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
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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 American Medical Association
has several hundred thousand physician members, all of whom consider
themselves important members of their communities, hence important
members of the AMA. "The Association" maintains a large, experienced,
and frequently successful lobbying staff in Washington. It would be
wildly impractical to permit every individual member of the Association
to walk into the Washington office and give orders to the staff. Even
when individual doctors have a very good idea, and the staff members
thoroughly agree with it, it's never safe to assume the professional as
a whole agrees. And in fact, it is always possible to find some doctor
who violently disagrees, no matter what the topic.
So, a couple of centuries of experience led to a system of funneling physician opinion up to the line to the House of Delegates,
and passing it through that narrow neck of the funnel before it is
released to the Washington office as "policy". Sure, a couple of
knuckle-heads can sometimes block a good idea at the narrow neck of the
funnel, just as an occasional Leonidas can save civilization at this
Thermopylae, against a bad idea. Sometimes an idea slides all the way
through on the first try, and sometimes it is necessary to build up a
head of pressure behind it. The fundamental question before the House
of Delegates is not entirely whether a proposition is a good idea or a
bad one; an equally important question is whether it likely reflects
the prevailing viewpoint of the profession.
My first salvo in the campaign to win AMA approval for Medical
Savings Accounts was a letter to Jim Sammons, the Executive Vice
President. He wrote back promptly that he had read the Medical Savings
Account proposal three times, and still didn't understand it. Although
my opinion of him was never quite the same, he did me the favor of
demanding simplicity, to be more quotable. An IRA for Health. An IRA
plus a catastrophic policy. What's good about that? Cheaper. What makes
it cheaper? Compound interest. How does it help poor people? More
people can afford to buy something that's cheaper. Sammons said, ok, I
can live with that.
The letter to the EVP turned out to be a good idea because it
established my claim to ownership. A few months later I arrived in
Chicago with a crisp, brief zinger of an MSA proposal, only to find
that somebody from Louisiana was attending the same meeting with an
almost identical proposal, called CHIP. Mike Smith was president of the
Louisiana Medical Society, and not only had the same idea but
personally had a lot of Louisiana oil money which he freely spent on
professional packaging of his presentation. Mike and I suspiciously
circled each other like two wildcats for a few hours, but we had so
much in common that very shortly we were the best of friends, remaining
so for years until his unfortunate death. He introduced me to his
Southern friends, I introduced him to my Northern ones, and the idea
itself picked up some allies on its own merits. It had a fairly easy
time of it in the House of Delegates. However, it was referred to a
committee for polishing and deeper consideration. Six months later it
had disappointingly picked up quite a lot of unforeseen opposition,
probably after the hospital and insurance executives heard about it. It
took another six months to fight through a wall of specious argument,
but an endorsement of the Medical Savings Account did become a policy of the
AMA and the eager Washington staff was thus free to run with it.
It has remained AMA policy ever since, and the main technical
problem for its main sponsors became one of keeping the idea alive in a
House of Delegates with constantly shifting turnover. The AMA is like
the court system; it doesn't like to keep revisiting an issue that is
settled policy. Too many other members have proposals requesting
attention, so why should we go on reaffirming old matters? However, the
proposal was stalled in Congress, and for the momentum, we needed to keep
beating the drum with variations which somewhat stretched the patience
of the more senior members of the House of Delegates. To them, I
apologize, with gratitude for their tolerance.
But what was the matter with Congress? What was the matter with the
editorial page of the New York Times? I was always uneasy about a protracted debate because reducing the cost of medical care (from the
patient's point of view) was apt to translate into reduced income for
doctors. I was leading a procession of self-employed entrepreneurs into
a proposal to cut their own income for the benefit of the public; how
long could physician enthusiasm be maintained for that? I'm proud to
say the answer is at least twenty-five years.
Even in retrospect, I am a little surprised that even such
sophisticated students of medical economics could remain focused for so
long. They might have come to regard the sponsors of MSA as being on an
ego trip, or else nutty fanatics obsessed with a lost cause. Or they
might have joined the young newcomers in fearing that such determined
opposition at a national level might signify the opponents were somehow
right to oppose it. The arguments advanced by the opponents really
seemed to have very little merit, but perhaps in private, it might be
possible to sympathize with some embarrassing circumstances that
explained the vigor of the resistance without crediting its excuses.
