I.S. Ravdin: Larger—and Smaller—than Life

Images courtesy of Archives of the University of Pennsylvania

Penn Medicine’s legendary I. S. Ravdin, M.D. (1894-1972) had a very full and remarkable career. After earning his medical degree from Penn in 1918, he rose to become the first chair of the Harrison Department of Surgical Research and later the chair of the Department of Surgery; served as chief administrator of the 20th General Hospital in Assam, India, during World War II and was eventually promoted to major general; and was part of a team that performed a bypass procedure on President Dwight Eisenhower.

In fact, in a slide presentation, Clyde F. Barker, M.D., G.M.E. ’59, one of Ravdin’s successors as chair of Surgery, has gone so far as to describe him as a “cult figure.” One suspects tongue was partially in cheek, but Barker illustrated his presentation and an earlier article in the Penn Surgery Society News (Fall 2013) with photographs of Ravdin in the company of President Eisenhower, President Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson, Pope Pius XII, Gregory Peck, Noel Coward, and General Vinegar Joe Stillwell, Com­mander of the American Forces in the China-Burma-India Theater.

But the number of famous and re­spected physicians who have been cele­brated in the daily comics must be very few – indeed, Ravdin may be the only one! In October 1957, Steve Canyon, the nationally syndicated comic strip featur­ing the easygoing pilot-adventurer, ran a story line involving young Poteet Can­yon, Steve’s ward, who is both an orphan and a cousin. Having fainted at a party, she is brought to “University Hospital” where the unnamed doctor, referred to as “The Man” by his staff, takes charge of her care. Using not his surgical skills but his medical training and psychologi­cal insights, he makes a diagnosis. Says one staffer, “What’s such a big deal about anorexia nervosa? Can’t he order forced feeding and bring up her strength?” Replies the other: “Not ‘The Man’! That would be bush-league stuff to him!”

The doctor mentions his wartime ex­perience a couple of times. For example: “During the war my hospital was in a miserable hut, but as long as the wounded kept coming, my experts worked as they would in a billion-dollar plant. . . .”

Poteet is drawn to the doctor be­cause of his directness, his concern, and his humanity. “I thought professors of medicine would be right gloomy – but you make me laugh!” To which the Ravdin figure replies: “Laughter is the greatest therapy! People – even whole nations – are in trouble if they lose their sense of humor!”
What may surprise readers of a later generation or two is that the doctor is shown many times smoking a cigarette, even while walking down the hospital hall or in the patient’s room! But it was an age when doctors – or “doctors” – even appeared in advertisements. For ex­ample: “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” Another campaign, for Lucky Strikes, claimed “20,679 physi­cians say ‘Luckies are less irritating’ ” – but whether these physicians personally smoked or examined patients who did is not clear.

But how did I. S. Ravdin happen to find himself – or an obviously fictional­ized version of himself – in Steve Can­yon? Some readers of Ex-CBI Roundup, a magazine for and about those who served in that theater during World War Two, wondered, and the magazine pub­lished a letter from someone who claimed to have “picked out the charac­teristic mannerisms of this University of Pennsylvania surgeon” in the comic strip (December 1957). In that same issue, the editor published a series of letters, start­ing with one from the artist and writer, Milton Caniff, who shared the others. As Caniff explained it, he was en route to Philadelphia to do a talk for the Boy Scouts “when a virus infection hit me suddenly and hard,” and he was rushed to HUP. “During this session I had the good fortune to get to know the doctor quite well and I was so moved by his fabulous personality, I resolved then and there to portray him in the strip.” In this context, it is worth noting that Penn Medicine’s Master Clinician Award is named after Ravdin.

It is also not clear whether Caniff was deliberately disguising the site of Poteet’s hospitalization. One of the larger Sun­day strips – which ran in color – has a caption: “The head of the State Univer­sity Medical School is called in on the case of the girl who will not eat . . .” The comic strip no doubt predates the an­guished cry of later Penn students and alumni: “Not Penn State!” And perhaps Caniff decided to promote Ravdin along the way.

As for “The Man,” Ravdin seemed to take his being turned into a comic strip character with good grace. In the letter Caniff forwarded to Ex-CBI Roundup, Ravdin wrote: “I had not realized that, during your convalescence, you were making a careful physical and psycho­logical study of me. It has been so good that my fan mail has developed to such proportions that I have needed an extra secretary to answer it.”