Medicine: Bequests

Two prominent men made bequests last week for the advancement of medical knowledge. Both bequests honored colorful doctors.

¶Brigadier General Charles A. Lindbergh, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography (The Spirit of St. Louis), gave his $500 prize money to Columbia University’s School of Dental and Oral Surgery, in memory of his maternal grandfather, Dentist Charles H. Land (1847-1922). A revolutionary figure in dentistry, Dr. Land perfected a way of enveloping defective teeth in porcelain jackets, and in 1884 invented a gas furnace for baking the porcelain. Lindbergh first made friends with Columbia Dental School when he started parceling out items from his grandfather’s laboratory.

¶Charles E. Merrill, 69, senior partner of New York’s investment house, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, gave $400,000 to Harvard Medical School (endowment: $23 million). Banker Merrill (an Amherst man himself) made the gift to establish a special professorship for heart diseases, to be named for Harvard Heart Specialist Samuel A. Levine. Dr. Levine. 63, the son of Polish immigrants, peddled newspapers in downtown Boston as a child, went through Harvard College and Medical School (Class of ’14) on a scholarship from the Boston Newsboys’ Union. A leading authority on coronary thrombosis, Levine is Merrill’s close friend and physician, is credited by Merrill with saving his life when the banker had a heart attack in 1952.