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VOLUME 22, NUMBER 42
NOVEMBER?, 1975
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
James M. Youngs 1955 Duke Medical Graduate
Doctor Kept Presidents' Illnesses at Bay
_ _ - w.T. 1 • • y rr* f 1 u Vmincr rprpivcd
By Joe Sigler
Almost anyone who is old enough
to remember the day and the tragedy
it represents can recall where he or
she was when the first news broke.
It was Friday, Nov. 22, 1963.
Dr. James M. Young had just
returned to the White House West
Wing physician’s office from lunch in
the White House staff dining room
with President Kennedy’s Naval aide
and an adminstrative assistant when
they got word of the shooting in
Dallas.
“We ran from the West Wing to the
Secret Service office where they had
%
%
TaMILIAR SURROUNDINGS — When Dr. and Mrs. James M. Young and daughter
Tricia came back to Duke earlier this year to see daughter Anne (second from left)
receive her cap in Duke Chapel as a School of Nursing junior, it was a return to
familiar ground for Dr. Young. The former physician to Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson earned his undergraduate and M.D. degrees here.
an open line to Parkland Memorial
Hospital,” Young recalled.
From the reports that were then
coming in from Parkland, the doctor
said, “1 knew there was no way of
saving him.”
Young had been on the President’s
staff as one of three White House
physicians since June of that year. In
that short time, he had traveled with
the President and his family and had
come to feel close to them.
In the immediate aftermath of the
assassination, Young helped
arrange for the autopsy when the
body was returned to Washington
and he cared for Mrs. Kennedy for
the next 10 days, in the White House
and later at Hyannis Port.
It was k major assignment for a
young Navy doctor just turned 34.
Dr. Young recalled these and other
events in his 20-year Navy experience
while visiting at Duke earlier this year
to see his daughter Anne receive her
cap as a junior in the School of
Nursing.
It was a return to familiar ground.
After attending a two-room,
eight-grade schoolhouse and then
high school in Massillon, Ohio, Jim
Young might have ended his formal
education. His family couldn’t afford
to send him to college.
But Young could play football, and
that’s what he did, coming to Duke
under an athletic scholarship and
earning four letters in football under
Coach Wallace Wade.
Still, his undergraduate days
weren’t all football. He was president
of the Student Government
Association, defeating Nick
Galifianakis who would later win
some elections and go to Congress. A
close friend of Young’s in those days,
who remains so today, was the
president of the Inter-Fraternity
Council, John O. (Jack) Blackburn,
now Duke’s chancellor.
Graduating in 1951, Young was
accepted into the Duke medical
school, where his honors included
election to Alpha Omega Alpha.
Upon earning his M.D. degree in
Rundles Talks Cancer in Europe
By William Erwin
A Duke cancer specialist says
earlier action by patients and their
doctors is cutting the death rate from
Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer arising in
the lymph nodes.
One out of every two people with
the disease can now be cured, said
Dr. Wayne Rundles, head of the
leukemia and lymphoma clinic at the
Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Hodgkin’s disease is a type of
lymphoma. It strikes nearly 7,000
people — mostly young adults — in
the U.S. every year, according to the
American Cancer Society.
Rundles spoke on the disease and
related cancers in Yugoslavia Oct. 28,
at the first meeting of the
Yugoslavian-United States Medical
Association, interviewed before the
meeting, he explained why the
Hodgkin’s disease survival rate is
climbing.
“People are getting smarter,” the
physician said. Patients report their
symptoms earlier. Instead of waiting,
they see their doctors at the first sign
of Hodgkin’s disease —a swollen but
painless lymph node, often in the
neck.
“In the past," he said, “they might
have thought it was infection and let
it go." The sooner a cancer is
detected, he noted, the better the
patient's chances for survival.
Why do patients take their
symptoms more seriously now?
Rundles pointed to educational
programs put on by the American
Cancer Society and other groups.
“They’ve had an impact,” he said, on
doctors as well as patients.
Doctors are more optimistic now
when they diagnose Hodgkin’s
disease, the specialist said. ‘They’re
better informed; they know a lot
more can be done for these patients
now than could be done even five or
10 years ago,” he said.
(Continued on page 2)
1955, Young received his Navy
commission. He retired on Sept. 1 of
this year and started work the same
day as director of medical affairs for
Massachusetts Blue Cross and Blue
Shield. He also is affiliated with
Lahey Clinic in Boston.
The event that was to result in the
three-year highlight of his Navy
career, service at the White House,
was a telephone call at 4:25 one
afternoon when Young was in the
library at the Philadelphia Naval
Hospital.
“She says she’s a White House
operator,” the person who got the
call to Young relayed.
On the other end of the line was
Navy Capt. George Burkley, who
was the second White House
physician at the time, working with
Dr. Janet Travell. Burkley said he
wanted to request Young’s
assignment to the White House
medical staff, with promotion from
lieutenant commander to captain.
Young is uncertain how he came to
such attention from the White
House, but he had met Kennedy"
briefly and talked with some of his
staff the year before.
After an overnight consultation
with his wife (“It would mean moving
back again to Washington after we
just got settled in Philadelphia,” he
explained). Young “called back and
said 1 would be honored.”
After those brief five months in the
Kennedy White House, Young
stayed on for the next three years
with President Johnson.
(Continued on page 2)
Medical Library
Opening Slated
In Ten Days
The new Medical Center Library,
housed in the recently completed
Seeley G. Mudd Building, is
scheduled to open its doors to library
users on Monday, Nov. 17, according
to Kathy Kruse, reference librarian.
Currently, the library’s 160,000
volumes are being transferred to the
new facility by oAe undergraduates
and a moving company which
specializes in relocating libraries.
The new library will contain 47,000
square feet of useable space as
compared with 10,000 in the old
library. It will have a seating capacity
of 575, exceeding the Davison
Building reading room which
opened in 1930, by 505 seats.
The new facility will also contain
two elevators, six rest rooms and 53
study rooms, including 13 group
study rooms. All of Duke’s
medically-related literature, as well as
the Trent Collection in the History of
Medicine and the Barchas Collection
in the History of Science, will be
brought together under the same
roof, for the first lime in many years.