Heartbeats of the City ______by Ricka McNaughton June 2019 (includes subsequent edits)

Synopsis: In the mid-1920’s, in Jersey City, New Jersey, a practical-minded family doctor field tested a unique, adaptive piece of equipment he devised. He hoped it would send a patient’s heartbeats “live” over a local phone line to an electrocardiogram (ECG) device in his office. It worked splendidly. The patient, who lived blocks away, didn’t have to leave her house, and the doctor didn’t have to leave his office in order to get an ECG reading. His idea predated the rise of similar technology by decades, but for some reason history seems to have forgotten about it. This account documents Dr. Jaffin’s medical first as well as the disease-fighting work that became his legacy. It also offers perspective on the doctor’s complicated alliance with the notorious mayor Frank Hague, the 30-year “Boss” of Jersey City who, by hook and by crook, built a monumental, world class health care center that never sent a single bill to generations of patients in the city. ______

r. A.E. Jaffin, as he preferred to be noted in print, had a time management problem. He would Dof ten find his medical services needed in two different places at once. At the age of 42, he devised a novel solution. He tinkered up a device that enabled him to evaluate, remotely, the heart function of a patient resting blocks away from his office.

It was regarded, then, as the first telemedicine breakthrough of its kind. It appears to have predated similar technology by more than three decades. The year was 1926. The place was Jersey City, New Jersey. Yet the modern record seems to have overlooked this transformative moment. That is, until a fragile newspaper clipping surfaced recently in a box of musty old documents, telling a story that deserves some fresh air.

Abraham Ezra Jaffin, of Lithuanian and older Spanish ancestry, immigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1888 as a four year-old boy. The family name had been Peretz. For whatever reasons

Page 1 prevailed at the time, they took the surname Jaffin to expedite a visa for passage to America. As a young man navigating the immigrant experience, Jaffin managed to take up the study of medicine at New York’s Columbia University and did post graduate work in Vienna.

We pick up his story in the heart of Dr. Jaffin’s career as a busy family physician with a medical practice in his own home on Emory Street in Jersey City, New Jersey, a ferry ride from Manhattan. He was then husband to Matilda and solicitous father of two young daughters, Helene and Elsa. The household didn’t end there. It never seemed to lack for a few extra relations in some state of life transition. This made for a revolving extended family, including a resident domestic helper who’d arrived when her husband died and left her nothing to live on. Though not related, she, too, became family. She and Matilda saw to the management of all things in that busy house.

Matilda ran a tight ship. Helene recalled the endless rounds of daily chores it took to keep the household and the medical office properly humming and gleaming. Also, the children of the house were made to remain maddeningly quiet in their play during their father’s office hours, which to Helene -- an energetic, outgoing child -- seemed never-ending. She wasn’t far off.

Dr. Jaffin had a strong interest in cardio- pulmonary medicine but operated as a frontline primary care physician, prepared to treat anything and anybody. His patient roster included the well-off and the well-known, but he was also devoted to caring for those from the city’s poorest quarters. He often tramped about town making house calls, as most family doctors did then. Calls in the middle of the night were not unusual.

His work did not end with his medical practice. He tried to stay abreast of every aspect of medicine. He also found time to compile research, publish papers in medical journals and was often invited to speak at conferences home and abroad. He sat on numerous local boards. And still, there is more to tell about his life’s work. No surprise, then, that he constantly sought to make more effective use of his time.

Wouldn’t It Be Something

Among those wishing bedside calls were some patients who, more often than others, just needed to know that the fluttery sensations

Page 2 they were feeling in their chests weren’t dire. Some of them were people of position accustomed to snappy treatment. No matter who they were, Dr. Jaffin went to make sure they were not in dire straits. He did this to be thorough, since heart troubles are nothing to trifle with, but also with the thought that listening and reassurance are vital elements of a doctor’s care. No exceptions. It was these kinds of calls that gave Dr. Jaffin what was, in his time, a pretty advanced idea. Wouldn’t it be something if he could check a patient’s heart function without leaving his office?

