I have planted three pink geraniums in the flower box next to Dr. Henry Seidel’s memorial bench at the marina overlooking Wellfleet Harbor. They are pink because I remember Dr. Seidel, who died in 2010 at 87, visiting me in my little pink childhood bedroom in Baltimore. He was my pediatrician.
What stands out in those memories is the kind way that he looked at me. Dr. Seidel’s expression conveyed tenderness and caring, as if to say, “I can see that you’re hurting, and I’ll do what I can to ease your discomfort.”
Until last year, I had no idea that Dr. Seidel had a summer home in Wellfleet and loved this place, too. My husband and I visit his bench whenever we do the marina walk. When the weather cooperates, we sit and soak up the view, and sometimes I talk to Henry and thank him for being such a good and compassionate doctor.
Ellen Rothman of Watertown and Wellfleet grew up in Baltimore, too, and was also Dr. Seidel’s patient. She says that when she went off to college, she didn’t want to stop seeing him as her doctor, and he said, “ ‘Ellen, you can see me as long as you want.’ He was a dear man. My mother swore by him. I was a very picky eater. I ate nothing but fruit. He told her, ‘She’s a fruitarian. She’ll be fine!’ ”
Rothman’s parents introduced the Seidel family to Cape Cod, and the families spent many summers here starting in the 1950s. In the 1980s, Dr. Seidel and his wife, May Ruth, bought a house in Wellfleet. He served on the board of Outer Cape Health Services, and May Ruth was the president of the Wellfleet Non-Resident Taxpayer Association (now the Wellfleet Seasonal Residents Association).
“My parents would walk the pier a lot,” says Steve Seidel, their youngest son. “It was a place that mattered to them. When Henry died, May Ruth and our son Sam hatched the idea of the bench. It was one of the first benches out there.”
Henry Seidel grew up in Passaic, N.J., the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Henry’s childhood pediatrician was the poet William Carlos Williams. Steve recounts a story that his father often told about a particular house call from Dr. Williams. The doctor opened his black bag and showed Henry an array of small bottles filled with different-colored pills. Williams asked Henry which pill would make him feel better faster. “My dad picked the blue one,” Steve says, “and Dr. Williams said that he agreed and then handed him a bunch of blue pills. It wasn’t until many years later that Henry realized they were all sugar pills.”
Dr. Seidel studied and then became a renowned professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “His professors were these people who had made major discoveries both about how the body worked and about treatment,” says Steve, “and he felt a tremendous appreciation to have them as his teachers.”
As dean of students at the medical school from 1977 to 1990, Dr. Seidel instilled the importance of empathy in the training of future doctors. He collaborated with a colleague on a course that emphasized the social, economic, and policy aspects of medical care. He cared for newborn and premature babies at the Harriet Lane Clinic at Hopkins, and he contributed to two textbooks, Primary Care of the Newborn and Mosby Guide to Physical Examination.
“As if it were no more complicated than breathing, Henry Seidel allowed everyone he came in contact with to feel that he cared for them as an individual,” Hopkins Professor David Nichols wrote in a memorial tribute. “It is for that reason that generations of pediatricians and students learned the ideal embodiment of the physician, because they had seen it in Henry Seidel.”
As a kid, I didn’t know about Dr. Seidel’s accomplishments. What mattered to me was that whenever he arrived at my house, his black bag was packed with the essentials — stethoscope, otoscope, thermometer, and, best of all, a string of lollipops. The sweetness of my memories is stirred each time I visit his bench and water his pink geraniums.
Lauren Kaufmann lives in Wellfleet.
