Medicine: Varsatility

• Share

Football killed 40 boys and young men during the 1931 season. To approximate that record of deaths it is necessary to go back to 1905 when more than a score of players died and President Roosevelt stopped the roughness of play.

Among this year's dead 40 were Joseph I. Johnson, 13, of Lafayette, Ind., who shot himself in the abdomen because he could not "make" his grade school team. Another fatality was Coach Ray Pardue. 24, of Statesville, N. C. High School team, cuffed to death by Garfield Jennings, 20, vexed linesman of the Taylorsville, N C. High School, which was playing Statesville High. Almost all the other deaths followed bashings on the football field. Most discussed of the deaths from violence were those of Army's Richard Brinsley Sheridan (TIME, Nov. 2) and Fordham's Cornelius Murphy. Murphy, 22, died fortnight ago from a ruptured brain blood vessel. Eleven days prior he had been buffeted into unconsciousness. He was hospitalized for concussion of the brain, released prematurely.

Injured last week was Jerry Dalrymple, crack right end and captain of the brilliant Tulane (New Orleans) team. Two days after the Washington State game, he discovered he had a contusion of the kidney.

New Haven Hospital contained Yale's Captain Albert J. ("Albie'') Booth Jr. for a week. He had taken cold after the Harvard game which his dropkick won for Yale (TIME, Nov. 30). The cold changed to bronchitis, the bronchitis to ''pleurisy with effusions." All pleurisies are grave matters. They very often indicate a latent or incipient tuberculosis. Footballer Booth at the end of last week was taken to Gaylord Farm Sanatorium, a tuberculosis rest cure operated at Wallingford, Conn, by Dr. David Russell Lyman, lung specialist.

There Footballer Booth was swathed under warm blankets, exposed to cold, clean, healing air. He must remain completely idle for at least four months—no work, no study, no excitement, very few visitors. He was to captain Yale's basketball team this winter, to play on the varsity baseball team next spring. He was scheduled for graduation next June, must now wait until at least February 1933. In June he and Marion Noble were to marry. The marriage will in all probability be postponed. Miss Noble and his mother visited him at the sanatorium last week end. His greeting: "Gosh, it's quiet here."

Yale also was quiet, with a self-defensive silence. For editorials and letters, clubs and individuals, deckhands and doctors were denouncing an athletic system which debilitated any young man to a condition where disease could so rapidly invade him. "Murder!" cried Columbia University's Spectator, which rampaged against football professionalism last month.

"Albie" Booth, 25, stands 5 ft. 6 in.; weighs 145 lb. For ten years he has played strenuous academic sports. At Yale for four years his labors began with mid-September football practice. As soon as the football seasons ended, and with only a few days respite, he went in for basketball. Baseball began when basketball ended. While baseball practice proceeded, spring football practice began. Meanwhile he was attending classes, studying and socializing. No one restrained him. and he developed what Sports Writer Robert Harron of the New York Evening Post called "versatility."