Free Amazing Medical Stories by George Burden

internationally known eye specialist, was a resident of Frankfort, Kentucky. A widower, he was returning home from medical business in Europe. He assisted a fellow passenger by removing a foreign body from her eye.
    Dr. Alice Leader, a fifty-five-year-old physician, practised medicine in New York with her husband, John. A first-class passenger, she shared a cabin with another woman.
    Dr. Washington Dodge, also a first-class passenger, graduated from the University of California medical school sometime in the mid-1880s. In 1896, he left the medical profession and entered politics. Apparently he did extremely well in his new role and had become a very popular and affluent member of the political community in San Francisco. He and his second wife and their five-year-old son, Washington Dodge, Jr., were on their way home from a visit to Paris. They had been in Europe primarily for him to consider a prestigious position with an international banking firm. The doctor’s health seems to have been failing, and during his time in Paris he had consulted a specialist.
    Almost nothing is known about Dr. Arthur Brewe, a physician from Philadelphia.
    On April 14, 1912, all of the physicians on the
Titanic
must have spent the early evening hours feeling entirely safe aboard the majestic ocean liner. Early in the day, Dr. O’Loughlin had lunched with Tommy Andrews, the proud builder of the ship. That evening, his dinner companion was Bruce Ismay, the Managing Director of the White Star Line, thecompany that had audaciously built what it contended was a “practically unsinkable” ship. The fanciful deception was about to be shattered.
    â€œIceberg, right ahead!” cried the lookout high up in the
Titanic
’s crow’snest. It was approximately eleven-forty p.m. on Sunday, April 14, 1912. For many of the ship’s crew and its passengers, these words would soon translate into a death knell.
    At the time of the collision, Dr. William O’Loughlin was probably asleep in what stewardess Violet Jessop described in her memoirs as his “magnificently appointed cabin.” He must have recognized very quickly that the ship was in real danger. Mary Sloan, another stewardess, encountered him soon after the collision. She asked if he knew what was happening. His words were far from reassuring: “Child, things are very bad.”
    It seems that he was on his way to see a passenger, Mrs. Henry Harper, on D deck, who had requested that he visit her cabin because she wanted him to convince her ill husband that he was too sick to get out of bed. Looking sombre, the physician passed on the bad news to the couple. “They tell me that trunks are floating around in the hold; you may as well go on deck.” His next movements are hard to trace, but a number of people remembered seeing him in the company of several crew members as well as with Dr. Simpson.
    Around two a.m., shortly before the
Titanic’
s fate was sealed forever, one of the ship’s bakers discovered Dr. O’Loughlin rummaging through a pantry on B deck, the deck directly above the ship’s hospital. Apparently, not long after the last lifeboat had left the sinking ship, the physician had declared that he would meet his end indoors. He said he refused to die in freezing water surrounded by others enduring the same terrible fate. Instead, he had gone to the pantry looking for whiskey to dull his senses. He knew that when the ship reached a certain depth, his lungs would implode. “Not necessarily painless, but it has the advantage of being quick.”
    Dr. O’Loughlin was eulogized as a true hero and a physician to whom “it made no difference whether the call came from a poor immigrant in steerage or a millionaire in the Royal Suite.” A memorial fund in his memory was established at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York, an institution he had generously supported. He also received, posthumously, the American Medicine