a place there, but when he came back, he said he didn't think he was interested. After we were married, we were both invited back to Alabama, and he decided then that he ought to accept the job offer. We agreed to come during the summer of 1946.
I felt reasonably sure I could find something to do on the faculty when I got there. It was a school that was just developing from a two-year school into a four-year school and had only moved to Birmingham from Tuscaloosa in the summer of 1945. There was really no faculty in the Clinical Department. During the summer we moved to Birmingham, and I called on the chairman of the Department of Medicine, who was a fulltime practitioner of medicine in the city. About that time I was notified I had passed the first part of the board exams and could take the second part in Chicago at the end of October, as they were having a special session of the oral exams to catch up with the flow of returning veterans.
University of Alabama
Our early years at the University of Alabama, which was not yet a university, were happy years. We were both growing in our professions. There were many veterans that were returning from the war. We were close to them in age, and everyone seemed particularly happy the war was over. We lived in student housing, which had been bought by the school and was only one block from the medical school. They were old residential homes, which were made into girls' dorms at one end of the campus, boys' dorms at the other, and apartments in between. There were parties from time to time, and a dance hall was about two blocks from where we lived. The student dances were held there, and we could walk to them. Many times there were breakfasts after the dances within the apartment complex. Within the next two years they put up two apartments for returning veterans.
As the years went by and the chairmen of the departments changed, we were promoted to associate professors. I had to do the legwork for developing the program in internal medicine for the Southern Medical Association meeting. Dr. Frommyer had accepted the secretary's position in the organization, and he gave me any help I needed to develop this program, which of course included a large geographic area. The next year I was elected secretary, so I continued to develop programs. In due time, I became chairman of that section and later one of the counselors.
In 1962, Dr. S. R. Hill and Dr. C. A. McCallum were appointed deans of the medical and dental schools respectively. They were both young men, and Dr. Hill, whom I did not know very wel1, asked me to serve as assistant dean with him and be in charge of student affairs and start a program for continuing education for physicians. I told him I didn't know anything about being a dean or either subject. He said, "I don't know how to be a dean either, but I'm going to spend the summer learning how." And thus I began my career as a dean.
