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From Scarlet Fever to COVID-19
HOW HOTCHKISS WEATHERED ILLNESS, DISEASE, AND EPIDEMICS
Wieler Infirmary sun porch, where ambulatory patients were allowed to read and rest, c. 1928
PHOTO: EDWARD VAN ALTENA, HOTCHKISS ARCHIVES
MARCH 2020
Last spring, a chain of events unfolded that would, in time, create a significant chapter in the School’s history. First, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in early March, Hotchkiss closed the campus and began the transition to distance learning. By early April, students learned that they would not return to campus for the academic year. Distance learning would continue through the end of the year, and the traditional commencement exercises on campus were cancelled. Suddenly, the Hotchkiss community became a virtual community. It was a seismic shift, though not the first time Hotchkiss had closed its doors in the face of an epidemic.
The following text and images were originally part of the 2009-10 exhibit, “Bearcats and Epidemics: A Hotchkiss History,” created by Curator of Special Collections Joan Baldwin P’03. Hotchkiss Magazine has updated the history to include the COVID-19 pandemic.
WHEN HOTCHKISS FIRST OPENED,
the invention of aspirin was still five years in the offing, and penicillin’s discovery was decades away. As the first students unpacked their trunks in the large, yellowbrick Main building, the likelihood that one or more of them might die from diphtheria, pneumonia, or one of a multitude of less dramatic illnesses was as real as their possible admission to Yale.
Ever-cautious, the trustees hired Dr. William Bissell as the School’s physician in 1892. A graduate of Yale, friend of Board President Timothy Dwight, and cousin of the School’s founder, Maria Bissell Hotchkiss, Bissell lived in Lakeville. Records indicate that he visited the School on an as-needed basis, administering medical care when illnesses were too complex for the School’s nurses. The idea that illness was an ever-present threat is clear from Headmaster Huber G. Buehler’s reports to the trustees, which frequently began with a report on School health.
Hotchkiss experienced its first epidemic in 1904, when three students came down with scarlet fever. Headmaster Buehler sent students home early for Christmas vacation, hoping that by the end of the holiday, the disease would have run its course. Unfortunately, it did not. In fact, when pupils returned, so did scarlet fever, this time as a full-fledged epidemic.
Hotchkiss had no infirmary to isolate sick boys, so it utilized Cleaveland House, which, at the time, was a dormitory occupied by 13 boys and two masters. Healthy boys were allowed to return home, completing work on their own until the School reopened in March. At some point in time, Cleaveland House became known as Pest House.
What Hotchkiss learned from this epidemic and the outbreaks that followed was that sick students needed to be isolated from everyone else. In February 1906, the trustees voted to build a separate infirmary, naming it after Sarah G. Huntress, a former matron, who played an instrumental role in advancing plans for a separate infirmary. Managed by several nurses, the newly-constructed, two-story, gambrel-roofed building offered isolation rooms, examination rooms, and a ward for less contagious patients. Located in what is now green space between Griswold Science Building and the Health Center, it opened in 1907. It remained the School’s
Dr. William Bissell
Dr. Harry J. Wieler Infirmary — presided over by Dr. William Bissell, who was succeeded by his son, Dr. William B. Bissell, in 1911 — until 1928.
In January 1912, scarlet fever hit the campus once more, and winter break was extended. Then, in September 1916, the opening of School was delayed due to the polio epidemic.
In 1918, by the time influenza began its march around the world, Headmaster Buehler was an old hand at contagion control. With more than half a million people in the United States sickened or killed by influenza between 1918 and 1919, it is no wonder that he worried continuously about when the disease might strike and what effect it might have on the School’s calendar. In the end, Hotchkiss began classes before the epidemic reached Litchfield County, and with the trustees’ blessings, Buehler instituted a series of rigorous quarantine measures. These included ending all visits to anywhere in Lakeville, Salisbury, or the surrounding area.
The vast majority of staff and teachers lived on campus, making it easier to maintain the quarantine, and no one from outside the School community was permitted inside Hotchkiss’s buildings without the headmaster’s permission. Writing to his good friend Horace D. Taft, headmaster at the Taft School, Buehler said, “I hope this quarantine can be lifted at the beginning of next week, but I am not sure. It has been pretty hard on the boys’ nerves, and this has shown itself in some dormitory restlessness.” Taft did not fare so well. By the end of October 1918, Taft had sustained 125 influenza cases, and one senior and one master had died.
The School suffered a minor measles outbreak in 1926. According to The Hotchkiss Record, on February 16 of that year, the midwinter dance was postponed because of eight cases of measles on campus; a swim meet was also canceled.
MARCH 1904
In 1928, the School made a significant step forward in healthcare that would help control future outbreaks. Dr. Harry J. Wieler became a resident doctor at Hotchkiss. Wieler Hospital, then called the Infirmary, opened, offering separate rooms for students with contagious diseases. It is the last building on campus designed by Cass Gilbert, opening first as a hospital, but used more like a dispensary and for isolation purposes.
The new infirmary boasted an examination room, x-ray room, operating room, offices, kitchen, dining room, library, four single rooms, several wards, and two sun porches. Contagious patients were sequestered on the building’s third floor. Still known as Hotchkiss Infirmary, the building was dedicated to the School’s first doctors, William Bissell and his son, William Bascombe Bissell, while the Huntress building became a nurses’ residence.
