For Country Doctors

A scion of one of Cleveland's first families is William Bingham II, son of the city's biggest wholesale hardware dealer, grandson of Samuel Colt (firearms), related by blood and inheritance to Colonel Oliver H. Payne of Standard Oil. Rich but shy at 59, Mr. Bingham spends most of his time in his home in Bethel on the banks of Maine's Androscoggin River. He first went there to be near his old Cleveland friend. Neurologist John George Gehring, who had bought an old inn in Bethel for a private sanatorium.* When Dr. Gehring died in 1932, aged 75, Mr. Bingham, who had given $200,000 for the John G. Gehring Floor at the Neurological Institute in Manhattan's vast Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre, bought his good friend's inn. Last April Mr. Bingham gave $400,000 to found for Professor Joseph Hersey Pratt of Boston's Tufts Medical School, a Joseph H. Pratt Diagnostic Hospital. Last week Mr. Bingham increased this by $300,000 and thus soundly financed a useful and needy branch of Medicine.

He announced that Pratt Hospital would "make it possible for patients needing diagnosis, patients from any corner of New England and from any economic group to get the latest medical advice and for the country doctor to profit from the knowledge and experience of specialists." The doctors will take turns studying at the Pratt Hospital. Mr. Bingham will pay their expenses in Boston, arrange for "exchange doctors" to substitute for them in their home towns. Maine doctors in batches of six are already taking advantage of this unique medical dispensation. In addition, all New England doctors will have the opportunity to send "the 10% or so of their most puzzling cases" to the Pratt Hospital for study and diagnosis.

*Memorialized by Novelist Robert Herrick, a onetime Gehring patient, in The Master of the Inn.

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