In 1926, the scene was set as follows: Stethoscopes already amplified heartbeats. Telephones wires already carried the human voice. Doctors commonly used them for simple diagnostic consultation. Electrocardiograms devices, (ECG’s) for charting and diagnosing heart rhythm irregularities were fairly new. What Dr. Jaffin successfully designed was a portable listening device that would relay the cardiac signals of patient blocks away to his own office, where they would feed into his ECG for his inspection.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast Dr. Jaffin’s breakthrough with the genesis of the device it rests on: the telephone itself. When Alexander Graham Bell first pursued the idea, he, too, had a kind of medical application in mind.

Bell was a part-time professor of vocal physiology at the then-new Boston University. Notably he had no related degree or formal training. He did have a lot of experience with the issues of people who had person-to-person communication challenges. His mother was hearing impaired, his father was a noted speech instructor.

In pondering the telephone, Bell’s initial thought was to make life easier for people with hearing deficits. The significant advance of Bell’s first telephonic device was voice amplification. As many innovations are, his was a clever merge of existing technologies and others that people were already experimenting with. In fact, his patent got registered mere hours ahead of a competitor. It did take a while for Bell and later partners in telephone development to add a dial and a ringer, and thus elevate the telephone into a fully world-altering technology. One inconvenience with early models was that you had to go pick up the receiver now and then to see if anyone was trying to call you.

Dr. Jaffin’s breakthrough was likewise a clever merge of existing technologies piggy-backed on Bell’s. Dr. Jaffin was tinkerer enough to fashion his prototype, but then he took his idea to the local

Page 3 telephone company for a hand hooking it up. Credit is due those folks for assistance rendered.

As early as 1905, one Willem Einthoven experimented with the transmission of signals from one ECG machine to another over a phone line, producing a kind of “telecardiogram.” But an ECG in that time weighed hundreds of pounds. Not a gadget you’d want to carry around the city.

In Dr. Jaffin’s era the ECG’s had gotten somewhat smaller. But Dr. Jaffin’s advance stood apart from earlier experiments because it did not require an ECG at both ends. All a busy doctor needed to do was dispatch someone to visit the patient, wire up a small heart- beat detecting apparatus and send the patient’s cardiac story back by phone line.

After this, similar telemedicine wasn’t developed until the 1950’s- 60’s in academic/lab settings. Perhaps Dr. Jaffin’s model required more tweaking to go mainstream. But remember that Bell got credit for getting there first with a phone that initially had no dial or ringer.

Dr Jaffin’s innovation had, in addition, instant utility. It was a two- sided win. It gave a doctor more hours in the day and was a great accommodation for patients.

How exactly was it built? What did it look like? The 1926 newspaper article describing the breakthrough didn’t going into great detail. Nothing in the family recollections offers more of a description than provided in this story. Did he file a patent? No record has been found. In that time it would have entailed a great deal of money, travel and bother for him. There is no simple look- up for this. As of now, in order to search the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office online database that covers Dr. Jaffin’s time period, you’d have to know the patent number and assigned classification.

But one thing is almost certain. Dr. Jaffin would not have sought to keep a useful advance in medicine to himself for personal gain. He dedicated himself to spreading valuable knowledge around.

In the following succession of events, you could, if you tried, find a small filament of fate. Alexander Bell’s transformative invention might never have happened in America, nor even become his legacy, had his family not left Scotland in some part due to the death of his two brothers from tuberculosis, which hit the family hard. Building on Bell’s technology, Dr. Jaffin, in his time, tinkered for a time with telephonic technology, but he devoted far more effort to the treatment and eradication of tuberculosis. His work in that area became his foremost legacy.