Wieler supervised a staff of 10, including four nurses, a lab technician, and a secretary. Like the Bissells, he reported on the School’s health at each board meeting and guided Hotchkiss through numerous epidemics, including scarlet fever, measles, mumps, and in 1931, poliomyelitis. In 1936, Wieler and the infirmary received a new ambulance. A gift from the Ford Motor Company, it was periodically loaned to area physicians, since the Town
1911
of Salisbury did not have an ambulance.
By 1931, Hotchkiss was 39 years old. It had suffered more than its share of epidemics, disease, and, sadly, the occasional death. But the fall brought polio. Despite the best efforts of Dr. Wieler and Headmaster George Van Santvoord ’08, five students contracted polio, two of them brothers from Massachusetts who attended Hotchkiss on scholarships. They came down with what appeared to be a mild form of the disease after Headmaster Van Santvoord had closed School and begun to send students home. The two brothers were sent first to Hartford Hospital, where they were kept in isolation, and then on to Newington Home for Crippled Children, where they stayed until January 1932. At that point, one boy was transferred to the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1927.
Throughout this period, Van Santvoord and many Hotchkiss parents raised thousands of dollars to pay for the boys’ hospitalization, care, and treatment. Writing to G.V.S. in May of 1932, one student said, “Governor Roosevelt arrived last Saturday for three weeks of treatment and rest. With him came a staff of reporters, military aides and advisors. I have seen him several times in the pool and in the sunbath. Everyone here treats him with the greatest simplicity, which he appreciates greatly….Tomorrow many of us are going to the Governor’s new house on Pine Mountain for a housewarming.”
By 1955, Hotchkiss Infirmary was a very different place from the Infirmary of 1928. With antibiotics and an effective polio vaccine readily available, viruses and infections were not the dire events they had once been.
Dr. Frank Smith, who succeeded Harry Wieler as the School’s resident physician in August 1955, presided over Hotchkiss Infirmary when it became Wieler Hospital. Named for the former resident physician, it was accredited by the American Hospital Association. In 1956, Smith received $10,000 from the Ford Foundation, which underwrote a new X-ray machine, a binocular microscope, sterilizing laboratory, and updated physical therapy equipment. While minor surgeries had long been taken care of in the Infirmary, the Ford gift also provided a newly-refurbished operating room.
By this time, many students came to the School with health insurance. Now that the Infirmary was an accredited hospital, it was eligible for health insurance reimbursements, which undoubtedly pleased parents who were used to paying separate infirmary fees.
Like his predecessor, Smith was a familiar figure at football games, standing arms crossed, pipe glowing. He also continued the tradition of meeting with and leading
NOVEMBER 1931
the School’s medical club. Known for his steady, cheerful spirit, Smith understood that in the regimented world of Hotchkiss, sometimes students needed a break as much as medical care. Judicious with the red card, Smith sometimes left those looking for a free pass on homework disappointed.
Smith also had a part-time practice in town, where he shared office space with Dr. Wieler. Unlike Wieler, Smith negotiated with the Board to allow him to spend a half-day each week at his former hospital, St. Luke’s in New York City. After the fall of 1957, when the School went under quarantine due to the flu, there is no further indication in the Hotchkiss Archives of epidemics that led the School to close the campus or alter the academic schedule.
A NEW CHAPTER: COVID-19
In recent years, the School has experienced several infectious outbreaks, from the SARS epidemic of 2003 to the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009. But antivirals, newer generations of antibiotics, better vaccines, and the advent of computers have helped provide faster detection, monitoring, and the timely dissemination of medical information, said Dr. Jared Zelman P’04, an emergency physician, family medical specialist, and the School’s medical director since 2005.
But when COVID-19 struck, it came with a unique array of challenges.
“COVID-19 spreads quickly, there is no cure, and it is deadly. That combination led the nation to shut down, and also our community to make the rare decision to shut down,” Zelman said.
Weeks before the outbreak in Seattle began making front-page headlines in February, Zelman had discussed with School administration the potential impact COVID-19 might have on the community.
As the virus spread across the nation, Head of School Craig Bradley informed the community on March 20 that Spring Break was to be extended by one week, until March 29, with online learning taking place from March 30-April 10.
Then, as state governments urged residents to shelter at home and schools across the country began closing, Bradley updated the community that distance learning would continue through the fourth marking period, following guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control.
On March 24, School presidents Luke Kalaydjian ’20 and Maggie Ottenbreit ’20 encouraged students to show their commitment to keeping the Hotchkiss community alive online by participating in virtual All-School meetings, clubs, chat rooms, and events. Like much of the country, students were asked to practice social distancing, standing no less than six feet away from another person, and to selfisolate if they tested positive for the disease.
On April 13, Bradley met with the senior class on Zoom to inform them that commencement exercises would not take place at Hotchkiss, marking the first time in the School’s history that Graduation would not be held in Lakeville. Instead, a virtual Diploma Day would take its place — and a celebration would be held for graduating seniors when it was feasible for them to return to campus.
