THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 14, 1995 TAG: 9508130052
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 40 lines
Obituaries of two retired physicians, Howard G. Bruenn, 90, and Thomas E. Morgan, 88, made the newspapers simultaneously the other day. Neither is a household name; yet both, in their medical capacity, found themselves at the center of momentous events.
Shortly after his transfer in 1944 to Bethesda, Md., Naval Hospital as chief of cardiology, Bruenn gave Franklin D. Roosevelt a physical examination and then was assigned as his attending physician for what turned out to be the final year of the World War II president's life.
Present at Warm Springs, Ga., April 12, 1945, the day FDR suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and died, Bruenn told reporters what had happened: ``At one o'clock he was sitting in a chair while sketches were being made of him by an artist. He suddenly complained of a very severe occipital headache. Within a very few minutes he lost consciousness.'' His final words, said Bruenn, were: ``I have a terrific headache.''
There literally was a doctor in the House during the 32 years Morgan spent in the U.S. Congress, representing a coal-mining district in the southwestern tip of Pennsylvania. Much of the time he was the legislative body's only practicing physician.
On March 1, 1954, when four Puerto Rican nationalists, firing from a spectators' gallery, wounded five congressmen on the House floor, Morgan bandaged his colleagues and also applied a tourniquet to the bleeding wound of Rep. Kenneth A. Roberts of Alabama. The lawmakers recovered.
We are all to some extent witnesses to history. The experiences of Bruenn and Morgan remind us that we never know when we might be called to be participants. by CNB