Political debate after all, even in scientific organizations, quite
characteristically wraps venal motives in a cloak of logic and
altruism. I remained fearful for years that the House of Delegates
would shrug its shoulders and let the opponents have their way. That
they never, ever, did so was probably related to medical care being
physician home turf; where you get used to hearing a lot of dumb
arguments, but you don't have to credit them with any merit until merit
is displayed. You can tell doctors a lot of fairy tales about
architecture or investment banking perhaps, but if you talk medicine
with them, you better have your facts.
Whenever my colleagues would privately draw me aside and ask why in
the world a lot of people were so resistant to the MSA, I had to tell
them I was not entirely certain. However, it was notable that three
groups had important things to lose, and would probably fight to
preserve them. The Medical Savings Account threatened the
eighty-year-old pricing preferences between hospitals and insurance
companies. Secondly, it threatened the sixty-year-old preferential
healthcare pricing for members of organized labor. And finally, the
politicians who were so anguished about the uninsured population might
possibly be more interested in preserving the grievance than achieving
its solution.
I can never remember a private conversation of this sort that didn't
satisfy the doctor who asked the question. And I also never met a
representative of health insurance, hospital administration or
organized labor who would admit any truth to it.
We should all be grateful to Lloyd B. Roach, the President of WCOJ radio station inWest Chester PA, for researching and popularizing the history of American radio broadcasting. From him, we learn that public radio had its origin in Philadelphia, during the early 1920s. While it is true that KDKA in Pittsburgh can claim to be the oldest radio station around, there are those who say that radio as we now know it had its origins on the rooftops of four department stores clustered at Eighth and Market Streets, busily announcing what was on sale today, and helping draw teeming crowds to that center of dry goods merchandising that many of us are still alive to remember. Strawbridge and Clothier, Lits, and Gimbels were on three corners of the intersection, Snellenbergs was a block up Market, and John Wanamaker's big store was a couple of block still further West. In those early days, names like David Sarnoff and Arthur Atwater Kent were the equivalents of Bill Gates and Andy Grove today. Eighty years before the dot-com revolution, the public radio revolution made zillionaires of kids who had been working in cigar stores a year or two earlier, and not merely communication but world culture was forever changed. And in both cases, a sudden drop in the stock market wiped out a lot of them, although a few survived.
Rush Limbaugh
It seems you ought to know about "Absorption" which is some kind of electrical phenomenon whereby a lot of microwave and computer traffic wipes out the AM (as opposed to FM) signals in big cities. Because everyone knows that the political right wing likes the red expanses of the map, while the left or liberal way of thinking is concentrated in cities, hence blue parts of the map, the overall effect is that AM radio is more a phenomenon of the exurbs, rural districts, and highways. And a further consequence is that call-in radio is heavily right wing in its audience, hence programs, Rush Limbaugh and all that. Because of the innate remorselessness of paid political consultants, it doesn't take long for politicians to recognize that getting rid of absorption would make radio call-in shows more likely to reach urban liberals. We can't have that, or we must have that, depending on the bias of the observer, and hence a sort of radio signal called XM is something we predict will be made forbidden or made mandatory, because it makes urban liberal talk radio possible again. The beauty of this cutthroat battle is that it is so obscure that the public won't notice its significance until it happens, and when it does there will be few fingerprints on it. Commentators will rattle on about shifting tides of opinion when in fact some manipulation of the Federal Communications Act or the local broadcast licensing regulations by people who know very well what they are doing is what has gone on. Heh, heh.
To get back to Philadelphia, the dreary hulks which now stand where the department stores once stood are a reminder that shopping centers, or collections of strip malls, have killed the department store. Two phenomena are at work here. The brand name which gave credibility and comfort to the department stores' reputation is being replaced by national brand names with local franchises., and national advertising rather than regional. That might have been bearable if the department stores had not placed so much unwise reliance on the concept of the "full-service operation". If you try to sell everything in one-stop shopping, as for example selling pianos as well as perfume, some of the things you include are going to be losers. Consequently, the perfumes on which you made your profits will have to become more expensive to pay for the losses on pianos, and eventually, the perfume specialty stores will destroy your profit center, ruining the whole full-service business. This phenomenon, by the way, is beginning to eat away at the economics of hospitals as well.
Everyone admitted he was a demanding task-master, to the point of eccentricity. That's a quality almost essential in any editor of a multi-author textbook because authors regularly procrastinate in submitting their contributions, while publishers have rigid deadlines and no patience at all with editors who ask to extend them. The central element in Nelson's fame was his 1600-page textbook of Pediatrics, with more authors than it is reasonable to count in the decades it was published and re-published, eventually establishing itself as the standard work in the field. Nelson applied discipline to his resident physicians, too. One former resident recently recalled his forbidding a husband and wife resident pair to eat lunch together in the hospital cafeteria. Not in my hospital, you won't.
