The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
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Philadelphia Revelations
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George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
The flood of German immigrants into Philadelphia after 1730 soon made Germantown, into a German town, indeed. From 1683 to 1730, however, Germantown had been settled by Dutch and Swiss Mennonites, attracted by the many similarities between themselves and the Quakers of England. They spoke German dialects to preserve their separateness from the English-speaking majority but belonged to distinctive cultures which were in fact more than a little anti-German. This curiosity becomes easier to understand in the context of the mountainous Swiss burned at the stake by their Bavarian neighbors, Rhinelanders who sheltered them from various warring neighbors, and Dutchmen at the mouth of the Rhine, all adherents of Menno Simon the Dutch Anabaptist, but harboring many differences of viewpoint about the tribes which surrounded them.
Anabaptism is the doctrine that a child is too young to understand religion, and must be re-baptized later when his testimony will be more binding. In retrospect, it seems strange that such a view could provoke such antagonism. These earlier refugees were often townspeople of the artisan and business class, rapidly establishing Germantown as the intellectual capital of Germans throughout America. This eminence was promoted further through the establishment by the Rittenhouse family (Rittinghuysen, Rittenhausen) of the first paper mill in America. Rittenhousetown is a little collection of houses still readily seen on the north side of the Wissahickon Creek, with Wissahickon Avenue nestled behind it. The road which now runs along the Wissahickon is so narrow and windy, and the traffic goes at such dangerous pace, that many people who travel it daily have never paid adequate attention to the Rittenhousetown museum area. It's well worth a visit, although the entrance is hard to find (try going west on Wissahickon Avenue then turning around, a little beyond the entrance).
Even today, printing businesses usually locate near their source of paper to reduce transportation costs. North Carolina is the present pulp paper source, several decades ago it was Michigan. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, paper came from Germantown, so the printing and publishing industry centered here, too. When Pastorius was describing the new German settlement to prospective immigrants, he said, "Es ist nur Wald" -- it's just a forest. A forest near a source of abundant water. Some of the surly remarks of Benjamin Franklin about German immigrants may have grown out of his competition with Christoper Sower (Saur), the largest printer in America, and located of course in Germantown.
Francis Daniel Pastorius was sort of a local European flack for William Penn. He assembled in the Rhineland town of Krefeld a group of Dutch Quaker investors called the Frankford Company. When the time came for the group to emigrate, however, Pastorius alone actually crossed the ocean; so he was obliged to return the 16,000 acres of Germantown, Roxborough and Chestnut Hill he had been ceded. Another group, half Dutch and half Swiss, came from Krisheim (Cresheim) to a 6000-acre land grant in the high ground between the Schuylkill and the Delaware. The time was 1683. The heavily Swiss origins of these original settlers give an additional flavor to the term "Pennsylvania Dutch".
Where the Wissahickon crosses Germantown Avenue, a group of Rosicrucian hermits created a settlement, one of considerable musical and literary attainment. The leader was John Kelpius, and upon his death the group broke up, many going further west to the cloister at Ephrata. From 1683 to 1730 Germantown was small wooden houses and muddy roads, but there was nevertheless to be found the center of Germanic intellectual and religious ferment. Several protestant denominations have their founding mother church on Germantown Avenue, Sower spread bibles and prayer books up and down the Appalachians, and even the hermits put a defining Germantown stamp on the sects which were to arrive after 1730. The hermits apparently invented the hex signs, which were carried westward by a later, more agrarian, German peasant immigration, passing through on the way to the deep topsoil of Lancaster County.
Settlements for three centuries have clustered along both sides of the Delaware Bay, like beads on two parallel strings.
Dr. Fisher
The Capital of southern New Jersey alternated between Salem and Burlington, and the King's Highway ran between them atop a clay ridge all of fifty feet above sea level. Colonial villages are strung along Kings Highway about ten miles apart, just like villages in the Midwest and for the same reason. That's about the distance a farmer's wagon could travel to market and return in one day. Travel by boat modified that somewhat. One unexpected feature: the marl clay ridge was eventually found to contain the first known dinosaur bones, still proudly on display at the Academy of Natural Sciences. We'll defer until Day Two describing the interesting origins of the coastal route on the Delaware side of the bay below the big river bend at Salem. In New Jersey the counterpart is the Del-Sea Drive, now rapidly fragmenting in response to school crossings and traffic. Although almost everything of interest is along these three roads, for this tour we propose taking President Eisenhower's interstate highway system, with side-trips as needed.
