Medicine: Rex Morgan Revealed

Rex Morgan, M.D., a square-jawed general practitioner with an adventurous suburban clientele, has become the most widely known physician in the U.S. without ever stepping out of a comic strip. Since his appearance in 1948, Dr. Rex's struggles with quacks, epidemics and psychoses have made him one of the strips' most cherished favorites.† After a long and successful effort to keep his own identity a secret, Rex's creator and author has now owned up. His name: Dr. Nicholas P. Dallis, 42, Toledo psychiatrist.

Human Failings. Dallis, an amateur cartoonist before he went to Temple University medical school, had long toyed with the idea of starting an educational comic strip about the workaday problems of a U.S. doctor. When he went to Toledo in 1946, as director of the newly established Toledo Mental Hygiene Center, he met a local resident named Allen Saunders, who does the continuity for successful comic strips himself (Mary Worth, Kerry Drake, Steve Roper). Saunders encouraged Dallis, put him in touch with Chicago's Publishers Syndicate and two artists who do the final drawings. So Rex Morgan, M.D. was born.

Since then, physicians and medical organizations (among them: the American Cancer Society, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration) have heaped praise on

Dr. Rex's sure-footed approach to medical problems and the medical education he gives his readers. Among the problems he has dramatized: multiple sclerosis, cancer quacks, tuberculosis, nutrition faddists and euthanasia (TIME, Dec. 25, 1950).

To show that his hero has non-diagnosable human failings, Author Dallis has also worked in a rather dignified romance with Nurse June Gale, Morgan's ever-loving assistant. A great many readers have demanded that Dallis finally get them married. (Among them: Dallis' wife, Sally, whom he met while she was a nurse at Philadelphia's Jewish Hospital.)

Leprosy Next. Dr. Dallis finds new subjects constantly bobbing up in his own practice. Not long ago he received a copy of a medical questionnaire on hypnosis. Psychiatrist Dallis considered his answers carefully, for hypnosis, long the refuge of quacks and magicians, is once more acknowledged to have some valuable uses in psychiatry. A few weeks later, Cartoonist Dallis had Dr. Rex pitted against an artful con man named Landros, who was practicing hypnotism for his own evil purposes on a wealthy young matron. In the course of snagging the villain and turning him over to the law, Dr. Rex gives his readers a cautionary capsule on the value of hypnosis, and why only qualified physicians should make use of it.

Recently, through his syndicate, Dallis got a letter of protest from a former attendant at the Carville, La. leprosarium. Rex, it seemed, had chided one of his comic-strip friends for treating his girl "like a leper." Result: after Morgan puts Landros behind bars, he will tackle the subject of leprosy, or, as Carville prefers to call it, Hansen's disease.