What his family life was like is not reported, but it can easily be imagined that he had rebellious children. One day he instructed his daughter to prepare a complete index of the textbook for the next edition. Apparently there was some resistance, eventually quashed. And to emphasize how unlikely it was that anyone would read an index very carefully, the book went through editing and proof-reading, and was in the bookstores for several months before anyone noticed the entry tucked away under "Birds".
Almost every retirement community, cruise ship, and the large hotel have a "fitness center", so there really is no excuse for retired people to be as weak and flabby as they generally are. Arthritis is pretty common, but it is ordinarily so mild that taking a large aspirin or a small Ibuprofen tablet will cause you to forget about arthritis pain long enough to get some exercise. Stretching exercises will often get rid of what pain remains, and you should feel better as a consequence, not worse. All sorts of good things happen when older people start getting regular exercise; but if you are really crippled, the following is not written for you.
A friend who regularly "goes back" to Princeton reunions reports that about half of his class was still alive for the 60th reunion this year. Unfortunately, only eight members of the class were able to walk in the parade. The rest rode in golf carts. Speaking with the understandable bias of a Yale alumnus, I have to say this sort of thing is not necessary at all.
Almost everyone graduates from high school in pretty good condition, and the majority of college graduates are pretty fit at the time of graduation, too. Speaking from the vantage point of the 60th reunion, the fellows who were the athletic campus heroes are generally the ones who have serious hip, knee and shoulder disabilities which become fairly troublesome by the time of their retirement from the workforce. Either that or they soon regale you with stories of their artificial joint replacements. Nevertheless, it is curious that these are the class members who keep up their exercise in some way, usually golf or tennis, sometimes sailing; it almost seems as though it should be mandatory to learn golf or tennis in college, so that by the time retirement comes along, exercise has become a lifetime habit. That even seems to be true of the ones in golf carts because of football injuries in the past, but scientific studies don't seem to have established whether vigorous football, baseball or polo as a youth make you pay too great a price in later life; it would be interesting to know the overall trade-off.
The majority of Americans have a different life pattern and must be urged to change it. After they get married and have a steady job, they abandon exercise pretty completely. A few games on weekends, perhaps, and vigorous summer vacations for a few years in their 30s and 40s. After that, there is essentially no exercise at all, a steady gain of weight ("My, don't you look good,") and if they are lucky, no major illnesses until they retire. The fact is, most people don't much enjoy exercise, and arrive at retirement age with the bravado boast they haven't had much exercise for thirty years. Even the medical profession has abandoned them; doctors tell them that exercise is good for you, a most unwelcome scientific opinion.
Combatting Sarcopenia
Let's simplify some of the confusion which abounds among trainers and physiotherapists, about the various competing types of exercise. There are three types, and you need all three of them. First, you need to overcome the decades of disuse atrophy which come from endlessly sitting at a desk. The muscles get thin and withered, a condition which luxuriates in the descriptive term "sarcopenia". Start out with about six weeks of the kind of exercise a lot of people say you shouldn't have, the weight-lifting variety, chin-ups, and push-ups, possibly Charlie Atlas-type of pushing one hand up while pushing the other one down, or pushing one foot against another. That's sometimes called "Dynamic Tension". The purpose of all this is to build muscle size or bulk. The professional athletes who look so grotesque with their shirts off tend in addition to resort to self-medication with a mixture of testosterone and growth hormone, but that's not advised for them or for you. It may be that thirty years of administering illicit muscle-building hormones will prove to be statistically harmless, but right now it doesn't seem exactly a wise or harmless thing to do. The professional athletes imagine they can make many millions if they just get a small edge on their competitors, and after that, they can retire in luxury. Even if that dubious claim eventually proves to be true for them, it isn't true for most of the rest of us. If someone is as emaciated as a concentration-camp survivor, perhaps hormones are justified, but it is only wise to undertake it under a doctor's supervision, and only for a few months.
