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
... William Penn's Quaker Colonies
plus medicine, economics and politics ... nearly 4,000 articles in all
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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.
An American contractor on his arrival in Iraq in 2007 to work for a company with a contract to mentor small businesses owned by Iraqis
Did you know you can still get commercial flights into Iraq? And did you know the politically correct way to land an airplane in Baghdad ends with a flush ... an extremely steep, downward spiral from 15,000 feet directly over the airport so not to attract gunfire? We flew Royal Jordanian Airlines so ours was a royal flush. Welcome to Iraq!
Some of you joined me from Almaty to Zagreb, from Bishkek to Banja Luka and Bansk. But nothing, absolutely nothing, compares with Iraq. I cannot do justice after only a few days, but my objective is to give you a first person, on-the-ground perspective of this country. At the very least, this will be educational. I fully expect my opinions to change and stories to conflict, but that's the way things are: fluid and unpredictable. I also expect and hope that what I tell you will differ vastly from what you are seeing on the US news. We all know of the US bias; these reports will give you perspective on the biases. Truth is a matter of interpretation and yours is as good as anyone's.
There are things I cannot say much about, mostly to do with security. What I suggest if you think of the most exciting action film you ever saw and begin there. My daily gear includes an armored vest and helmet, and moving from point A to point B requires extensive planning and preparation, including multiple guards and armored vehicles. I am learning to follow orders which will be a pleasant surprise to my wife. For the ladies, this is a haven of hunks: young, dashing men in excellent physical condition.
My story starts in neighboring Amman, Jordan, a diamond in the ruff, a rose among thorns. People walk the streets of Amman as if things are normal. If you look at a map, however, you will see Jordan is surrounded by lands where walking streets is not a privilege taken lightly. Our stay here is brief, overnight only. In the morning we board a plane for Baghdad but are instructed to go back to waiting because of "bad weather" in Baghdad, the first sign of unpredictability. Later, after flying over a sand storm on the way to Baghdad (it is mostly desert between Amman and Baghdad) and finding beautiful weather upon arrival, we are unsure what the real cause of the delay was.
After more delays in passport control (one of our party was deported back to Amman because he did not have the right paperwork), the other member of my team and I met our security detail, a guy from France and another from Australia, and we donned protective gear and received a briefing about what we could expect on our five-mile trip from the airport to the International Zone (IZ, formerly called the Green Zone). This stretch of highway has been called the 'most dangerous road in the world' and our security personnel is accustomed to navigating assorted threats. The ride was directly from the movies and we arrived, as expected, safely.
I haven't said much about my job because it is not entirely clear to me. I am a civilian contractor, and working for the US government requires skills nobody should ever seek. I'll fill you in as this unfolds. By the way, I turned a huge corner today. Boarding an airplane to Iraq for the first time produces anxiety by itself. Knowing you will spiral steeply toward a target is equally troubling, not just because of the dangerous maneuver but also because of the reason for it. So as I nestled fitfully into my seat and tugged the seatbelt tighter than usual, and only then learned the pilot was a woman, I had two choices. The choice I made was to refresh my amazement of the 'fairer' gender. It seems women really can do anything!
Feel free to contact me if you want to give me orders. I am listening very well right now.
The state of Connecticut absolutely loathes the idea that it is influenced by neighboring New York City. But Greenwich is full of hedge funds escaping high taxes, unfortunately not by very much. New Canaan is what Greenwich used to be, a snooty New York suburb. And Litchfield seems destined to be next in line, but still able to deny it. It's charming, neatly manicured, but still affordable. Young investment bankers think of buying a weekend home there, which will become New Canaan or Greenwich by the time they retire, which on Wall Street is often sooner than they guess. Meanwhile, the restaurants struggle to present an upscale appearance. The local law school claims to be the first in America. In spite of civil appearances, however, this is the town that decided to invade Pennsylvania on three different occasions, provoking massacres of several hundred people. Litchfield derives from Lichtfeld, a place where heretics are burned. When those dreadful Baptists from Rhode Island made an appearance, the local Congregationalists were ready to take a stand. The borders of Litchfield once extended west to Wilkes Barre, but it is still puzzling to ask how these invaders crossed the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. Or how settler families marched through what is still pretty much a barren wilderness. All the while, telling themselves their destination was a paradise when even neighboring Scranton today looks down its nose at Wilkes Barre. What is this invasion trip like today, and why in the world would the Connecticut Yankees have changed it, three times?
