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"We realized that the traditional principles of the Massachusetts Medical Society warned practitioners to keep their personal and professional activities out of the lay Press as much as possible. However, the circumstances which confronted us in this case were such that a policy of direction, control and restraint in apportioning news which seemed autocratic to us appeared unharnessed to many members of the [medical] profession looking on from the outside. . . ."
The Committee on Ethics & Discipline of the Massachusetts Medical Society accepted Dr. Truesdale's apology. "Dr. Truesdale," the Committee acknowledged, "realized the obligation to preserve a decent professional reserve and at the same time avoid alienating the Press, whose good offices our profession has had many occasions to acknowledge with gratitude." But the Committee found cause to snarl because "a quasi-official endorsement of the publicity was offered by the assignment of the New York Academy of Medicine of its press liaison officer to report the operation for the Associated Press." That special reporter for the A. P. was tousle-headed Dr. lago Galdston (born Israel Goldstein), 41, executive secretary of the New York Academy's Medical Information Bureau and Press Relations Committee, who had, before the McHenry girl reached Fall River, assured New York editors that an operation for diaphragmatic hernia was a surgical commonplace and not worth reporting.
Last week, Dr. Truesdale, although not excommunicated from Organized Medicine, felt the weight of his colleagues' professional ire. He was vice president of the Massachusetts Medical Society and reasonably expected to continue to hold other offices. At the Massachusetts Society's convention in Boston last week the nominating committee pointedly refused to nominate Dr. Truesdale for any office whatsoever.
Meanwhile Alyce Jane McHenry continued to ride high on a prospering wave of publicity. Her mother Luella McHenry, an Omaha department store clerk, no longer has to work. Her father Paul, a Sioux City, Iowa salesman, left his job to become reconciled with her mother. Her sister Frances Jean quit school to share in the glory and excitement.
Last week the McHenry quartet was touring New York City. They appeared at the Bronx Zoo, the Aquarium, Palisades Amusement Park, Woolworth Tower, the Normandie, N. Y. Police Department Headquarters, McAlpin Hotel and Hearn's Department Store where small, smiling Alyce was billed as "the upside-down tummy girl."
When informed of the snub Massachusetts Medicine had given Dr. Truesdale as a result of her case, she wept great tears and cried: "Those cruel, old fogy New England doctors. . . . Oh, I love Dr. Truesdale. What can I do to help him? He was grand to me."