After the muscles have been bulked up for a month or two, perhaps longer if you are incorrigibly lazy, it is time to go to stretching and platform building. Some effort should be made to rotate muscles of the whole body, particularly if there is still an appreciable amount of muscle soreness for a day or two after each session. This is the time for a gym with a dozen different types of machines, each one aimed at a different muscle set. The magic number is five; stretch and pull each muscle group five times and then go to another; usually, it's five times on each side of the body or ten times per machine. Take an aspirin or ibuprofen before each session, and drink at least a glass of liquid afterward. Three times a week is often enough for a beginner to get started; but remember if you give yourself a month's vacation, it will take another month of hard work to get back to 80% of what you had only recently achieved.
After six months or so of this drill, start building endurance. A stationary bicycle, a treadmill, or swimming pool laps are useful for almost anyone. Running on a track is fine, but the majority of retirees have enough arthritis somewhere that they have to be careful about jogging. If the pain appears while doing this, especially chest pain, stop immediately.
A word about shoes. People with ankle injuries, chronic flat feet, or arthritis in the feet and ankles may well find they can't get any endurance exercise because their feet hurt. Before rushing into bunion surgery or some other drastic response, try some foam rubber shoes. These were once special-ordered by a famous seven-foot professional basketball player, who wanted to be three inches closer to the basket when he threw the ball. So, three inches of foam rubber was glued to the sole of his running shoes. Well, you trip if the edges aren't trimmed at the heels and toes, so various other small modifications evolved. Eventually, a commercial version emerged in which the foot is essentially encased in foam rubber, and after walking on them for a couple of weeks, the rubber gets crushed down appropriately. The effect is a molded shoe, just like molded ski boots, with crushed foam rubber instead of fiberglass. Quite often, the effect is to push the bones back into ideal arrangements, with dramatic relief of the chronic pain. If your feet don't hurt, you walk more, maybe even start to jog. During the first few weeks, be careful, or you may stumble and fall on your nose. After a month, you'll forget you have them on, and maybe even forget your feet used to hurt. Progress can be measured by the ability (usually after six weeks or so) to put on regular shoes for a day. Without pain.
ABOUT ten years ago, I first encountered the use of the term "Human Rights". Seated as a member of the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association, I was distracted when a late resolution was passed around for urgent consideration. Such resolutions require a supermajority to be introduced as a business of the House, either two thirds, or three-quarters of the attendees, and a little speech by the author explaining the "reason for lateness". The resolution was a one-line request for endorsement of the concept of Human Rights by the American Medical Association. The stammering explanation for lateness (as distinguished from holding it over to the next meeting) was that it was self-evident that the Association would favor human rights and immediately place it on the "Consent Calendar" for approval without voting on it. Like everyone else in the room, I looked to my seatmate neighbor to ask what this was all about. No one knew, so the author was asked to explain. Well, it was about human rights, not animal rights or corporate rights, and was otherwise so self-evident it needed no further explanation. Just what was in the mind of others seated in that room I cannot say, but to me, the resolution seemed like nonsense, whose author seemed very innocent and naive. In any event, the resolution was dismissed, the paper discarded, and we went on to the medical issues we were there to discuss.
Bill of Rights
the committee to prepare the Bill of Rights, it is easily possible that he felt the same way about the ninety rights he decided to delete. The handful of rights which survived into the Bill of Rights seem to have been limited to preventing outrages (freedom of speech, assembly, petition for grievances, press, religion) which the British had committed during the Revolutionary War. The rest of the proposed rights would have to go through the process, one by one, of establishing that violations had indeed been numerous and notorious. By contrast in the recent construction of the Bill of Rights for the European Community, a far more relaxed attitude was in evidence. They are fifty pages long, including such things as the right to work half time when an employer wants you to work full time. The best I could say about that would be it is micro-management. The worst would be to imagine that a great many people who voted for it were displaying a deliberate intention to make the European Union unworkable, and that must have been at least a majority, if not a super-majority. Without more willingness to compromise than this, the EU seems doomed.
In fact, the whole concept of prosecution for human rights violation is too vague to be useful. When individuals commit outrageous crimes, the matter can normally be handled under the criminal code, with the offense defined and appropriate punishment described in advance. Murder and torture are not commonly affected by whether or not rights have been violated. On the other hand, offenses by component national states are usually regarded as acts of war; if Ghengis Kahn were accidentally admitted to the EU, the punishment would start with expulsion from the Union, and surely go on to war, essentially the same outcome. A nation which was able to deal with the Iroquois and the Comanche tribes surely has no nightmares about Nebraska electing Pol Pot as governor. The human rights advocates have simply got to make a more plausible case for revolutions in our criminal justice system, if they are to be taken seriously.
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.
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