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Dr. Jaffin drove himself to learn all he could about TB. He wrote papers about tactics for fighting the disease, both medically and socially. For historical perspective, the effective TB-fighting drug streptomycin was not discovered until 1943 and was not used in a clinical setting until 1949. Jersey City’s poorer citizens were among the most ravaged by the illness and had the least access to care, fanning the spread of the disease. As one way to quell that spread, Dr. Jaffin worked to ensure that all food workers in the city were tested for TB to prevent them from spreading illness in such places as restaurants and supermarkets. He helped establish a string of “chest clinics” in his city where anyone could go for free health care. In the quest to provide free health care to all in need, Dr. Jaffin had a like-minded connection, a man named Frank Hague.

Frank “I am the Law” Hague, as he was called by the media, ruled as mayor of Jersey City for 30 years. The tough Irishman arose from a squalid ward of the city known as The Horseshoe, a muddle of immigrants, taverns and tenements. He was expelled from public school around the sixth grade. He hit the streets and fared better in the schools of thuggery and organized corruption. In time, the story goes, he was recruited to provide creative voter intimidation and/or delivery services to local political party bosses. Eventually he became The Boss.

It’s been said by a few of his contemporaries that Frank Hague wouldn’t hesitate to have you threatened, beaten or worse if you got in his way. The allegations, if not factual, were at least plentiful. He was said to have pocketsful of public officials. He didn’t seem to fear the long arm of the law because, to all appearances, it was draped in a friendly way around his shoulders.

Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair

History does show that the politician Frank Hague was an unparalleled Democratic party organizer. His political machinery helped deliver victory-making votes not just locally but at national levels as well. There are some who feel that President Franklin Roosevelt would not have gotten elected without him. In his time and place, Hague faced many “strongmen” like himself in the boxing rings of political and civic life. Presumably, he was just tougher.

It’s interesting to think about Dr. Jaffin, a man so principled and principally dedicated to the welfare of others, pairing up with Hague. This alliance of medicine and muscle could have asked

Page 5 much of each man’s better angels. No account has been found concerning how Hague and Dr. Jaffin came into each other’s orbit or how exactly they collaborated, apart from family stories. WE do know that Hague was a patient of Dr. Jaffin’s. No telling which relationship led to the other. But history has a lot to say about Frank Hague.

Throughout his notorious long reign as mayor of Jersey City, Hague had a reputation for social largesse toward the poor and middle classes. The perception fell one of two ways. Some constituents worshipped him as a champion of the common man. Others said his helping hand was conditional on “voting the right way,” accusing him of taking large monetary kickbacks for himself, and what’s more, failing to be the least bit subtle about it. It seemed as though, if you needed what Hague could deliver, that was the package you got.

In the 1920’s, Hague launched a push to build a large hospital campus that eventually spawned a series of towering structures on an old 1880’s hospital site. He got the project going with buckets of federal dollars--- a reward for his vote-delivering prowess, some say. It took a while, nonetheless, to start the digging.

On October 2, 1936, to the cheers of an estimated 200,000 people, President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the new Jersey City Medical Center at McGinley Square. One account gauged it to be the third largest health care facility in the world. Another said it was the largest. Either way, what’s more remarkable is that for, generations, Jersey City residents who received care at the hospital were never sent a bill.

One of Hague’s first new campus builds was the Margaret Hague Maternity Hospital, named after his mother. In the desperately poor tenements of his youth, deaths from pregnancy or child-birth related complications numbered far above the average. He built his maternity hospital for all women and children in his city in honor of those whose suffering he had personally witnessed growing up in his old neighborhood. Hague next added towering new surgical units, quarters for nurses and built the even-more-towering B.S. Pollack Hospital for Chest Diseases where Dr. Jaffin would come to serve as director. It reigned as the tallest building in the city for 50 years.

A number of years ago a then-91-year old woman who had been employed in Dr. Jaffin’s era at the Jersey City Medical Center spoke about the experience. When asked she said that she knew of Dr. Jaffin but did not recall meeting him. Of Hague, though, she spoke reverently.

“His own first love was that medical center,” she said, and while

Page 6 she worked there, she related, he came to the hospital almost every day and spoke in a friendly, familiar manner to everyone, including her. “He never passed you by without saying something,” she reminisced. “It tickled me…the mayor talking to me. You didn’t have to have a penny and they’d take care of you there.”

