THE TELEPHONE would ring and I would answer it.
From the other end, "Are ya runnin' dry?" The voice was that of George Willoughby Stephenson, MD, FACS, archivist of the American College of Surgeons.
"Seems like it," I would say.
"Be right up!"
Then George and I would have a cup of coffee together in the small lounge provided by the college and together solve all but the stickiest problems of our world. For the stickiest problems, George's pronouncement would be, "It's a puzzlement."
This sequence, occurring late in the morning of most days, was not exactly a ritual, but it happened, whenever nothing else got in the way, for a decade.
When I joined the staff of the American College of Surgeons, late in 1987, George was in his late 80s and had been employed at the college since 1950, having been recruited from a private general surgery practice . . . [Full Text of this Article]
