In the Classroom

The Marvelous Dr. John Cordice Jr.

ACTIVITIES

FIND OUT MORE

The archives at Harlem Hospital may have additional information on Dr. Cordice, or there may be items at Queen’s Hospital beyond what can be found online.

DISCUSSION

There must be more information about his stint in the military with the Tuskegee Airmen.

PLACE IN CONTEXT

In his nearly a century of years, Dr. Cordice was present at a number of historical events.

By HERB BOYD

Special to the Am News

Although Dr. John Cordice, Jr. attended countless numbers of patients with heart trouble, he is most famous for being one of the three doctors at Harlem Hospital in 1958 who operated on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after he was stabbed by a deranged woman. For many years the credit for saving Dr. King’s life was given to Dr. Aubre de Lambert Maynard, the hospital’s chief of surgery. But historians have corrected the record and concluded that it was mainly the expertise of Dr. Cordice and Dr. Emil Naclerio, who actually performed the vital surgery.

Dr. King was in Harlem at Blumstein’s store on 125th Street signing his book Stride Toward Freedom, when Izola Ware Curry stabbed him with an envelope opener that came so close to his heart that if he had sneezed the blood would have filled his lungs. He was rushed to the hospital’s emergency room and the doctors were summoned to save his life. Dr. Cordice wasn’t on duty that day and received the call while he was visiting a Brooklyn medical office. He was told that an important person had been injured. They had to use a hammer and chisel to crack King’s sternum and break three ribs in order to remove the blade.

Born John Walter Vincent Cordice Jr. on June 16, 1919 in Aurora, North Carolina, he was the son of a physician, who worked for the U.S. Public Health Service during the flu epidemic of 1918. The family moved to Durham, N.C. when John was 6. After graduating early from high school he attended New York University and its medical school.

During World War II, he served as a doctor for the famed Tuskegee Airmen, a stint that interrupted his internship at Harlem Hospital. But after the war he resumed his internship at the hospital and held a number of residences thereafter. He studied in Paris in 1955-56 and was part of a team that performed the first open-heart surgery in France.

All of this was in preparation for his becoming the chief of thoracic and vascular surgery at Harlem Hospital, and he was in this capacity when Dr. King was a patient there after the stabbing. On several occasions Dr. King reflected on the incident, praising the doctors and their skills. He wrote thank you letters to them and in his last public speech before his assassination in 1968, recounted how without the doctors many of his achievements would have never occurred.

“If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters,” he said. “If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1961, when we decided to take a ride for freedom and ended segregation in interstate travel. If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Ala., aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream I had.”

Later, Dr. Cordice would hold the same position at the Queens Hospital Center, and subsequently was president of the Queen's Medical Society in 1983-84.

On Dec. 29, 2014, Dr. Cordice, the last surviving surgeon from that hospital team, died at 94 in Sioux City, Iowa, his granddaughter Jennifer Fournier said. He had moved to Iowa in November to be near family.

“I think if we had lost King that day, the whole civil rights era could have been different,” Dr. Cordice said in a Harlem Hospital promotional video in 2012. Dr. Naclerio died in 1985, Dr. Maynard in 1999.

Dr. John Cordice Jr. (NYC Health and Hospitals Corp/AP)

THIS WEEK IN BLACK HISTORY

Aug. 21, 1831: Nat Turner, in Dismal Swamp. Va., led one of the largest slave rebellions.

Aug. 21, 1904: The great bandleader Count Basie born in Red Bank, N.J. he died in 1984.

Aug. 22, 1867: Fisk University established.

a series of second and third jobs. Families of undergrads everywhere should know that an average of 40% of college faculty members are unpaid for grading, writing letters of recommendation, course preparation, curriculum creation, holding office hours, conference travel, professional development, printing papers, membership fees for academic associations, publications, sabbaticals, health insurance, disability insurance, longterm care insurance, unemployment insurance, parental leave, family leave, pensions, and vacation and sick days. For many faculty members, it is physically impossible to spend their weekends writing unremunerated letters of recommendation for their students, like the six letters I wrote for the undergrad who had watched a beloved grandmother die of exposure in a neighborhood left without services for months after Hurricane Sandy. When it comes to finding unpaid hours to get to know students and to write letters for them, most faculty members are too busy trying to make rent.

The institutional silence on academic poverty can mean death, as is painfully evident in so many stories like that of Thea Hunter, who earned her doctorate in history from Columbia during some of the same years when I was there earning mine in Italian, although I can’t remember our paths ever crossing. With scholarship so innovative that Eric Foner sang its praises in a recent memorial in the Atlantic, Thea Hunter gave up a tenure-track position, in part because too many people on campus discriminatorily claimed she was the janitor based solely on the color of her skin. Afterward, she endured years of poverty wages as a contingent faculty member, and she died in 2019 with organ damage resulting from asthma and heart disease. Practically every contingent faculty member has forgone or delayed needed medical testing or treatment, because “sick days” can result in courses being reassigned to substitutes, leaving us with zero income. The Ivies are not immune from involvement: according to the Atlantic, Thea Hunter had a series of contingent positions at my own beloved alma mater, Princeton, before teaching at institutions in New York City. I know of no campus that is immune. In 2019, Columbia’s English Department failed to place a single PhD candidate in a tenure-track job.

We need voters capable of understanding the urgency of reducing fossil fuel emissions. We need voters with effective language skills to spread the word. We need resilience, grit, and empathy in the face of natural disaster. Studying the country with the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites means gaining access to evidence that inspires life-sustaining compassion, evidence that sparks discussion and analysis, evidence that expands our conceptions of the infinite possibility of being, evidence that shows us what we fight for if we fight to save the earth.

To the people who tell people with doctorates to pursue “alternative careers” against their wills, I say that the need for committed college teaching is greater now than ever before. What the world needs now are educated voters. If human life on earth is an experiment we hope to save from climate change and political instability, then we must address poverty as a barrier to educating the electorate.

A wave of university donations could stamp out poverty in academia. University donors could give their names to endowment funds to provide meal plans and housing for low-income students. University donors could also create named endowments to fund salaries and benefits packages for contingent faculty. College giving could eliminate poverty as an obstacle to educating voters who determine climate policies—policies that are our only hope of preventing catastrophic floods and fires.

What world are we leaving to our students? We all have a planet to save. Andiamo!

Diana C. Silverman holds a doctorate in Italian from Columbia University and teaches college Italian courses in New York City.