Dr. Jaffin was known to carry himself as One Who Must Be Obeyed. How he and a man like Hague settled any moral or practical differences is a question. Dr. Jaffin’s daughter Helene recalled that her father had a sharp eye for any sub-par standard of care he saw on his hospital rounds, whether for his patients or their surroundings. Should he perceive an infraction, woe to the guilty party. The story goes that when Dr. Jaffin came down the hall at the hospital, certain staff would slip into the nearest supply closet. Most of my personal anecdotes concerning Dr. Jaffin came from Helene. She was my mother.

Helene

Here I stray temporarily from the narrower story of Dr. Jaffin’s work to the keeper of his flame, my mother. But these recollections do have relevance to her father’s legacy and character. I have no memory of meeting my grandfather. I was not quite two years-old when he died. But Helene, through the tales she told, made him known to me.

Although she had no formal medical schooling herself, Helene came to spend a good chunk of own her adult life in service to hospital operations and the cause of medical education. This began in 1950’s-60’s while my father worked as an art director for a small ad agency in New York City. Helene was relegated to raise three children in the commuter burbs. She loved my father enough to do this. But she seriously craved some outside mental stimulation. No small wonder, given her background.

Helene had graduated from college, served adventurously in the Women’s Army Corps and studied at the Yale School of Drama. She became a working actress with a signature dark beauty. She earned critical notice for roles on the New York stage and in regional summer stock where the seats were dotted with celebrities whose sightings, in that time, prompted as much notice by drama critics as the performances themselves.

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Helene thrived on the glitter and the applause but no less the hard work, grittiness and adrenaline-fueled camaraderie behind the scenes. In contrast, she made no secret of her displeasure with diapers and dishes, laundry and cooking. Loving parent that she was, I’m sure, too, that at times we three kids gave her sufficient cause to ponder other roads not taken. It seemed to me, then and afterward, that there was no job Helene didn’t do well. Love it or endure it.

Shortly after she began having babies, Helene volunteered as an administrative aide in the department of medical education at a local teaching hospital. This morphed into a higher level paid position she held for many years. But still, on her own time, she’d bring home taped recordings of guest medical lecturers and transcribe them for the hospital’s reference library. Her ear was attuned to medical lingo and she was a whiz at correcting the grammatical missteps and halting rhythms of the live presenters.

Through her work, she also came to know hospital’s revolving rosters of fledgling doctors. She felt they required an escape from the institutional grind. Some were living far from home, lonely in some cases for family in other parts of the world and appreciative of home cooked meals. On weekends and holidays our small dining room in our small house managed to pack in a United Nations of foreign medical interns and residents. Some of our guests were grappling with English at the same time they were getting a medical education. Hanging with an American family provided a kind of immersion learning.

I was still a child at the time but I remember vividly a few of our regular guests over the years. There was a young Iranian so shy he would barely speak to strangers and badly needed the practice. My mother went to work on him, settling his social nerves and improving his conversational skills.

We also hosted a German doctor still stumbling now and then with his English who did not take well to friendly correction, and this dampened people’s enthusiasm for giving it. He habitually mispronounced a particular English word in a way that sounded like a common vulgarity. No one cared to call him on it. But when he spoke the word at our dinner table once, my rambunctious brothers made a great show of hooting, falling off their chairs and rolling on the floor. This display had to be explained to our guest, and the moment stands as a notable one in our family’s contribution to one doctor’s education.

Because the interns and residents were usually dead on their feet from the strenuous hours they kept, my mother would oft times instruct them in Dr. Jaffin’s art of the 15-minute power nap. He had famously taught himself to close his eyes and induce a short

Page 8 shot of very restorative sleep. He might nap several times a day, wherever he might be. He did this sitting up, sometimes in public view, with no great care for the impression it might have made.

