The Johns Hopkins Hospital Nov. 12, 1917.
Dear Miss Turner,
Tonight there his [sic] dying in this building the great Dr. John Franklin Mall, Prof. of Anantomy in the J.H.U. Last Wed. he was operated on for gallstones & the gall bladder removed by his life long friend - the great surgeon Dr. W. S. Halstead. Twenty four hrs. following the operation his temp. began to rise & he vomited every half hr. Again Dr. Halstead went in & found a clinisticulum [?] just above the Ampulla of Vater in which were other stones. He rallied from this, when the wound became infected & they went in again in the night. He was continual vomiting due to an antiperistalsis of the bowel (sometimes called dynamic ileus) for which no cause is known. Dr. Mall is not expected to live through the night. By his bedside sit constantly a group of the most noted medical scientists in this country, but he is gradually leaving them - and the world in which he played such a big part. He had just moved into the new building of the Carnegie Institute here & was director of its activities not only here but in N.Y.C. He is one of the men who have made Johns Hopkins what it is today. And tonight he is dying! leaving behind [love?], & a void which it seems nobody can ever quite fill.
Across the hall from where I write is a wealthy woman dying of cancer. We have not told her so, but she knows it; and as I go into her room she clutches my wrists & draws me down in the bed beside her, eagerly scanning my face for a false hope which I cannot bring myself to produce. "I am dying by the inches. I know I've lived for myself all these years & wasted my life, but if you'll save me now I'll give my life to the poor. Oh! I cannot bear to lie down there in the ground for all eternity."
What is that thing called Death which science cannot explain or dissipate; that one thing from which men shrink as they stand in its austere outer chamber. From a purely selfish standpoint I often wonder how anyone could prefer life to its termination - life with its physical pain, its limitations of body & spirit, its unsatisfied longings & daily crucifixion of disappointment & decay. The real sting of Death is to those who must linger yet awhile. So may it be with Dr. Mall tonight.
Affect.