Joseph Bolivar DeLee was an American physician who specialized in obstetrics, and became known for the foundation of the Chicago Lying-in Hospital.
Background
Joseph Bolivar DeLee was born on October 28, 1869 at Cold Spring, New York, in the Hudson Valley. He was the fifth son and ninth of ten children of Morris and Dora (Tobias) DeLee. Both parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland; his father was the son of a French army surgeon who had settled there after Napoleon's defeat at Moscow. After a brief residence in New York City, the family moved in 1885 to Chicago.
Education
DeLee attended elementary school in Cold Spring and finished grammar school in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father had moved his dry goods business.
DeLee graduated from the South Division High School in 1888 and, although his father had wished him to become a rabbi, entered the Chicago Medical College (later the Northwestern University Medical School), receiving the Doctor of Medicine degree in 1891. Among his professors he was particularly influenced by W. W. Jaggard in obstetrics. DeLee's eighteen months' internship at the Cook County Hospital gave him a close acquaintance with the low state of obstetrical care, and he determined to devote himself to the goal of raising both the standards and the standing of obstetrics as a medical specialty.
He continued his training in Europe, studying maternity hospitals and home obstetrical services in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, and in 1894 returned to Chicago.
Career
In 1895 DeLee rented four rooms in a tenement basement and opened the Chicago Lying-in Dispensary, a maternity clinic which offered free prenatal care and obstetric service in the patient's home. He secured interns and senior medical students to assist in the work and in 1896 himself became chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University Medical School, but the Dispensary remained an independent undertaking. A hospital was added in 1899, and in 1917 a new 100-bed building was erected.
DeLee himself did most of the fund raising, initially from Chicago's Jewish community (although the Lying-in Hospital was never sectarian), after 1908 with the aid of a Women's Board headed by Janet Ayer (Mrs. Kellogg) Fairbank, a well-to-do Chicagoan.
DeLee's life was a crusade to prevent unnecessary death in childbirth. When he began, most babies among the working classes were delivered by midwives, and none of the abler medical students thought of specializing in such a field. Through teaching and writing DeLee sought to give medical students practical training in childbirth as well as careful instruction in pathological cases. As a teacher he was unsurpassed. Chiefly he taught by precept. He spoke to large groups of observers while delivering a patient; never stepping out of character, he remained the pedagogue as he walked through the corridors or even sat in his room to relax.
His writings further spread his principles and techniques, beginning with his Obstetrics for Nurses (1904), which went through twelve editions in his lifetime, and culminating in his monumental The Principles and Practices of Obstetrics (1913), which he spent several years in writing and for which he supervised the making of nearly a thousand photographs and drawings. It became a standard text both in this country and abroad and went through repeated editions.
For nearly four decades (1904-1941) DeLee edited the Yearbook of Obstetrics, and he contributed more than seventy-five papers to medical journals. He also lectured widely; he spoke and wrote authoritatively, lucidly, crisply, and with wit.
In 1924 the University of Chicago began overtures to DeLee to affiliate the Lying-in Hospital with its medical school, offering to build a new hospital for his use. Though fearing a reduction in the community service aspects of the hospital and reluctant to give up his independence, DeLee eventually gave his consent. The affiliation became effective in 1929 (at which time he gave up his Northwestern University appointment for a comparable one at Chicago), and the new building opened its doors in 1931. The change proved a great personal disappointment, as he found himself increasingly subordinated within a medical school with a strong scientific emphasis. University rules compelled his retirement four years later at the age of sixty-five. The move highlighted DeLee's chief weakness, his lack of a research orientation. A humanitarian and a superb craftsman in the obstetrical art, DeLee was empirical in method, clinical in approach.
For the most part he trained clinicians who chose private practice. Their influence on the profession was thus limited, as compared to the students of John Whitridge Williams at Johns Hopkins, who came to fill professorial chairs in many medical schools.
Before his death he had arranged for the continuation of his dispensary as the Chicago Maternity Center.
Views
DeLee's favorite maxims, inscribed on the walls of his delivery rooms, were "Non vi sed arte" (Not with force but with art) and "Primum non nocere" (First do no harm).
DeLee believed that mechanical intervention (such as forceps delivery) could prevent the poor outcomes that sometimes resulted from childbirth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Personality
An individualist, a perfectionist, a man of high ideals to which he selflessly devoted himself (and his personal means), DeLee could be stubborn and uncompromising in pursuit of the ideals.
His lack of tact, especially when he encountered instances of careless obstetrical technique, sometimes involved him in personal controversy, as did some of his public statements. DeLee never married, avoided close friendships, and lived only for obstetrics.
Tall and erect, he made a striking appearance with his intense dark eyes, white hair, and full mustache and pointed beard.