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.

As patients with crippled digestions multiplied in her case histories, Dr. Jordan found that 55% had no ulcer or other organic cause of illness. Instead, their digestive tracts were rebelling against their owners’ abuse—with hastily wolfed meals, rich and heavily spiced foods, often washed down with alcohol and-cured in tobacco smoke. Many compounded the mischief by harmful self-medication, especially with laxatives. For these, as well as for the follow-up care of the more serious cases with active ulcers (which might require surgery or at least a couple of weeks in the hospital), Dr. Jordan laid down a series of rules which have become famous.

Nap & Nip. Foremost, perhaps, is: “Throw away the skillet and the deep-fat fryer.” Dr. Jordan’s aversion (she calls it a phobia) to frying is that it incorporates the fat more securely in the basic food so that the stomach has to work harder to digest it. Another injunction has been dubbed “Nap and nip.” Hard-pressed executives, Dr. Jordan holds, should have a quiet lunch, free from stressful business talk, and a cat nap afterward; then they should have one or two highballs (she believes in tall, diluted drinks, is dead set against cocktails) to relax them before dinner. Though she did not give up the weed herself until she was 51, Dr. Jordan has become convinced that smoking is invariably bad for a wounded digestion—for the ulcer victim it is “like pouring gasoline on a fire.”

No spoilsport. Dr. Jordan believes that digestive cripples should be encouraged to exercise in moderation and go out for noncompetitive sports, e.g., golf between husband and wife, or tennis doubles between two couples. A keen early-morning golfer herself, she is the only woman member of Marblehead’s Tedesco Country Club allowed to play on Sundays.

Also on the positive side, Dr. Jordan holds that ulcer victims need not punish themselves with dreary diets if they use discrimination and good sense. To prove it, she co-authored (on the advice of The New Yorker’s late dyspeptic Editor Harold Ross) Good Food for Bad Stomachs. Published in 1951, it is still selling, is leaded for a new edition.

For Dr. Jordan, retirement from practice at the Lahey Clinic and New England Baptist Hospital will not mean taking off a starched white coat: she has not worn one since internship, has favored trim dresses and suits that emphasize the briliant china blue of her eyes. Neither will retirement mean less activity—only more variety. She has a lot of technical medical writing to catch up on, wants to get back to the classics she has had to neglect for so long, and to learn Spanish. Dr. Jordan wants more free time with her second husband, retired Investment Banker Penfield Mower, and to get to Boston Symphony concerts. And she will have a tough stint as a six-day-a-week columnist for King Features Syndicate. Appropriately, her first “Health and Happiness” column for next week begins: “Let’s face it: old age must be lived and lived with.”