As the New Jersey nest emptied, Helene and my father relocated to Colorado where, as well as continuing to work for a time, my mother put in 30 more years as a hospital volunteer. She delighted in finding her acting feet again in local theater companies and was scouted for roles in a few television commercials. She also used her theatrically trained voice to tape what were then called “books for the blind” in that not-so- long-ago pre-digital audio world. In between she achieved Senior Olympian gold as a swimmer. The glory days were back.

It bears noting that Dr. Jaffin’s wife Matilda, my grandmother, also willingly put on hold a very different life from the one she made with her husband. She was valedictorian of her high school class and a woman with strong opinions. An impassioned speechwriter, she argued for a woman’s need to be seen and act as an individual. She vigorously campaigned for a woman’s right to vote and make other legal decisions in her own best interest.

These were not entirely safe or tame undertakings in that time. Nor were they a secret to Dr. Jaffin when he married Matilda. Nor did he disapprove. She herself chose to play the supporting roles she did in her husband’s lifetime. As Helene told it, “He was her king.” But she was free to wear any hat of her choosing. (Including the impressive one in her portrait.)

Matilda made Dr. Jaffin’s professional life possible. But the way he practiced medicine then would hardly be possible today. Nearly gone, now, is the solo practitioner and house call maker. You’d be surprised to find anyone with an in-home medical office -- or a physician who isn’t forced to work for a disembodied corporation, or a hospital that isn’t taken over by a conglomerate.

Mayor Frank Hague’s playbook for the provision of free health care doesn’t offer a blueprint for solving today’s health care inequities. But whatever else it may have been, and for as long as it stood, the Jersey City Medical Center was a towering mecca of medicine and a beloved center of social good in the eyes of many.

In whatever ways the two men worked together, Dr. Jaffin might have had to train his focus on the greater goods Hague’s methods achieved. It’s how a lot of things still work. And in the span of Dr.

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Jaffin’s career, his telemedicine “first” was unquestionably overshadowed by all else he did. But that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked. □

Published originally on the author’s website, theinsufficientskeptic.com ______

Author note: As a freelance feature writer of small repute since 2009, I’m fond of finding lesser-known stories behind advances in technology. My only scientific credential is the love of going where curiosity takes me. However, there is one part of my professional past that shaped my perspective for this story. For many years I was head of external communications for a regulatory agency that oversees the financial services industry, i.e., the world of banking, insurance and securities, and there was also a division called the Health Care Administration (HCA). HCA engaged in turbulent efforts to advance health insurance reform, rein in hospital costs and increase access to care for those without it.

If you have anything you’d like to convey to me about this account of Dr. Jaffin’s work, I’d be happy to hear from you. Send comments, additions, corrections to: rickamcn (“at” sign) gmail.com □

Attachments follow:

- Research Stories, Disclosures and Acknowledgments: 1. I hereby disclose… 2. Dating Dr. Jaffin’s invention 3. An alarming hanging and a mysterious break-in 4. Karen Reeds, say hello to Dr. Jaffin 5. What documentation is there that Dr. Jaffin was a player in the conception of the Jersey City Medical Center? 6. A confidentiality issue 7. Thanks go to Dan Yurman 8. What became of the charitable Jersey Center Medical Center - Image: Jersey Journal news article, April 23, 1926

Page 10 Research Stories, Disclosures and Acknowledgments

1. I hereby disclose that… I don’t pretend to have the highly specialized research skills and valuable insights of a professional historian. What’s more, this story, stylistically, is like an “Everything Bagel.” There’s a lot going on.

It began as and still is a way to preserve a family story for future generations. For that reason, the expanded public version stubbornly retains certain reminiscences. That public version came about because an interested and supportive friend in the medical field prodded me to write it. So, to the best of my ability, I gathered more scientific and historical facts for readers who would zero in on those things. I’m glad this happened. I learned so much more. Some of it you’ll find below rather than in the narrative itself. Even an Everything Bagel can only hold so much seasoning.

If you have anything you’d like to convey to me about this account of Dr. Jaffin’s work, I’d be happy to hear from you. Send comments, additions, corrections to: [email protected]

2. Dating Dr. Jaffin’s invention: You may have noticed that the photocopy of the newspaper article I used in this story didn’t show a publication source or date. The fact is, for years, all I had was that photocopy, and it lay there untraced.

