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HEALTH AND WELLNESS THROUGH THE YEARS
“No body (sic) is sick now, and our cup runs over with blessings. – LAUNCELOT BLACKFORD DIARIES, MAY 9, 1882
From a time when the School physician was an adjunct position, comprising area doctors who visited campus, to the state-of-the-art deButts Health & Wellness Center of today with a full-time physician, a medical services director, eight nurses, a wellness coordinator, and school counselors, Episcopal has a rich history of individuals who have cared deeply about the health and well-being of students. Launcelot Blackford, EHS Principal 1870-1913, was inarguably ahead of his time in the realm of managing the health and wellness of the School community. In a time that infectious diseases like scarlet and typhoid fever were life threatening, Blackford was ever attentive to the health of the School community, carefully noting in his diary cases of illness, both the cause and number, as well as actions taken to treat and to prevent the spread of any contagious conditions. As his diaries convey, Blackford’s tenor for the day was very much informed by the health of the School. An outbreak reliably depressed his outlook, while recovery could be counted on to lift his spirits. Understandably, the health of the School weighed heavily on Blackford.
Illness among the students not only concerned Blackford, but also his wife Eliza, as she frequently cared for the students when they were sick on campus and sometimes accompanied students when they were transferred to a local hospital for more specialized care. Blackford’s cousin Mary Willis Minor was brought in as needed and for more serious cases, the School hired “trained” nurses, sometimes from as far away as Charlottesville.
From the earliest years of his tenure, Blackford had to manage the School’s response to illness, facing an incidence of scarlet fever in the 1871-72 school year, his second at Episcopal. Although Blackford could take comfort in the knowledge that the student’s case of scarlet fever was a mild one, he took every precaution to manage its spread. He isolated the student until he had recovered and was no longer contagious, and Blackford also limited campus leaves. The Principal was committed to forthright communication with the School community, writing each parent to announce the case of scarlet fever and subsequent updates. The Principal updated a parent with the following message, “No other case of Scarletina has appeared, and we now are sanguine none will, but of course time alone can determine that. The convalescent seems well again, but will be confined to his room a week or two, in abundant caution.”
The following year Blackford faced a smallpox scare, but thanks to his proactive vaccination campaign, Episcopal High School was spared. With prevalence in Alexandria and the District of Columbia, Blackford secured the vaccination of the entire EHS community, reporting in his History of the 1872-73 Session, “Smallpox being unusually prevalent in the District and Alexandria, and half a dozen cases and four deaths having occurred at the toll-gate near the cemetery on the road to town, I had thorough vaccination performed. In December and January partly by authority and partly by persuasion, I secured the vaccination of every man woman and child, white and black, on the premises.”
At other times during Blackford’s tenure, illness could not be avoided. A mumps outbreak of nearly 20 students in February of 1873 necessitated the temporary conversion of a recitation room to isolate the affected students. Coming off of the smallpox scare, Blackford seemed to take the mumps outbreak in stride, although a few years later he and the School’s physician successfully lobbied the Board of Trustees for a new building to house the infirmary.
By the turn of the century, Episcopal had outgrown the infirmary building constructed in the 1870s and by 1901 Blackford was again advocating for a new infirmary building. His efforts were rewarded with the construction of a two-story brick building just to the east of Blackford Hall. Blackford took a keen interest in the new infirmary, particularly its location. While the Board of Trustees proposed and approved a more remote location, Blackford succeeded in achieving a more centrally located placement. Principal Blackford expressed his pleasure with the location of the new infirmary writing in his diary, “The patients seemed greatly to enjoy the view of the field from the windows of the infirmary, the sunshine removing the danger of cold.”
A mumps outbreak put the new infirmary to the test shortly after the start of the 1902-03 school year. As Blackford recorded in his diary, “Eight more cases of mumps were developed and domesticated in the New Infirmary. The chagrin of this is largely offset by the novel satisfaction of having ample and comfortable accommodations for so large a number, especially considering what would have been our dismay had the same emergency arisen a year ago when we had but a single room, the East room over B.L.S.”
The Infirmary a great comfort.– LAUNCELOT BLACKFORD DIARIES, FEBRUARY 10, 1904 –
When a case was serious enough to exceed the capabilities on campus or the local Alexandria Hospital, Blackford would take advantage of the relative proximity of Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, as he did in 1903 on behalf of a student who required emergency surgery.