King Henry IV
Those Yankees were almost certainly indifferent to the magnificent scenery offered the traveler of this path, especially when the fall foliage is awe-inspiring. George Washington's headquarters was to be located later at Newburgh for longer than at any other place, and thus it became the first national park monument in the country, lying across the path of the largely forgotten invaders. Unfortunately, hardly anyone even today in Connecticut knows what was notable back then, or cares to learn. Connecticut may make its living on Wall Street, but in a spiritual sense, it faces Boston. Curators at the National Park at Newburgh likewise know nothing of the Pennamite Wars. Restaurants have difficulty summoning up a hamburger; the motorist must pump his own gas. But there are clues; at least six different towns along the invasion route call themselves Milford, or New Milford, or similar. The postal service frowns on using the same name twice in a single state, else surely there would be more Milford. There are other clues. Near the end of the trip to the Wyoming Valley, can be found the "Promised Land Park". It's just past a place called "The Lord's Valley". Not far away can be found in the town of Dallas. Just why did Wilkes Barre name so many things after other places far away?
White Flower Farm
Perhaps the law school has something to do with it. Charles II of England had given Connecticut all the land to the Pacific Ocean when it was all wilderness that just about nobody wanted to own. Eighteen years later, the same king gave the same land to William Penn. Any modern lawyer, and maybe those backwoods lawyers three centuries ago, would tell you that if the King gave it away, it was no longer his. But Penn went to court with the complaint that the present king had just given it to him, and the court agreed that Penn could call the Sheriff to throw the Connecticut people out. Modern citizens would suspect bribery or other foul play, and perhaps the Yankees did, too. After all, ancestors of that King had badly mistreated some of their ancestors, so perhaps he held a grudge. Unfortunately, that's not how the law saw things at the time, and it's not entirely likely the Connecticut Yankees were being calm and straight about it. The fact was that Connecticut farmland never had much topsoil, and by this time it was worn out. Population growth pushed, and some fanciful tales of Wyoming (now Wilkes Barre) Valley's abandoned richness, pulled. They needed it, they wanted it, no one else was using it, the owner was already rich enough, and -- King Charles, that rascal, had given it to them.
The Connecticut Yankees liked to read books, so let them read Shakespeare. The so-called Henriad, those four plays concerning Henry IV and V in the 15th century, describes accurately how the King of England owned the whole island, by inheritance and by force of arms. Those nobles who followed him and brought along enough troops to win battles were each given a piece of the kingdom. But if, as quite regularly happened, one of the nobles betrayed or displeased the King, he lost his head, and his land was given to someone else. That's what it meant to be the King, and that's still largely the way it was in the Seventeenth, even early Eighteenth, century. It's true the Barons forced a king at Runnymede to obey the laws himself, Parliament asserted itself in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, the open country began to be enclosed for private ownership in the Eighteenth century -- and the fellow colonists in America would ultimately break loose from England to extend these property rights further, until in 1787 the Constitution made it final. But that's a long way from saying King Charles II couldn't do what he pleased at the time he did it, and how many girlfriends he happened to have was irrelevant to the case. William Penn was a better lawyer than anyone in Litchfield and won the case every time it came up.
And furthermore, the Connecticut folks were out of step with their friends. Eleven of the colonies were fighting for independence, and George Washington was not alone in despairing that the other two colonies were fighting, not the British, but each other. Litchfield may now have the most beautiful flower farm market in America, but at the other end of the same street, the professional forebears of the Litchfield Law School were once giving poor advice.
As I was rushing out of my office tonight, trying not to be late for a gathering of constituents, I was suddenly confronted by a nice young lady holding a piece of paper, closely followed by a young man with a big professional TV camera. I like to think they were lying in wait for me, but more likely they were haunting the Starbucks across the street.
