Father of: Modern Medicine
The Story: Hippocrates (who lived somewhere around 460-430 BCE to 360-370 BCE) was born on the island of Cos, Greece, and was taught medicine by his father Heraclides. Hippocrates was a physician who made house calls. He founded the Coyan Medical School and wrote some 70 books known as the Hippocratic Corpus. He died in old age in Thessalia.
Whaa? Part I: The Hippocratic school of medicine held that illness is the result of an imbalance of the human body’s four humors – yellow bile, blood, phlegm and black bile. They were characterized by the same properties – dry, hot, wet and cold as the four elements – fire, air, water and earth. Hippocratic therapy was directed towards restoring this balance.
Whaa? Part II: The two sons of Hippocrates – Thessalus and Draco – were his students. They each had sons named Hippocrates.
Whaa? Part III: From the Hippocratic Oath, “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel …. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.”
The Man: Miguel Jose Serra at Petra was born on the Spanish island of Mallorca, Spain, on November 24, 1713. At the age of 16, he traveled to Palma, the capital of Mallorca, and entered the service of the Catholic Church, the Order of St. Francis of Assisi, and took a new first name in honor of Saint Juniper.
The Story: In 1750, at the age of 36, Father Junipero Serra volunteered to serve the Franciscan missions in the new world and sailed for Vera Cruz, Mexico. In 1769, he set off on an expedition with Gaspar de Portola to found missions in California.
When Father Serra founded the first of California’s missions in San Diego, he was 56 years old. Serra personally established 9 of the 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma. On August 28, 1784, at the age of 70 and after traveling 24,000 miles, Father Serra died of a snake bite at Mission Carmel. The Father is buried there under the sanctuary floor.
Whaaa? Once, while riding on a mule from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, he injured his leg. It troubled him for the rest of his life but he continued to make his journeys on foot whenever possible and refused all remedies and medications.
During the last three years of his life, he visited the missions from San Diego to San Francisco, traveling more than 600 miles, in order to confirm more than 5,300 Native Americans who had been converted and baptized.
His zeal frequently led him to employ extraordinary means in order to move people to penance; for example, he would pound his breast with a stone while on the pulpit, scourge himself or apply a lit torch to his bare chest.
The Man: Sigmund Freud (born on May 6, 1856; suicide on September 23, 1939)
Father of: Psychoanalysis. He is also the father of three sons and three daughters, all of whom lived in the shadow of his genius. Freud was a loving and generous father but was so committed to his work that his children were raised primarily by their mother, Martha.
The Story: This Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist – who changed the way we think about thinking – wrote essays and books on repressed desires, the unconscious mind, symbolism and the interpretation of dreams. In 1876, he published his first paper about the testicles of eels.
According to Freud, pretty much every aspect of human behavior can be explained in terms of sexual desire (“anatomy is destiny”); however, one of his most famous quotes is, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Whaaa? Anna, the youngest child and a noted child psychoanalyst in her own right, was her father’s favorite. By no Freudian slip, he once referred to her as “my only son, Anna.”
Martin, the eldest son, wrote in 1957, “I have never had any ambition to rise to eminence…. I have been quite happy and content to bask in reflected glory…. I believe that if the son of a great and famous father wants to get anywhere in this world he must follow the advice given to Alice by the Red Queen – he will have to go twice as fast if he does not want to stop where he is. The son of a genius remains the son of a genius, and his chances of winning human approval of anything he may do hardly exist if he attempts to make any claim to a fame detached from that of his father.”
The Man: Walter Chauncey Camp (April 7, 1859 – March 14, 1925)
Father of: Football
The Story: When Walter Camp (the son of Leverett Camp) entered Yale in 1876, he immediately became one of the best all-around athletes at the university. In his undergraduate days he made every varsity team – rugby, tennis, swimming (from short distances up to five miles), crew, running the hurdles, etc.
Most professional sports start as youth sports. Most youth sports in the United States start as college sports. When we were celebrating our first centennial, the most popular game was rugby. Camp changed that.
As Yale’s first football coach, Camp is credited with restructuring English rugby into American football – creating the scrimmage line, the eleven-man team, signal calling, set plays, the T-formation and the quarterback position. He was the originator of the rule that a team had to give up the ball unless it advanced a specified distance within a set number of downs. Camp was the first man to publish a book on football and was a pioneer in the use of pictures and illustrations as coaching aids. He helped to establish the National Collegiate Athletic Association and was a member of the Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee for 48 years.
Historian Parke Davis found Camp to be “exceptionally fast and extraordinarily strong, resourceful, courageous, thinking continually in terms of football, swiftly solving new situations, and indomitable.”