For his day, Blackford took an expansive approach to health and wellness. Not only did he track and manage active cases of illness within the School community, he also assumed a broad view of health and wellness, recognizing the connection between lifestyle and health. To keep abreast of developments in adolescent health, Blackford sought out and read the latest publications on the subject. In his September 22, 1895, diary entry Blackford wrote, “Much interested in reading Dr. Duke’s [sic] ‘Health in Schools.’” Clement Dukes was a British physician who served as the medical officer for the Rugby School from 1871-1908. “Health at School: Considered in its Mental, Moral, and Physical Aspects” was a forwardthinking book for its time covering subjects from the control of epidemics in schools to the sanitary construction of dormitories, the relationship between diet, work, and play and mental health, as well as the importance of sleep for healthy development and learning. These concepts have certainly stood the test of time. To communicate this message to his students, Blackford had the school physician deliver a series of lectures on “Physiology & Personal Hygiene” to the student body with topics including tobacco and alcohol, as well as nutrition.
Blackford’s successors stood up to the challenge of keeping the Episcopal community healthy, with Archibald Robinson Hoxton, Sr., EHS Class of 1895 and Principal 1913-47 making the decision to dismiss the School in the fall of 1918, due to the worldwide H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic. Hoxton’s announcement was documented in the November 1918 edition of The Chronicle, “On Friday, October 4th, Mr. Hoxton greeted us in chapel with an announcement that created no more excitement than if a bombshell had dropped into our midst. The epidemic of Spanish influenza being quite prevalent everywhere, and several cases having broken out among us, it was decided to close school before the conditions could take a turn for the worse. Most of the boys hastily packed up their belongings and set out for home, but a few much against their will were left here to compose a select body known as ‘Flu’ school. In many ways we were quite fortunate as none of our number were seriously ill, and the 29th of October found us all established on the old hill once more, ready to hit the lessons harder than ever.”
While looking back at health and wellness programming at Episcopal, Dick Baker ’53 recounted the memories of his father, Charles Baker EHS Class of 1919. “Dad remembers the train ride home, particularly with the caskets of all of the dead stacked up in all of the stations that he went through. His father, S.C. Baker, a surgeon associated with World War I, was training in New York to be a neurosurgeon and traveled home after contracting the flu in New York, only to die shortly thereafter of the flu epidemic; so my father lost his father at about age 17.”
As Episcopal’s health program continued to evolve, Dr. John Roberts, EHS physician 1952-84, bridged the gap between “old school medicine” and the practice of medicine today. His son, Dr. Allen Roberts ’72, explained, “Dad was a country doc by background…[who] made house calls and carried the black bag.” When Dick Thomsen ’30, Principal 1951-67, found himself with an immediate need for a school physician, he was fortunate to have connected with Dr. John Roberts. Upon accepting the position, Roberts’ routine was to make sick calls at Episcopal at 8:30 a.m. followed by rounds at neighboring Virginia Theological Seminary. His sense of humor endeared him to the students and faculty, while exemplifying what good medicine should be in the Hippocratic tradition. Unlike other physicians from his era, Dr. Roberts did not assume a paternalistic authority and chose instead to embrace decision making in conversation with his patients. According to his son, Dr. Roberts “brought good bedside medicine to EHS.”
Dr. Roberts also brought his sense of service to Episcopal, having served as a medical officer during World War II and, prior to that, as a missionary in China. As was the way in old school medicine, Dr. Roberts was not just a provider of healthcare, he was a trusted confidant. If one saw that the door to his office in the infirmary was closed, one knew Dr. Roberts was meeting with the Head of School and was not to be interrupted. Dr. Allen Roberts’ takeaway from the difference between his father’s time as EHS physician and now is that “one person was expected to do it all and one person did. This would be impossible now. EHS has stayed ahead of the curve. Even when you have the right multidisciplinary team, the wellbeing of the patient still hinges on the individuals (providing care).”
To that end, some of the most important decisions made by Dr. Roberts as Episcopal’s physician were who he hired to provide nursing care to the students. Ken Tyler ’83 remembers Nurse Virginia Settle, “Thankfully, I didn’t spend much time in the Health Center during my time as a student, but I did have a couple of athletic injuries that required Nurse Settle’s care. I remember her being tough, but kind, with a welcoming smile. But she could also cast a stern expression, which she sometimes had to do to deal with 300 rambunctious boys!”
Thankfully, most students’ encounters with the infirmary and Nurse Settle were brief and intermittent, but for Lee Hobson ’83 the infirmary was the site for his long recovery from a car accident during a school break that left him in a body cast for six months. Between being in a body cast and in a wheelchair before progressing to crutches, Lee could not climb stairs, so he stayed on the first floor of the infirmary and credits Nurse Settle with being integral to his recovery. While she had a reputation for being gruff, Hobson explains that Nurse Settle had a big heart and gave him the encouragement to get better when he needed it most. As his recovery progressed she encouraged her patient to keep moving and return to the full EHS experience. For Lee, Nurse Settle was the face of the infirmary and by extension the face of his recovery from a life-threatening car accident.
Thanks to dedicated instructors and medical professionals like Blackford, Hoxton, Dr. Roberts, and Nurse Settle, Episcopal was well positioned to ride the changing tides of medical needs throughout history and bring Episcopal into the modern day.