The question was fired at me, what did I think about Governor Christie using the Supreme Court about gay marriage? I had to admit I don't watch TV all day long, so I hadn't heard about it. Well, do you think it is appropriate for the Governor of a state to sue the Supreme Court? Huh, do you? Caught totally by surprise by a question I don't know much about, I answered, or mumbled, that it seemed to be a lawyer's question, and I'm not a lawyer. I do know that the U.S. Supreme Court will refuse to take a case unless the plaintiff can show he has sustained a personal loss of some sort. But I don't know anything about the New Jersey Supreme Court or its rules, and the whole thing seems to me to be above my pay grade. Or something like that.
If I had had more than ten seconds to think about it, I might have said, "What you really are asking me is Don't you think Christie is a bad, insensitive person?" And my answer to that question if put a little more plainly, would be, "No, I like Governor Christie a lot and I trust a former U.S. Attorney to know the fine points of law better than I do, so I support him."
And if I am wrong, and the real question you are asking me is Am I gay? Then, my answer would be, "No, I'm not gay one bit. But I am inclined to let other people do as they please, as long as it is harmless to others."
And if the hidden question is do I approve of people being gay, I would have to answer that if everybody became gay, it's pretty hard to see how the human race would survive. Now could I ask you a question? Who are you, and who is paying you to ask me slanted questions?
Follow-up, written the next day:
The next day's newspaper gave an entirely new slant to this little episode. It seems the decision was made by the Superior Court, not the Supreme Court, and Governor Christie appealed the decision, he did not sue anybody. So the whole interview process was a put-up job, slanting the attention away from a record-breaking court decision to Governor Christie, who was dutifully responding to a Superior Court ruling which overturned a state law. All the rest of it was either intended to shift attention or else to tangle me up in a confused reaction to some events which did not happen at all.
In that case, let me state my central position. Governor Christie is a great guy, who definitely needs to win re-election November 5. And I am running for the role of Assemblyman for the 6th District, prepared to help him in every way I can.
The State of Delaware has its special election phenomenon of Returns Day, dating from Colonial days when people active in politics gathered in Georgetown waiting for the election returns to be counted and announced, and then celebrated. In a day when electronic balloting and vote counting have speeded things up, things have changed everywhere, but traces remain.
The tradition is now that the "head of the ticket", the Governor or Senator running for election will gather a large crowd in a hotel meeting room on the night of the election, about two hours after the polls close. Supporters are rewarded with drinks and eats, reporters gather for comments, and the television station interviews interminably, waiting for the results to be announced. Official results are slow to arrive, having to go through more certification steps, but the district and precinct leaders keep an open telephone line to headquarters, relaying the results, especially the local results, to the headquarter celebrations in various local hotels. At the local headquarters end of the lines, someone keeps an ear glued for ballot results to be announced. Nowadays, the party faithful is gathered in a taproom, all right, but the whole place is filled with people holding a cell phone to their ears while they eat pizza with the other hand. Nearby, of course, is a stein of beer. So, the room erupts with sudden huzzahs every few minutes, and at other times people are reassured that later returns will reverse an unfavorable trend. When the final results are announced, the losers make concession speeches. Winning politicians always arrive late to the party, are greeted with cheers, and proceed to make a victory speech. And then leave.
One by one, the ranks of the party thin out until the room is empty except for the barmaid.
Stephen P. Mullin came by the Right Angle Club and told us what happened in the casino world, in about five sentences. As anyone who reads the papers will know, four brand-new, billion-dollar, casinos are going broke in Atlantic City. What most of us didn't know was that gambling revenues are going up, nationally, and more people are visiting casinos than ever before. That doesn't sound right.
