| In 1910, he graduated from Rush Medical School, Chicago, Illinois. There, at a meeting of the Student Volunteer Movement, he had encountered Eleanor Whipple, a young women with remarkable determination, talent, and zest for life, who had worked her way through medical school as a nurse-tutor to an invalid teenager. Moreover, at the age of nine, she had decided that someday she would go to China. After meeting her, William Wesley broke off engagement to someone who had refused to go to China, and married Eleanor in 1911. He was the charismatic character; she, the quiet, effective administrator who kept the household functioning at a high level through all their subsequent extensive travels. |
| Not long thereafter, the Evangelische Gesellschaft (Lutheran Church) commissioned Dr. Peter, as a surgeon, to run a hospital in central China. On the way there, they were detained in Japan for several months because of the Chinese Revolution of 1911, one of the more serious such upheavals. When they arrived, they found that hospitals needed to be established, but that all plans had been disrupted. |
| Thereafter, Dr. Peter's work in China included much after-battle surgery to try to save soldiers wounded in the many conflicts between powerful warlords. However, he also observed the primitive conditions and ignorance of ordinary sanitation that prevailed in most of the country, abetted by the "flood, famine, and pestilence" cycle of uncontrolled natural phenomena. Concluding that rather than "picking up the pieces at the bottom of the cliff, we need to put a fence across the edge," his primary interest turned from surgery to public health. |
| During these times, Eleanor ran the household and took care of their three children, Jane, born in Kuling; Hollis, in Nanking; and Margaret, in Shanghai. In a typical arrangement in Shahghai, theirs was one of seven missionary families who live in one compound. All food and water had to be sterilized, for most was contaminated. Even with the several customary servants, keeping a family healthy was an executive challenge. The household usually also included an assortment of guests staying for an evening, a few days, or many months - missionaries docking in or departing from Shanghai, children of friends who needed special care, Chinese associates, deaf girls learning lip reading - almost anyone Eleanor could help. |
| A furlough to the United States in 1917, a month-long voyage by ship, brought the sights of whale spoutings, and more ominously, of German submarine periscopes. In response, the ship had to observe blackout conditions, for two thousand Chinese coolies bound for France to dig trenches for the American soldiers occupied the hold. In 1918, as a Chinese-speaking Y.M.C.A. Secretary, Dr. Peter - even though a conscientious objecter - served with that battalion in France for a year. |
| In 1917 the family went to live in Boston where Dr. Peter earned in one year a degree from both Harvard and MIT in the new field of public health. After Dr. Peter's service in France in 1918, the family returned to Shanghai, where they lived until 1926. With the help of several missions, the YMCA and many Chinese leaders, including Madame Chiang Kaishek, he ran the Council on Health Education and traveled extensively, lecturing in Chinese on preventive medicine, prenatal care, and smallpox and cholera control. |
| During this period, he trained many Chinese doctors in Western medicine, and encouraged them to develop ways to solve their country's health problems. With the International Red Cross he also assisted in famine, earthquake, and flood relief in many parts of Asia. |
| In 1926, he and his family came home on furlough, unaware that the internal changes about to occur in China meant that only Dr. Peter himself would ever return. After earning another degree in public health from Yale under Ira Hiscock, he took a post with the Cleanliness Institute in New York City. He and Eleanor located the family in White Plains, to take advantage of the education available there for the children. |
| After the Crash in 1929, at the invitation of the Chinese government, he returned for nine months to China, living as a Chinese, lending influence and practical ideas for public health endeavors there. Later, when he lived in Washington, he tried to have indemnity money owed to China channeled into preventive flood control, rather than to other ends. In 1933-34, he spent a year in Germany with the Oberlander Trust Fund studying public health facilities. |
| He returned from Europe to begin work as Medical Director of the Navaho Indian Reservation, supervising 11 hospitals, outpatient programs, and preventive education in a huge territory in the Four Corners area, where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. As soon as the housing and administrative colony built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs was ready, he and Eleanor moved from Albuquerque to Window Rock, Arizona, a towering stone mass with a large round opening which Navahos regard as the center of the world. |
| Because roads were often impassable in the desert, he became the oldest pilot to obtain a license, and made his rounds in a Piper Cubā, carrying all manner of supplies along with him. Dr. Peter particularly liked the Navaho people, especially their sense of humor, and felt that they were much like the Chinese, of whom he was very fond. |
| During World War II, between 1944 and 1946, he filled in for Dr. Ira Hiscock at Yale while Dr. Hiscock served in the armed forces abroad. Arriving to assume his post with his pistol strapped on, he initially terrified the secretaries. |
| After eight years as a health administrator, he and his wife moved to Washington, D.C., where he took a position with the State Department. Traveling in South America, he conducted the programs by which South American doctors and sanitary engineers came to American medical institutions for further training. It was during this period in Washington, through his activities in the American Public Health Association and his interests in research, that he came to know Nathan Shock. |
| In 1950, he and his wife built a log cabin at Scientists' Cliffs, the cliffs along the southwestern Maryland shore of the Chesapeake Bay, long of interest to paleontologists for their rich deposits of fossils, where numerous scientists from many disciplines had already established a private community. They then helped their eldest daughter, Jane Peter Coffin, and her family build a similar cabin nearby, where she and her husband live today. For eight years, they enjoyed their hobbies, particularly his penchants for carpentry and invention. |
| In 1958, he made his historic phone call to Dr. Shock, and after a round of discussions, began a typically energetic, enthusiastic recruiting campaign. "I'm going to do this, and so is my family - and you should, too!" he exhorted his neighbors and friends - to the effect that eighty of them did. He, however, was the first, and may well have been the proudest. |
| Within a year of this ambitious start, he was found to have "the biggest aneurysm in captivity - bigger than a grapefruit!" for which he underwent surgery successfully. However, he died the next day in recovery. Outstanding for his physical drive, commitment to excellence, and stellar talents. Dr. Peter had made many contributions to the success of public health world wide, the most lasting of which may be the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. By the time of his death, the Study had ninety-five participants, all male. |
| Eleanor Whipple Peter, M.D., waited twenty years to become one of the first women subjects. At the age of ninety-five, in a wheel chair, become one she did. This strong, quiet, much beloved woman, the active helpmate to her husband's exciting, spectacular life, lived to the age of 97. Of their descendants, seventeen now participate in the program. |
