James Edgar Paullin: Internist to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Oslerian, and Forgotten Leader of American Medicine

• Paullin, James
• Roosevelt, Franklin
• Osler, William
• History of medicine
• Knowledge, attitudes, practice

On 29 March 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt journeyed to Warm Springs, Georgia, his favorite place for recuperation. The president was in excellent spirits until the afternoon of 12 April, when he developed a terrific occipital headache followed by loss of consciousness. His blood pressure was more than 300/190 mm Hg (1). James Edgar Paullin, Roosevelt's Atlanta internist, was summoned immediately. Paullin recklessly sped the 85 miles from Atlanta to Warm Springs in 90 minutes, arriving to find the president near death. Later, he described the events:

The President was in extremis when I reached him. He was in a cold sweat, ashy gray and breathing with difficulty. Numerous rhonchi in his chest. He was propped up in bed. His pupils were dilated and his hands slightly cyanosed. Commander Howard Bruenn had started artificial respiration. On examination his pulse was barely perceptible. I gave him an intracardiac dose of adrenalin in the hope that we might stimulate his heart to acting. However, his lungs were full of rales, both fine, medium, and coarse, and his blood pressure was not obtainable. There were no effects from the adrenalin except perhaps for two or three beats of the heart which did not continue. Within five minutes after my entrance into the room, all evidence of life had passed away (2).

Few remember James Edgar Paullin (Figure 1). Even at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, where he was a founder and practiced for 45 years, he is now virtually forgotten. Yet during the 1940s, he was one of the best-known and most influential physicians in the United States (3, 4). Paullin was born on 3 November 1881 in Fort Gaines, Georgia. After receiving a bachelor of arts degree from Mercer University, Macon, Georgia, in 1900, he entered Johns Hopkins Medical School, Baltimore, …