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NeoReviews Vol.9 No.4 2008 e137
© 2008 American Academy of Pediatrics

Historical Perspectives

Perinatal Profiles: Clem Smith: A Gentle Gardener

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

	The Human Side

 
His beginnings (presciently) were in language, to the extent that he dropped out of medical school to study English and "Freshman Rhetoric" for a 2-year period. We in medicine can be grateful for Clem's return to the fold, armed with the biblical background, articulate power, and insight to entitle a paper "The Valley of the Shadow of Birth." His father, Shirley W. Smith, had been Professor of English at the University of Michigan and, after an interlude in the Philadelphia insurance business, returned to Ann Arbor as its Vice-President and a (sometime) screenwriter. Some of Clem's continuing research funds were comprised of Shirley's royalties from his delightful story for It Happens Every Spring, a 1949 movie about a magical baseball that repelled bats and allowed actor Ray Milland to become the winning pitcher of the World Series. Another funding source was the American Cancer Society because his Harvard colleague, Bill Castle (elucidator of intrinsic factor, vitamin B₁₂, and megaloblastic anemia), had suggested to him that babies, as well as cancers, grow. Clem's most faithful and lasting funding was from Leonard Mayo of the Association for the Aid of Crippled Children and, during his last active years, to the newly formed National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Born in 1901, Clem was wholly educated through medical school at Ann Arbor. Following a 2-year pediatric residency at Michigan, he began his long association with Harvard as a Children's Hospital resident in 1931 under Kenneth Blackfan, remaining there until 1943, when he briefly returned to Michigan as pediatric chair at Wayne State.

Although I cannot delineate just when Clem's interests gravitated across Longwood Avenue to the Boston Lying-in ("BLi") from the Children's Hospital, his first article on the newborn is dated 1939, and by 1941, the BLi was listed . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Nicholas M. Nelson, MD^*

^* Professor of Pediatrics Emeritus, College of Medicine, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pa