The retreating British Army ferried out of Philadelphia in 1778, went from Camden to Haddonfield and turned north on King's Highway. For this tour, we turn south from Haddonfield, pausing for a glance back at Camden. Poor Camden scarcely exists anymore, but the battleship New Jersey is parked there, the waterfront view is awesome, and Walt Whitman's home is open to tourists. Once the home of shipbuilding, Campbell's Soup, RCA/Victor, and the terminus of railroads at the ferries to Philadelphia, the town was first threatened by isolation by the Pennsylvania Railroad going down the other side of the river in 1839, but ultimately made economically redundant by the construction of the Ben Franklin Bridge in 1926. An interesting sociological study called Camden After the Fall relates how one futile effort after another to restore Camden after 1950 led only to riots and chaos; it's difficult to suggest anything which has not already been tried and abandoned. The present unstated but relentless approach is to tear the obsolete buildings down as they deteriorate, leaving vacant land which will eventually coalesce and become attractive to developers. Toll houses could be found along the turnpike to Haddonfield until 1960, but the automobile made Camden obsolete. What's left begins with the suburbs five miles away.
New Jersey Line
Haddonfield was a plain little Quaker town with undiscovered dinosaurs buried underneath it until the Revolution when the fugitive New Jersey legislature met in the Indian King Tavern and created the State of New Jersey. Because the Pennsylvania/New Jersey fortifications of the Delaware River at Fort Mifflin/Red Bank blocked the British fleet, Hessians were sent to attack New Jersey's Fort Mercer from the rear, staying overnight in Haddonfield. One young Quaker, a famous runner, ran ten miles to alert the defenders of Fort Mercer, who then defeated the Hessian attackers the next day by pretending not to notice the Hessians until they suddenly turned around and ambushed them. Later on, after the British occupied Philadelphia, General "Mad Anthony" Wayne rounded up cattle in Salem County and drove them to Trenton, then over to Valley Forge to relieve Washington's starving troops. The British responded to this with a famous massacre in Salem County by cavalry under Col. John Simcoe. So off we go to National Park, originally called Red Bank because of the reddish color of the clay riverbank at that point on the river, to see Fort Mercer. From here we travel to Salem, seeing its sadly dilapidated Colonial buildings, and the oak tree which was already famous among the Indians for its huge size in 1683. Along King's Highway, we pass through Mickleton, Mullica Hill, and Woodstown, three cute little Quaker villages waiting to be overwhelmed as suburbs.
From here we go to Greenwich, named for Connecticut settlers, where Paul Revere stirred up a tea-burning party in sympathy with the Boston event, on his way to promote even greater agitation in Philadelphia. Greenwich is sometimes referred to as a second Williamsburg, but what's here is original, not reconstructed. In passing, this tour takes us past Hancock's Bridge where Simcoe massacred those farmers who sold cattle to Anthony Wayne. That's biased local history speaking; in fact, Tory-Rebel reprisals were very bitter on both sides. Until ten years ago, this blood-stained site stood alone in the lonely moors, but unfortunately, it's pretty much built up and harder to find in the new suburbs than it was in the reeds.
From Greenwich we go on to Cape May, with a brief detour to Bivalve. The point about this stop is the perfectly gigantic pile of oyster shells left over from the days as a center of oyster harvesting. Notice the roads; they're paved with oyster shells. Oysters eat algae, sewage fertilizes algae. Overfishing the oysters caused rotting algae and bacterial overgrowth in the river. The result was depletion of the dissolved oxygen, dead areas for fish, murky water instead of a clear stream. It's an opportunity for oyster farming, but the vast piles of shells at Bivalve are a warning of how far we have to go before we restore the river.
