Death of DeLee

". . . One of the greatest obstetrical leaders of the country, not only in our time but in all of history." In such words did Chicago's famed Obstetrician Fred Lyman Adair speak of his chief, the late Dr. Joseph Bolivar DeLee (TIME, April 13) at the Second American Congress on Obstetrics and Gynecology last week in St. Louis. The influence of Dr. DeLee was indeed palpable at this meeting.

Dr. DeLee was a pioneer in obstetrical movies. Many of his devoted students who had just come from the Chicago funeral saw the gentle, goateed, slender man with the dark, alert eyes once again at the Congress--in one of his movies. The film instructed doctors on breech presentation (buttocks or feet first instead of head). Dr. DeLee made 16 such movies, paying half the expense of all of them. He always looked for a pretty blonde mother to take the leading role.

Perhaps those who appreciated him most were the 8,000 women in Chicago's slums whom Dr. DeLee had delivered of babies during his 40-odd years of practice. In 1895, the poor young physician, son of Jewish immigrant parents, scraped together $500, collected a stove, table, chairs and linen, bought two secondhand beds, and started Chicago's first free maternity dispensary in a $12-a-month tenement flat.

By the turn of the century his fame had spread and his Lying-in Hospital was endowed by Frederic Adrian Delano, uncle of President Roosevelt. From then on Dr. DeLee alternated between delivering socially prominent mothers at $2-3,000 a baby, poor mothers for nothing. Today Lying-in Hospital is a $2,000,000 institution connected with the University of Chicago. In its gleaming delivery rooms, 3,000 babies a year are born.

A skillful surgeon, Dr. DeLee developed the modern, low Caesarean operation. He also campaigned for prophylactic forceps delivery, a method of sparing the mother by using forceps early in a predictable, prolonged labor.

Despite these innovations, Dr. DeLee constantly inveighed against "meddlesome midwifery," always preferred to let nature take its course whenever possible. He was a great advocate of home deliveries. Although some doctors today believe he overstressed this point, his technique is more widely used now than ever before in communities where hospitals are scarce.

Dr. DeLee wrote a modern bible of obstetrics (Principles and Practice of Obstetrics), 40 other publications, taught maternal care to more than 11,000 doctors and nurses. He also founded with his own money the Chicago Maternity Center on Maxwell Street (recently popularized in the movie The Fight for Life), which sends doctors and nurses to women in the slums. He was a man who knew that doctors, like other men, make many mistakes. Whenever a nurse slipped up, he would utter no reproach, but send her a box of candy.

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