Dear heart
You can’t imagine how I’m looking forward to tomorrow and a letter from you. Three whole days is too long to wait. Darling, my darling, I do so long to hold you close, so close I can even feel your heart beat, while I kiss your lips as tenderly and gently as a clumsy lover can. But that must wait for three weeks yet—or is it three eternities? Certainly nearer the latter if time is reckoned according to my feelings?
However, you can be glad you are not here just now, for the rain, cold, and cloudiness continue. Yet what better time to have you cuddled in my arms? Imagine an open fire, a cold, rainy day, and just the two of us—but I am merely torturing myself with dreams from which I awake terribly disappointed because for the present, at least, they can’t come true.
In regard to the internship, Dr. Heinbecker says the letter from Dr. Whipple‹1› is just as good as a promise of a place. He knows Dr. Whipple, so perhaps we are scheduled for N.Y. next year. How I dream of the time when we will be together for always, sweetheart. Then no vacations will separate us, not if I can help it. We both like the same sorts of things, outdoor life, horses, etc., so that we should never have any occasion for any trouble with our recreations. Let’s always keep close to the simple life, so that we can be happy with each other, with the sun, the moon, the sky, the sunsets, the song of a bird—without having to drive ourselves from cocktail parties to night clubs to God knows what else trying to find entertainment as so many do. But maybe that wouldn’t suit you?
Give the family my regards. I don’t say that very often, but that’s because I can think of little else but you when I write—and most of the rest of the time too.
For another time, my sweet, I must tell you good-night, but first I want to again assure you that now and forever you have—my heart and
All my love
Harold
- research↩
2 Comments
If the Whipple we seek is a friend of Heinbecker’s, then a likely candidate seems to be George Hoyt Whipple, winner of the 1934 Nobel in Medicine for research into hemoglobin. At this time, he would’ve been at the Department of Pathology at the University of Rochester, NY. Whipple’s Disease is named for him.
However, it could also be Allen Oldfather Whipple of Columbia U. Beckett Howorth’s oral history transcript mentions Washington U. students doing surgical internships under a Dr. Alan [sic] Whipple at Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Whipple performed the first pancreatoduodenectomy, commonly referred to as “The Whipple Procedure.”
Have a look at this envelope when you get the stack back — it’s cancelled on the back at 10:30, and on the front, over the stamps, at 11pm… not clear whether it’s more important to indicate when the stamps were cancelled or when Harold visited the PO. If the latter, then the time should be set back to 10:30.