Medicine: For Crippled Digestions

Into a busy little office at the famed Lahey Clinic on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue this week marched a succession of men whose names read like a sample page from Who's Who in America—bankers and industrialists, politicians and diplomats. Their mecca was the consulting room of Dr. Sara Murray Jordan, chief of the clinic's department of gastroenterology, one of the world's most eminent woman physicians and a top authority on everything that can go wrong with the human digestive tract.

Into this office had come such notables as Actor Raymond Massey, Financier and ex-Diplomat Joseph P. Kennedy and his Senator son John, and choleric Columnist Westbrook Pegler. When Sir Anthony Eden visited the clinic for surgery last year, it was Dr. Jordan who did the vital diagnostic work on which the surgeons' lifesaving decision was based.

Reason for this week's flurry of activity was that Dr. Jordan, who will be 74 on Oct. 20, is retiring—not to a life of idleness, but to begin a new career as a medical writer. Many patients wanted a last, reassuring word. For her part, Dr. Jordan was shuffling case histories, making certain that her patients would go on getting the same care.

Second Love. It taxed all her tenacity for Sara Murray to get to be a doctor at all. She knew that was what she wanted to be from age twelve, when she saw a fellow worshiper convulsed by an epileptic seizure in a Newton, Mass, church. But that was in 1896, when women doctors were still frowned upon. Sara's carriage-builder father told her to forget the idea. After breezing through Radcliffe in three years, she pursued her second love, philology, took a Ph.D. at the University of Munich. There, too, she met and married Lawyer Sebastian Jordan, had her only child, Mary Stuart Jordan.

Her father still thought she was crazy when, just short of her 33rd birthday, she enrolled at Tufts College Medical School. But she graduated summa cum laude. Soon after her internship, Dr. Jordan got an invitation from up-and-coming Surgeon Frank H. Lahey to join him in a new clinic. No surgeon, Dr. Jordan deliberately narrowed her field from the broad specialty of internal medicine to the new subspecialty of gastroenterology. In working days of 14 to 18 hours, she devoted her seemingly inexhaustible energy to the diagnosis and treatment of indigestion, peptic ulcers (in stomach, duodenum and small bowel), upset gall bladders (usually with stones), and ulcerative colitis.

"Heal Thyself." By 1929 Dr. Jordan had developed a duodenal ulcer of her own. As she lay unconscious on the operating table for removal of her gall bladder (it had stones in one wall), Surgeon Lahey debated whether to do more major surgery, a short-circuiting (stomach to intestine) operation. When she came to, Dr. Jordan was vastly relieved to learn that he had decided against it. She went on to cure her ulcer with her own treatment. It has never recurred.