Cape May was the first Atlantic Ocean beach resort, reached from Philadelphia and Tidewater Virginia by boat long before roads were usable. We are told Cape May was originally a separate barrier island, joined to the rest of South Jersey only later. It was once a whaling port, and the Quakers of the region were more related to Nantucket than to Philadelphia. Whale-watching is popular here, but dolphin sightings are more reliably frequent. As you would expect, this cute little place has many fine restaurants and hotels. The hotels are so authentic that strangers share common bathrooms the way they always used to do, so bed and breakfast places can be preferable for snootier tourists. Those whose great-grandparents once stayed in places like the Chalfonte, however, find it important to rough it in traditional summer places. The ocean currents "tumble" the small stones in the beach so beach-walkers can amuse themselves looking for "Cape May Diamonds". Unfortunately, even the locals often have never heard of them, so you are probably on your own. From here, we take the forty-minute ferry ride to Lewes, Delaware.
Cape Henlopen, on the Delaware side of the entrance to the bay, is south but appreciably to the east of Cape May. That means that a line directly west from Cape May points well inside the mouth of the bay, to Slaughter Beach, or Mispillion Point on the Delaware side. The ocean salt water turns to fresh river water at about this level, making for remarkably good fishing at certain times of the year. Furthermore, horseshoe crabs come ashore here on both sides of the bay to lay eggs. Birds who took off from South America months earlier swoop out of the skies to eat the crab eggs on the appointed day. Hawks pause in the woods to fly together in flocks over the bay, based on their own signals. Mispillion Lighthouse is the greatest place on the Atlantic flyway for bird-watching, crab-watching, fishing and nature loving. But you have to know when to go there and remember the best local hotels do get filled up at those times.
A lot of people are named Turner, probably reflecting some degree of ancestry of wood turners. That's an ancient skill, using wood lathes. In Colonial days, commercial wood turning had a focus on banisters of houses, flag poles, and even toothpicks. At the present time, it is mostly a hobby conducted in garages by people who are mechanically inclined; but when a skilled artist takes it up, the products can be exquisite works of art. Because this is America, there is a national club of artisans and admirers, called the Furniture Society, and a local Philadelphia club called the Wood Turning Center. It's located at 141 North 3rd Street. Because of one-way streets, you are advised to consult a map if you plan to drive there, on the north edge of the Ben Franklin Bridge, rather near the Constitution Center. Ron Humbertson, the curator of the museum, recently visited the Right Angle Club and talked about the subject.
The average skilled amateur takes ten or more hours to produce a wooden bowl on a wood lathe, but the professionals manage to do it in about five hours. If you start with a gnarled tree trunk, the product has many interesting lines and whorls. But then the artisan has to contend with knot holes, unexpected holes of wood rot, and the likelihood of cracking the piece in the process of carving it. By far the majority of a piece of raw wood is then carved away and discarded, something that bothers real tree lovers.
Because of all these unexpected features of the wood, the thinner the final piece, the more likely it is to crack and experience other mishaps, perhaps even leading to discards and starting all over. Even just drying the raw wood can lead to cracks, and sometimes even before the carving begins, so real artists gently dry the wood themselves as part of the whole process of producing art. Even if it doesn't crack, the usual finishing process involves five or more layers of clear epoxy finish, to reduce scratching and to hold it together to prevent those cracks. Those bowls which are intended to hold salads had better be crack-free if salad oil is to be poured on the food. Like any other piece of art, the really outstanding pieces are not intended to go on dining tables.
MICHAEL Bolton, Vice President of the Opera Company of Philadelphia, recently addressed the Franklin Inn Club, giving one of the more informative descriptions we have had about the inner workings of a philanthropic entertainment. We are very grateful to him for being so frank and open about an important perplexing issue.
The Academy of Music was originally designed as an opera house but served for many years as the home of the Philadelphia Orchestra as well. We formerly had two Opera companies, but the audience couldn't support two before they merged. Things are now definitely looking better for opera in Philadelphia; the recent presentation of La Boheme , for example, was one of the high points of American opera in recent memory. However, that achievement has been made with struggles and a certain amount of patchwork. For example, the Academy of Music is owned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, which now has its home in the Kimmel Center, and rents the Academy building to the Opera. It's hard to know who makes out better in this circular arrangement, but there is little doubt the Opera Company is pinched by the rental fee of $45,000 per performance, which probably partly goes to subsidize some of the financial troubles of the Orchestra that have recently been in the papers. It ends up costing a million dollars to put on a performance at the Kimmel Center, nearly two million to put one on in the Academy.