Ed Rendell
All it takes to understand this paradox is to look at a map of casinos in the region, with a focus on the Philadelphia/New Jersey region. A few years ago, Las Vegas and Atlantic City pretty much had a monopoly on casinos in America, and then the Indians found they, too, had a special political exemption. And then Pennsylvania's ebullient governor, Ed Rendell noticed that most of the license plates were Pennsylvania plates, going over the various bridges to New Jersey. So he hired Steve to be a consultant, and sure enough, an awful lot of money made in Atlantic City was Philadelphia money. The Legislature was strong-armed into permitting slot machines in Pennsylvania, the necessary building permits were issued, and Pennsylvania started taking back its own gambling money. The New Jersey casinos promptly lost business, and the over-supply of them dragged the financially weakest of them, down the tube. Mystery solved, and that's about all there is to the story.
Adam Smith
Adam Smith once wrote that "The more you gamble, the more certain you are to lose." The gamblers lose money, and the neighborhoods turn sour, but this was the first I had heard that the owners of the casinos could lose money, too. And now, come to think of it, the politicians can lose money, as well. Not at first, perhaps, because a lot of gamblers want to try out the newest and latest slot machines, as well as look down on themselves through looking up, at the new mirrors on the bedroom ceilings. Speaking of that, Steve tells us that the big money is made on slot machines. The so-called table games lose money and are just for show. Which reminds me that I once ran into the man who invented the modern slot machine. He was a surgeon from the West Coast, but one of his patients complained that people were robbing the old-fashioned slots by drilling holes in the side when no one was looking. One of their buddies would come back later, and stick a metal wire in the hole, triggering a noisy jack-pot. My new friend the surgeon was a computer nut and substituted little computers for the clunky mechanicals. That frustrated the pilferers, but it also drove away from the ordinary folks who put in silver dollars instead of wires. They liked the clunking noises and flashing lights, so fake rattles, and flashing lights were installed, making everybody happy again. He was tired of taking out gall bladders, anyway, so he retired to cruise ships where he could spend his time entertaining passing doctors. He was advised that was a good thing to do, anyway, in order to keep himself healthy. People who owned a lot of old clunky mechanical ones are apt to be vengeful types, you see.
Casino's Closing
Well, the politicians who get bribed to permit casino licenses are delighted to tell you how much out-of-state money these benevolent institutions bring into the state, $1.4 billion dollars a year in the case of Pennsylvania. So they get re-elected to office in those hide-away little rural villages which characterize America's state capitals, where a number of them have just had brass plaques attached to their portraits, at least in Harrisburg, to commemorate this or that majority leader who afterward went to jail. As one of them just told the news media, "You can't change history, can you?" The City of Harrisburg just went bankrupt over some sewage disposal plant, and you may remember that Philadelphia was once the state Capital. The fact that 49 of the fifty state capitals are in small towns, without much in the way of investigative journalism, and the additional fact that most capitals have been moved from corrupt old cities to the regions inhabited by the noble savages, gives you a sign that this wasn't exactly an accident. The state government is clearly the weakest part of our political system, and its operation in the dark corners of states is more cause that symptom. Someday I'll tell you the story of a multi-billionaire who asked me to suggest a good place to donate some money. I suggested that funding several think tanks in state capitals might produce a significant improvement in the environment, and he thanked me for the advice. Unfortunately, he bought the Chicago Cubs instead, so the experiment never got tried out. There's no doubt that Chicago could use a little reform movement, too, judging by some of the political specimens that have recently crawled out from under that rock. While Philadelphia is neither as corrupt nor as contented, as it was a century ago. We get our fun bankrupting casinos in other cities.
Just one more story. Some New York potentates once took it in their heads to buy up some Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO). Somehow my name was referred to them, and I was hired as a consultant, to put on a white coat and walk around inspecting AC's local HMO. Naturally, I was driven down one of many new highways which New Jersey had built to attract the gambling trade, although I could have gone down on one of the newly refurbished train systems with the same purpose. Inside the HMO, I must say I have never seen so much syphilis, cirrhosis, schizophrenia, and associated medical features of the gay life, and I hope never to see that sort of medical excitement again. Those were the employees of the casinos, the so-called permanent members of the community. New Jersey may have enjoyed a brief spell of prosperity with out-of-state money. But if you balance that against the present rubbish heap, I'm not at all sure the taxpayers of New Jersey were financially better off for the experiment, on long-term balance.
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.
