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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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Part:         Session:         Page of 1143

Lasker:

Oh, no, ho, I would never have thought of medicine as a career. I only think in terms of the raising of money or the giving of money or the activating of people through education. I was never at all interested in being a doctor or a nurse; for some curious reason that didn't seem to be anything I could do at all. I was always interested in how to get something done by indirection.

Q:

Did you think in terms of necessary research for all this?

Lasker:

Yes, I thought that medical education needed to be improved and that research was certainly necessary. But I just realized that the whole nation wasn't only at Madison, Wisconsin; there were reports from all over the country that people were ill on an enormous scale everywhere, and I realized that we just weren't prepared and that this was lack of foresight on the part of the human race.

Another thing that interested me when I was growing up, and that upset me, was that my grandfather, who was a wonderful man and lived in the house with us, had very severe arthritis in his hands and could absolutely nothing with them and his hands just lay out straight and they were often swollen and red from rheumatoid arthritis and when they weren't actively painful he still hadn't the use of his joints. He had to have a nurse. And this distressed me very much.





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