It's true that our opera costs (and ticket prices) are less than in many other cities, most notably the Metropolitan Opera in New York. But it's more important to know that only half the budget is spent on performers. When you hear of the prices paid to performers, particularly soloists, it's easy to imagine this is the main source of financial strain. But the issue is not what people are paid, but rather who is overpaid. At the top of the list has to be the stagehands, whose hourly wages Mr. Bolton declined to specify. But I recently had the opportunity to overhear a conversation on the train between a stagehand and his friends. With great glee, the gentleman described how few hours he worked, how little needed were his services, and how soon he expected to retire. Even making some allowance for boastfulness, this recital was a little hard to take on the day after I had sat in a hundred-dollar seat.
The Academy of Music
The management of the Opera certainly seems to be thinking hard about how to rein in expenses. Perhaps a little too hard, when you notice the orchestra pit has been filled in to allow for several more rows of up-front seats. The consequence of this economy, however, is that it's nearly impossible to put on Wagnerian opera, or even some of the more elaborate operas of Puccini and Verdi. There have been complaints from some of the front-row customers that they have trouble looking upward at the libretto titles which are shown on the Proscenium. Something may have to be done about this.
Philadelphia wants to put on more and better operas. There are so many applicants for positions that the junior nonfamous singers are charged $300 by the agents, just to have an audition. Voice teachers command several hundred dollars an hour to coach aspiring performers. There is a great oversupply of performers in the local market; the problem is inadequate demand, resulting in part from high prices. No doubt this situation will correct itself, partly, when the economy recovers. Unfortunately, however, some of us old-timers can remember the Japanese recession which is in its seventeenth year, and our own Great Depression of the 1930s, which lasted fifteen.
My own suggestion is that the Italian and Central European immigrants of the early Twentieth century are disappearing, and their children have become Americanized. What we now need is to make a conscious effort to Americanize classical music, especially opera. American singers no longer adopt European stage names; it's more likely to be the other way. Let's recall that America was founded just eight blocks from the Academy. Beaumarchais, the one who wrote the Barber of Seville, ran a Revolutionary gunpowder smuggling ring in conjunction with Robert Morris. Major Andre and General Burgoyne were authors and producers of theater. If librettists get desperate, there is always Benedict Arnold the estranged hero of the Battle of Saratoga. And George Washington with tears on his cheeks as he gave orders for Major Andre to dance on the end of a rope. There's plenty of material for grand opera in this city. And most of it is even true.
William Shakespeare, (spelled Shakspere in his last will and testament, and thus arguably the preferred spelling four hundred years ago), lived and wrote four centuries ago. And yet the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia claims to be the oldest continuous Shakespeare Society in the world, dating from around our Civil War. You will have to ask Dean Sandra Cadwalader how that happens to be reconciled. In any event, this Philadelphia Club was founded by Horace Howard Furness, brother of Frank Furness, Congressional Medal of Honor awardee and notorious swash-buckling architect of the Art Museum on North Broad Street, properly pronounced "Furnace". Although the Society started meeting for dinner on Washington Square, it presently meets in the Philadelphia Club on the corner of 13th and Walnut, after meeting for ten years in the Franklin Inn Club on Camac Street of the same city. Much of the early memorabilia are housed in the libraries of the University of Pennsylvania, including the Variorum Shakespeare which it originated.
THE FIFTH ACT OF HAMLET
By a series of freak weather conditions, the meeting of the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia on April 11, 2018, had been postponed several times, and thus the reading of the fifth Act of Hamlet fell on that date. According to Harold Bloom in his book The Invention of the Human, the style of Shakespeare's plays changed abruptly at that point. No less than T.S.Eliot referred to the play as "certainly an artistic failure", but most other critics give it a much higher ranking, especially culturally. Perhaps Nietzche had it most accurately when he spoke of Hamlet "not as a man who thinks too much but as the man who thinks too well."
