The Story of Saint Luke’s Hospital, 1894-2014
was born in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on November 16, 1865. Her father, a pioneer in the oil industry, was associated with John D. Rockefeller, and was a prominent figure in Standard Oil Company. For the second time, strategies designed to benefit Western Reserve’s medical school would benefit Saint Luke’s – first in its founding and again in its course for the future. Only months earlier, President Woodrow Wilson had asked for and received from congress a declaration of war. The United States entered World War I on April 16, 1917, and Saint Luke’s plans for expansion remained on hold. Within a few days of the declaration of war, Dr. Skeel, Saint Luke’s surgeon and chief of staff, had joined the British Medical Corps. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Stoner, diagnostician and generalist, left to organize the medical unit of U.S. Base Hospital No. 52 and to serve as its chief of staff. The next to leave was Dr. C.V. Davis, resident in charge of Saint Luke’s interns. Those who remained behind fought another war on the home front – the great influenza pandemic of 1918-20 – fought by an army that was depleted, as doctors and nurses answered the call to war. More Americans died as a result of the pandemic than all those who died in World War I. Between October 1918 and June 1919, Cleveland saw 30,000 reported cases and 5,474 deaths from influenza. Nationwide, an estimated 675,000 lost their lives to the pandemic, as compared with 116,156 American deaths on the battlefields of World War I. Worldwide the death toll is estimated to have been between thirty and fifty million. In the meantime, Dr. Skeel had seen service on virtually all of the important fronts of the war. He had been gassed. He had saved lives. He left no record of his experiences. One story is known, coming to light in a letter to Dr. Skeel’s widow, sixteen years after the doctor’s death. It was the twenty-third annual “thank you” letter from Charles F. Rafferty of San Francisco, in which he wrote: When I was rolled onto Dr. Skeel’s operating table at Evacuation Hospital 108, I concluded from the large practice he seemed to enjoy that he was competent, and I was not otherwise interested. When, however, during the first dressing, he adroitly emptied the hot ashes from his big pipe on my bare abdomen and stood there smiling while I feebly and futilely tried to brush off the coals, I do recall that I expressed certain convictions as to his probable genealogy. Had I used my imagination, if any, I would have realized that he did this trick deliberately as a counter irritant to the agonizing pain on unavoidably touching the sciatic nerve which was exposed for about seven inches. Afterwards, as more and more doctors, army and civilian (in France, Virginia, New Jersey and New York), continued to express amazement over my operation and the astonishing results obtained, I became more and more anxious to meet “Dr. Steel.” Every person I met always had the same question put to him, “Do you know Major Steel, a surgeon?”11 Rafferty had been hit twenty times in the abdomen and lower part of his body by a machine gun. After being discharged, he returned to Buffalo. He was still suffering from pain and sleeplessness but could not find a doctor able to help him. Continuing to search for “Dr. Steel,” he asked a stranger on a street car his standard question. The stranger was an employee of the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland. After further conversation, in which the stranger asked Rafferty some questions, he said, “I think I know this man. His name is Skeel, not Steel. I believe he has moved from Cleveland, but he has a brother living there. I’ll get the address for you.” Rafferty went to San Francisco to meet the army surgeon and stayed for treatment. His letter continued: My thrice weekly visits to Dr. Skeel warped me back into a normal groove. I began to sleep regularly and improvement was immediate and progressive. Page 23