Medicine: Restless Orthopedist

Happily endowed with money, brains and background is Dr. Michael Hoke of Atlanta. His father. Robert Frederick Hoke. a Major General in the Confederate Army, prospered during Reconstruction by pushing what is now the Seaboard Airline Railroad through North Carolina to Atlanta. Dr. Hoke’s mother was a New York Van Wyck. One of his uncles. Robert Van Wyck, was elected mayor of New York City in 1898. Same year, another uncle, Augustan Van Wyck, was defeated for Governor of New York by Roosevelt I. General Hoke wanted his son to become a civil engineer like himself. “Mike” obeyed, took a C. E. degree at the University of North Carolina. Having thus complied with family authority, he proceeded to study medicine at the University of Virginia, to establish himself in Atlanta as a general surgeon. Restless, he went to Boston for post-graduate study in orthopedics, returned to Atlanta to become the South’s first specialist in that branch of medicine. Self-reliant Dr. Hoke made his own steel braces on his own blacksmith’s anvil. With an income of his own, he was free to devote much of his time to organizing Scottish Rite crippled children’s homes.

After Roosevelt II organized Warm Springs Foundation for the treatment of infantile paralytics, Orthopedist Hoke was called in to be one of 15 consultants. Five years ago Dr. Hoke was asked to become Surgeon-in-Chief. He took up residence in Warm Springs’ Little White House, which he regularly vacated each Thanksgiving to make room for the President. White House correspondents quickly made Dr. ‘”Mike” Hoke’s name familiar throughout the land.

Last week Dr. “Mike” got restless again. He was “bored by routine.” “needed a change.” Abruptly he quit Georgia Warm

Springs, now a smoothly running, richly endowed sanatorium. His assistant, Dr. Charles Edwin (“Ed”) Irwin, 36, became the institution’s new Surgeon-in-Chief. Dr. Michael Hoke, 62, happily hunted for an Atlanta office door upon which he could once more have his solitary, independent name glued in letters of gold.