Hamlet is twice as long as other Shakespearean plays. Prior to that time, the plays were either light, frothy comedies, or else bloody assassinations. By contrast during a fourteen month period during the later period, four plays emerged: Othello , King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. His seemingly final comedy, The Tempest, although filled with "farewells", was far from his last play. He died a comparatively young man in his fifties, allegedly in a barroom argument. The character of his final plays was so strikingly different from his earlier ones that many serious commentators associated themselves with the idea they were the product of two different authors.
While the plot of the two aspects of Hamlet is substantially the same, the character of the Prince has been radically and abruptly changed in the second one. To paraphrase Bloom, the earlier character was an archaic avenger much like his ghostly father, while the later one was a renaissance redeemer. The explanation given is the rather unsatisfying one of fear of sending the villain to paradise at the moment of his remorse, thus avoiding his soul from repentance. In short, the choice of a new king originally (a version of the original survives) was a selection of the fiercest defender of his surviving Vikings, whereas the later version starting with the present fifth Act, was modified to be the wisest manager for the flock of remotely related relatives. The directness of the language and the abbreviation of action are certainly accelerated after this time. Placed among his other thirty-some plays, the transformation is certainly striking.
THE CHANGE IN PUBLIC PORTRAIT OF THE PRINCE
Ignoring the now-largely rejected interval of Freudian viewpoints, the modern transformation of attitude about Hamlet began at the time of my own contact with it at Yale, about seventy-five years ago. Like the memories of Rip van Winkle, they had persisted unchanged from that time, failing to recognize the further evolution, then reconsideration, to which scholarship had taken it in the seventy-five-year interval. A complete transformation had taken Hamlet from archaic avenger to scholarly redeemer. What now mattered was, who would make with the wisest king, not who had the strongest genetics. The external vision of the culture changed from barbarian to Renaissance Church, to secular scholarship. The Church lost its control, replaced by the university, with pockets of transitional viewpoints persisting. It had taken seventy-five years to make the last jump, which had taken fifty years to reach earlier transformations. Following my new profession down scientific paths, I had entirely missed the Freudian adventure.
This probably would have remained a scholarly squabble, had it not been accompanied by a parallel change in society's view about what was truly the wish of the populace, a changed view of what mattered in life, which the cultural image portrayed. It wasn't the theatrical portrayal which mattered, it was the image of it among the populace, changing the way the theater portrayed it.
Imaging the embarrassing interval of freedom viewpoint. The transformation of attitudes about Hamlet sign seventy-five years ago but was abandoned by me by the elections of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. The paradox of the two halves of Hamlet had been recognized but largely set down to new attitudes of the Renaissances. When I returned to Shakespeare after retirement from Medicine almost a century later, Freud had come and gone, but the memory of early transformations persisted unchanged like the memories of Rip Van Winkle. My impression returned its focus on the Renaissance because of its focus on the Protestant Revolution by Samuel Johnson and his spiritual discontent Fanny Kemble, while the English Department at Yale had shifted the focus from the church to the spiritual focus of the stage to the secular view of the secular literary critics. From the choice of a king must be the best likely military defender of the popular admission had shifted to the weird spiritual leader genetics and fierceness had shifted to the secular values; the church had given way to the University. Because of my own switch of attention during romance with medical science, I hadn't noticed, and the rest of Philadelphia hadn't paid attention, either because of Fanny Kemble, the computer, and the decline of the influence of the theater. When the subtle shift was announced to Philadelphia, it was treated courteously by Philadelphia, but totally ignored a week later. Literary criticism beyond to New Haven, Philadelphia never expected to change, so it just didn't.
The Nature of Hamlet's Transformation.
The pace of cultural change had been immensely altered by the computer. Only one week later, Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress about the mysterious revolution in politics, economics, and culture. We have searched by for a unifying theirs that the search had been abandoned just as it began to be successful, the unifying these emerged as society was giving the battlefield over to specialization. So the politicians saw the cultural infection as political, just as economists saw it as economics, and the press saw it as news.
But what had suddenly changed was a cultural splitting; unification took over from specialization in a week's time the cultural change was going to take longer than the change itself. It took four hundred years to change for something from external changes to
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