I want to acknowledge the key player who finally solved this dilemma. Before she died my mother had jotted down that she thought the year of the story’s publication was “around 1930.” When I began this further research in 2011, I was living in Vermont. I enlisted by phone the help of Cynthia T. Harris, Manager of the New Jersey Room at the Jersey City Free Public Library to try to source the article.

She made an enthusiastic stab, which I so appreciated. But as she explained at the time, there were three area Jersey papers of the period, each with two or three different hefty editions a day. This didn’t include the New York papers just across the Hudson River, any of which might have carried such a story. But given the sort of local detail in the piece, it was likely a Jersey paper. Some microfilm existed for the period but lacked a searchable digitized index other than by date. To boot, there were significant time gaps in the records of all the papers. Two had ceased publication.

I would need to go to New Jersey and sift blindly through thousands upon thousands of stored film images. I didn’t go. Eight years later I made a pivotal find.

Page 11 Tucked deep in my mother’s papers I discovered something I hadn’t seen before – an original chewed-edge, time-darkened news clipping telling of Dr. Jaffin’s innovation. The same one I had a photocopy of, but, drat. The original had no date or source either. It was pasted tight to a piece of thin paper obscuring the back. But I was able to shine a flashlight through it and just make out some material on the back of the clipping that might narrow down the date. I called the Jersey City Library again with the new information.

To my delight, I found that Cynthia Harris still worked there. I told her what I’d found. We were off and running again. And with the new information -- and some new resources she lacked in 2011 -- she tracked the article to an edition of the Jersey Journal dated not 1930, but April 23, 1926. She sent me a copy of the entire page the story ran on, banner included.

3. An alarming hanging and a mysterious break-in: Interestingly, while searching out cites for Dr. Jaffin, Cynthia Harris dug up some alarming family history I’d never heard about from anyone. One clipping she shared reported that Dr. Jaffin’s cousin was found hanged in the back of his Jersey City coffee business. My uncle Ralph Morrison discovered the body and called Dr. Jaffin to the scene. Police were also called. A note was found. Its contents were never publicly reported. Another clipping reported that Dr. Jaffin’s home was broken into and ransacked while the family was traveling together in Europe, where Dr. Jaffin was attending medical conferences.

Could the two distressing events – the ransacking and the presumed suicide of a close family member -- have any connection to one another? Had Dr. Jaffin’s alliance with Frank Hague somehow put them in danger from Hague’s enemies? To be filed under over-imaginative thinking. For now.

4. Karen Reeds, Say Hello to Dr. Jaffin. I also want to acknowledge the kindness and enthusiasm of the respected medical historian and author, Karen Reeds (Ph.D., Harvard, History of Science). We weren’t previously acquainted, but I reached out to her with the first iteration of this tale, and she promptly got back to me. She had not previously heard of Dr. Jaffin’s story. She wrote: “I dearly wish I'd known about your grandfather when I was working on [her book] A State of Health: New Jersey's Medical Heritage. No question he belonged in it.”

I’m grateful that she shotgunned the story to a list of colleagues and others who took interest in the story. She also did some curious digging of her own. Along the way she discovered a small, intriguing personal connection. It turned out she had previously met one Dr. Carroll Moton Leevy, Dr. Jaffin’s younger co-author

Page 12 of a 1946 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association [August 3, 1946/FLUIDS IN CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE CARROLL MOTON LEEVY, M.D.; JOHN A. STRAZZA, M.D.; ABRAHAM E. JAFFIN, MD.]

