Medicine: Life Story

Life Story His patients had lately found him gruff and moody. Nevertheless, Dr. Raymond Roscoe Squier was one of the most successful gynecologists in fashionable Greenwich, Conn. On a hot afternoon last week, he was neither in his office nor at his home: dressed only in his underwear, he was sitting at a portable typewriter in a bedroom at Manhattan’s University Club, pecking out the story of his life.

He began with his birth in Topeka, Kans. 52 years ago. Then he recalled the University of Colorado, where he made Phi Beta Kappa, Johns Hopkins, where he took his M.D., interned, and won a prized Carnegie fellowship in embryology. In the ’30s, he built up a good practice in Manhattan, where he was on the staff of three hospitals. His marriage (childless) ended in divorce in 1942. That year he moved to Greenwich.

In 1947, he married Dr. Helen Flanders Dunbar, a topflight psychiatrist and pioneer in psychosomatic medicine. She, too, was recently divorced.* After three years, Drs. Squier and Dunbar separated. Their marriage, Dr. Squier confided to his typewriter, was soon to be dissolved. And he had financial worries. Because of unpaid bills, he wrote, the “$15 in my pocket is more than I have in the world.”

There were also differences with his professional colleagues in Greenwich. Dr. Squier was getting near the end of his story. “I have no objection to its being known that my death is voluntary,” he wrote, “and I desire cremation as simply and quickly as possible, with no residuum anywhere.” With a final flourish of professional courtesy, he added: “For the information of the medical examiner, I have taken Nembutal and Seconal.”

Dr. Squier corrected and signed the original and seven carbons of his life story, then scrawled: “Did it at 5:15 p.m. Goodbye.”

Next morning, the club manager found Dr. Squier dead in his room.

*From George Soule, a onetime editor of the New Republic.