Whaaa? As a sportswriter, Camp dealt mostly with football. But he also provided advice for fighting the common cold, informed young girls what to expect at the Yale Junior Promenade and changed the way Americans thought about keeping physically fit. He developed a physical fitness routine (the “Daily Dozen”), which became so popular that it was used for the physical conditioning of most U.S. military personnel during World War I and is still part of the Marines’ basic training.
The Man:
Father of: Three children with first wife, controversial economist Fiorella Kostoris.
Also Father of: The Euro
The Story: In 1982, back when the European Union countries still maintained restrictions on trade and capital movements, he proposed a single currency throughout
Whaaa? Padoa-Schioppa is point man on the 2008 budget, a 1.3-billion euro package presented to the Italian Senate in mid-October, 2007. Part of his proposed package is getting grown children to leave their parents’ nests. “Let’s get these big babies out of the home,” said Padoa-Schioppa. “We’re encouraging young people to leave home. If they don’t, they just stay with their parents, they don’t get married, and they don’t become independent.” So Padoa-Schioppa is also father of Italy’s pro-empty nest strategy.
More than half of Italian 25- to 29-year-olds still live with their parents, compared to 21 percent of Germans and just 5 percent of Swedes. They can’t afford to move out. Padoa-Schioppa wants the government to build more public housing to the tune of 8,000 new apartments a year for a total of 80,000 new residences over the next ten years.
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The Man: Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks. One of the first “compassionate conservatives,” industrialist Warbucks is a self-made zillionaire ($10 zillion, to be precise). A loving, caring father and philanthropist, he can be as hard as steel. He is listed in Forbes as the world’s richest fictional character.
Adoptive Father of: Little Orphan Annie
The Story: On September 27, 1924, Daddy Warbucks made his appearance in the Little Orphan Annie comic strip. His first wife had Warbucks meet Annie when he returned from a business trip; he was immediately attracted to her can-do attitude, and he fell in love.
Whaaa? Ethnically, Daddy Warbucks is a mogul.
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Father of: Louise Joy Brown, shown here in a 2003 photo with her family. Louise, the world’s first test-tube baby, was born of his seed on July 25, 1978.
The Story: Brits Lesley Brown and her husband John Brown had been trying to have a baby for nine years. “Dear God,” she would pray, “I wouldn’t moan about being kept awake at night and washing dirty diapers if you’d let me have a child.” John tended bar in Bristol and worked for the railroads; Lesley weighed and packaged cheese in a factory.
John may have lusted in his heart. “Find yourself a normal woman,” Lesley told him. “I’ve nothing to give our marriage now that I can’t have a child.” But the Browns saw an infertility specialist and the rest, as they say, is history.
Whaaa? To avoid a media circus (yeah, sure, good luck), the doctors arranged a late-night Caesarean section delivery on July 25. John was sent home from the hospital at the usual time but then, to his surprise, summoned by telephone a few hours later.
Louise married in 2004 and gave birth to a baby boy late last year.
Since Louise’s birth, there have been more than a million in-vitro fertilization births worldwide.
The Man: William Jackson Smart
Father of: Father’s Day. In 1909, Mrs. John Bruce Dodd (nee Sonora Louise Smart), pictured above, proposed the idea of a “father’s day” because she was so grateful to and so fond of her Civil War veteran father. When Sonora was sixteen, her mother died in childbirth, and this single dad raised all six of his children on a rural farm in eastern Washington. Mr. Smart was a pioneer.
The Story: Due to his example and her efforts, the first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane, Washington, on June 19, 1910, but it was a local festivity. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge acknowledged the idea of a national Father’s Day to encourage us to love each other better, or at least more, and “to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”
Whaaa? Father’s Day didn’t become a national holiday until 1966 when President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation establishing it on the third Sunday in June.
Moral: Mrs. Dodd was 85 years old in 1966; her persistence and patience paid off. The devoted daughter of Mr. Smart is a fine model for this fine holiday: Sooner or later, good things happen.
The Man: Thomas Jefferson
Father of: The Declaration of Independence, the Democratic Party and the University of Virginia. In 1772, Jefferson married a 23-year-old widow, Martha Wayles Skelton; they had six children. He also fathered several children with his slave Sally Hemings.
His Father: He was born April 13, 1743, the third of eight children to a pedigreed mother, Jane Randolph, and a wealthy planter and surveyor, Peter Jefferson. His father died when Thomas was 14 years old, whereupon he inherited 5,000 acres of land and a dozen slaves.
The Story: The third president of the United States was also the first secretary of state and the second vice president.
Whaaa? Jefferson gave only two public speeches during his eight-year presidency. In his will, he asked that his plantation Monticello be used as a school for orphans of navy officers. He died on the fourth of July 1826 – on the fiftieth anniversary of adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