Here Karen discovered something that she felt spoke to Dr. Jaffin’s character. She wrote:

“The Journal's note on the authors' affiliation reads: 'From the medical services of the Jersey City Medical Center: Dr. Leevy is assistant medical resident, Dr. Strazza is medical resident and Dr. Jaffin is attending physician.' That order of the authors' names sheds light on Dr. Jaffin's character. Ordinarily, the lead author would have been the doctor with the highest rank -- the supervisor, who might not have done any of the actual work but still got the most credit. Here, however, the authors were listed in reverse-order of their positions at the Jersey City Medical Center (the closest thing New Jersey had to a medical school at the time). Even more interesting -- although it would not have been obvious from the names -- the lead author was African-American. All this suggests that Dr. Jaffin was remarkably generous, modest, and free from the racial bigotry that Dr. Leevy encountered so often.”

For quick sketches of Dr. Carroll Moton Leevy's life and distinguished career in hepatology, see: http://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/leevy-carroll-moton/ and https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and- books/leevy-carroll-m-1920.)

Karen Reeds also generously arranged for me to interview then- nonagenarian Miss Eileen Quirk (the “Miss” is included at her request) who had worked at the Jersey City Medical Center in Dr. Jaffin’s and Hague’s era. I reached her by phone and she provided me the firsthand observations that I included in this tale about Hague’s love for his hospital and its people.

5. What documentation is there that Dr. Jaffin was a player in the conception of the charitable Jersey City Medical Center? If there is any proof out there, I didn’t come across it. I have only family stories and inferences drawn from certain events and published materials that give weight to that lore. Shortly after Dr. Jaffin’s death in 1952, the hospital dedicated a new campus clinic in his name. At the dedication ceremony, a speaker made much of Dr. Jaffin’s character and worthiness for the honor. I have an original program from that event and a transcript of the dedication speech, lengthy enough that Dr. Jaffin, had he been able to attend, might well have found time for one of his famous power naps.

I could also speculate that Dr. Jaffin may have had any number of reasons to remain an uncredited backroom general in Frank Hague’s building campaigns. Possibly, too, he mainly contributed guidance concerning medical need. It was certainly Hague who leveraged truckloads of government dollars and whatever it took, in his sort of playbook, for permitting and construction.

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6. A confidentiality issue: I want to mention that the normally confidential fact of the doctor- patient relationship between Dr. Jaffin and Frank Hague may be mentioned in this story because it was noted publicly in newspapers from time to time when Hague became ill. All else relating to this connection is of course ethically sealed.

7. Thanks go to Dan Yurman: I have overhauled this story a time or two since I first wrote it. Recently, Dan swooped in with a cool little stash of new relevant scientific facts. He is a shrewd navigator of the digital information cosmos. He also has a talent for reporting useful technical information in polished and readable form -- like his grandfather. Dan is my brother.

8. What became of the Jersey City Medical Center of this story and its humanitarian concept? Franklin Roosevelt had concluded his cornerstone-laying speech with these words: “Frank Hague, his associates and the people of this city have pointed the way for many other communities in the Nation. May they see and emulate the fruition of this splendid dream.” Well, that dream died an ugly death.

Putting together different accounts, the long-charitable Jersey City Medical Center suffered from unmeetable commitments, unhealthy management, political strife and allegations of financial misdeeds. Some say the facilities were overbuilt and overpriced (think kickback margins) at the start. If these things weren’t the death of the dream, perhaps this was:

By the time the original campus shut down, the economics of health and hospital care had become governed by very different forces, driving costs shy high. Formerly thriving private hospitals were already going down like dominoes. In came a new era of corporate acquisition and consolidation. In 1988 the medical center Hague built came under new for-profit management, and around 2004 moved to a new location, leaving behind a large campus of empty buildings. In 2007, some of the structures, which by then had stood vacant for a number of years, were turned into high-end condos. ______

Keywords: Dr. A. E. Jaffin, Matilda Jaffin, Helene Jaffin, Elsa Jaffin, Ralph Morrison, Frank Hague, Jersey City, Electrocardiogram, Telemedicine, Jersey City Medical Center, Tuberculosis, Karen Reeds, Cythia Harris, Eileen Quirk

See April 23, 1926 Jersey Journal article next page.

Page 14 Page Jersey Journal, April 23, 1926 15