The 298th

Part of the U-M Medical School’s Heroic Efforts during World War II

When the 298th General Hospital was called to active duty in June of 1942, the University of Michigan Medical School’s organization of the unit already had been two years underway. The 298th provided heroic front-line medical services to the armed forces in England, Belgium and France under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Walter G. Maddock, M.D., associate professor of surgery, with nurses directed by Lieutenant Margaret K. Schafer, instructor in nursing and operating room supervisor who ultimately became lieutenant colonel and chief nurse in the European Theater of Operations.

The 298th was one of the countless contributions made by the University to the nation’s defense during perhaps the most challenging period of its history. To meet the demand for trained personnel, the University moved to a three-term year for continuous operation, and the Medical School accelerated its instruction to produce doctors in three years instead of four.

Unprecedented levels of government research, much of it classified, were conducted at the University, and the U-M trained more than 4,000 enlisted men and officers for the Navy, 8,000 Army soldiers, and 12,350 civilians in such areas as language instruction, ordnance inspection, meteorology, naval architecture and Army law—all while the University itself suffered a severe shortage of workers due to massive conscription and voluntary service.

Burgeoning enrollments as veterans returned challenged the University after World War II as well. Older than the typical student, often married and more likely to have cars, the surge of veterans changed the student landscape forever and helped signal a post-war University far different from that which existed before the conflict.

The Furstenberg Era

My father was a very quiet man,” recalls Nancy Furstenberg (Residency 1954) of her father, Albert C. Furstenberg (M.D. 1915), dean of the Medical School from 1935 to 1959. “He was dignified in his bearing, very formal. He even wore a tie out fishing.

“I recently heard somebody say that he was cold and dictatorial,” she says, “but that is not true. He was not a judgmental person. Because he didn’t talk a lot, people sometimes made incorrect assumptions about him. He rarely expressed displeasure; if he didn’t approve of something, the most you would get out of him was a ‘hmmm.’ When he said ‘hmmm,’ you knew there was trouble.”

Though her father rarely discussed his visions for the Medical School at home (“especially after I came here as a doctor,” she says), Nancy remembers him many times articulating his belief that physicians should have a foundation in the arts and that a medical faculty’s focus on education and teaching should be at least as important as their focus on basic research. (“That view almost got him shot!” she says).

She also remembers him as being concerned about an issue that has gained more primacy since his death. “He quietly promoted diversity in race and religion,” she says, “although he was less sure about women in medicine, except for Elizabeth Crosby whom he held up as an example of someone with really worthwhile achievements.”

Her father also pursued outreach programs with hospitals in Flint, Detroit and Grand Rapids, Nancy says, hoping that by doing so students would gain a more realistic and varied clinical experience. He was an original member of the federal government’s Deans’ Planning Committee, advocating for a linkage between medical schools and the Veterans Administration hospitals as a means of improving medical care for veterans returning from World War II and expanding the clinical experiences available to students.

One of her father’s major contributions to the Medical School, she says, was his ability to raise funds for important new construction and programs, an achievement that resulted mainly from the friendships he had built in the 1930s with such people as philanthropists Sebastian Kresge, W.K. Kellogg, and C.S. Mott. “My father was extremely good at convincing them that the school was their school, that they were partners in the enterprise, and that therefore they should provide more money to accomplish its goals,” she says.

“My father was extremely good at convincing them that the school was their school, that they were partners in the enterprise, and that therefore they should provide more money to accomplish its goals.”

Her father’s commitment to building those relationships drew the entire family into the effort on many occasions, she recalls. “Our whole family and the Ruthvens went out to Palm Springs once to visit W.K. Kellogg,” she recalls. “I remember hearing my father and President Ruthven whispering together about the alarmingly high cost of our hotel rooms: $35 a night. They were both frugal. But it was well worth it. Kellogg even named one of his Arabian horses after Dad.”

Nancy Furstenberg’s memories of the University of Michigan and the Medical School derive from several perspectives: that of a young child growing up in Ann Arbor as the daughter of a physician who later became dean of the Medical School; an undergraduate at Michigan majoring in English; and, later, a resident in internal medicine (her interest was diseases of the lung, especially tuberculosis) in the Medical School where she was subsequently a member of the faculty for 16 years.

Many of the names most closely associated with the more contemporary history of the school are names that have a child’s meaning for her: of Roy Bishop Canfield, for instance, whose premature death in a car crash led to her father’s appointment as chair of the Department of Otolaryngology, she remembers staying overnight at the Canfields’ house, and “hating it—they had satin sheets and I kept sliding out of bed.”

Her father and Alexander Ruthven (president of the University from 1929 to 1951), whose families enjoyed a close friendship for more than 20 years, shared an interest in horseback riding, and she remembers spending weekends on the farm they bought together near Dexter and the summers the families spent in adjoining cottages on the shore of Lake Michigan near Frankfort.

“...he was never interested in genealogy. He used to say, ‘You are what you make of yourself, not what you’re from.’”

Her parents’ marriage derived from a medical event: her mother, Elizabeth (known as Micky), a young college student at the time, was a diphtheria patient in the old Infectious Diseases Hospital when she met her future husband, the attending physician. “They couldn’t have been more different,” Furstenberg says. “My mother was a freshman, social, outgoing, dramatic, artistic. But my father had the good sense to know she would be one of his greatest assets.” Micky earned her bachelor’s degree from Michigan four years after her husband became dean of the Medical School, and Nancy remembers her father “standing up and bowing” as his wife received her diploma.

Although her forthrightness and outgoing personality Nancy Furstenberg attributes to her mother’s genes, she carries with her a heavy dose of her father’s down-to-earth pragmatism. “I wanted to be an actress,” she says. “I spent time at Interlochen and I got accepted into the Yale School of Drama, almost the same day I got accepted into the University of Wisconsin Medical School. But I didn’t have high cheekbones and I didn’t have a great figure, and I said to myself, ‘Get real.’ I’ve never regretted the choice I made, though I do wish I could have been more successful in my own medical career while Dad was still alive.” (After her father’s death she went on to become associate dean of the Medical School at the University of North Dakota.) She does remember with satisfaction, though, the time she overhead him say on the telephone to a colleague, ‘I used to wonder about women in medicine, but Nan seems to be doing all right.’

Now in her 70s and again a resident of Ann Arbor, Nancy Furstenberg retains the abiding interest in medicine that began in her early childhood. “I think my first word was “otorhinolaryngology,” she laughs. As the Medical School celebrates its sesquicentennial, she herself celebrates her life as a physician and medicine’s promise on the eve of revolutionary new advances in the life sciences. “I’ve always been more interested in the future than in the past,” she says. ‘I got that from my dad; he was never interested in genealogy. He used to say, ‘You are what you make of yourself, not what you’re from.’”