Bequests

Two prominent men made bequests last week for the advancement of medical knowledge. Both bequests honored colorful doctors.

P:Brigadier General Charles A. Lindbergh, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography (The Spirit of St. Louis), gave his $500 prize money to Columbia University's School of Dental and Oral Surgery, in memory of his maternal grandfather, Dentist Charles H. Land (1847-1922). A revolutionary figure in dentistry, Dr. Land perfected a way of enveloping defective teeth in porcelain jackets, and in 1884 invented a gas furnace for baking the porcelain. Lindbergh first made friends with Columbia Dental School when he started parceling out items from his grandfather's laboratory.

P:Charles E. Merrill, 69, senior partner of New York's investment house, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, gave $400,000 to Harvard Medical School (endowment: $23 million). Banker Merrill (an Amherst man himself) made the gift to establish a special professorship for heart diseases, to be named for Harvard Heart Specialist Samuel A. Levine. Dr. Levine. 63, the son of Polish immigrants, peddled newspapers in downtown Boston as a child, went through Harvard College and Medical School (Class of '14) on a scholarship from the Boston Newsboys' Union. A leading authority on coronary thrombosis, Levine is Merrill's close friend and physician, is credited by Merrill with saving his life when the banker had a heart attack in 1952.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.