The musings of a physician who served the community for over six decades
367 Topics
Downtown A discussion about downtown area in Philadelphia and connections from today with its historical past.
West of Broad A collection of articles about the area west of Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Delaware (State of) Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Religious Philadelphia William Penn wanted a colony with religious freedom. A considerable number, if not the majority, of American religious denominations were founded in this city. The main misconception about religious Philadelphia is that it is Quaker-dominated. But the broader misconception is that it is not Quaker-dominated.
Particular Sights to See:Center City Taxi drivers tell tourists that Center City is a "shining city on a hill". During the Industrial Era, the city almost urbanized out to the county line, and then retreated. Right now, the urban center is surrounded by a semi-deserted ring of former factories.
Philadelphia's Middle Urban Ring Philadelphia grew rapidly for seventy years after the Civil War, then gradually lost population. Skyscrapers drain population upwards, suburbs beckon outwards. The result: a ring around center city, mixed prosperous and dilapidated. Future in doubt.
Historical Motor Excursion North of Philadelphia The narrow waist of New Jersey was the upper border of William Penn's vast land holdings, and the outer edge of Quaker influence. In 1776-77, Lord Howe made this strip the main highway of his attempt to subjugate the Colonies.
Land Tour Around Delaware Bay Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Tourist Trips Around Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey all belonged to William Penn the Quaker. He was the largest private landholder in American history. Using explicit directions, comprehensive touring of the Quaker Colonies takes seven full days. Local residents would need a couple dozen one-day trips to get up to speed.
Touring Philadelphia's Western Regions Philadelpia County had two hundred farms in 1950, but is now thickly settled in all directions. Western regions along the Schuylkill are still spread out somewhat; with many historic estates.
Up the King's High Way New Jersey has a narrow waistline, with New York harbor at one end, and Delaware Bay on the other. Traffic and history travelled the Kings Highway along this path between New York and Philadelphia.
Arch Street: from Sixth to Second When the large meeting house at Fourth and Arch was built, many Quakers moved their houses to the area. At that time, "North of Market" implied the Quaker region of town.
Up Market Street to Sixth and Walnut Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
Sixth and Walnut over to Broad and Sansom In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Montgomery and Bucks Counties The Philadelphia metropolitan region has five Pennsylvania counties, four New Jersey counties, one northern county in the state of Delaware. Here are the four Pennsylvania suburban ones.
Northern Overland Escape Path of the Philadelphia Tories 1 of 1 (16) Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
City Hall to Chestnut Hill There are lots of ways to go from City Hall to Chestnut Hill, including the train from Suburban Station, or from 11th and Market. This tour imagines your driving your car out the Ben Franklin Parkway to Kelly Drive, and then up the Wissahickon.
Philadelphia Reflections is a history of the area around Philadelphia, PA
... William Penn's Quaker Colonies
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Philadelphia Revelations
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George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Obituary
George R. Fisher, III, M.D.
Age: 97 of Philadelphia, formerly of Haddonfield
Dr. George Ross Fisher of Philadelphia died on March 9, 2023, surrounded by his loving family.
Born in 1925 in Erie, Pennsylvania, to two teachers, George and Margaret Fisher, he grew up in Pittsburgh, later attending The Lawrenceville School and Yale University (graduating early because of the war). He was very proud of the fact that he was the only person who ever graduated from Yale with a Bachelor of Science in English Literature. He attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons where he met the love of his life, fellow medical student, and future renowned Philadelphia radiologist Mary Stuart Blakely. While dating, they entertained themselves by dressing up in evening attire and crashing fancy Manhattan weddings. They married in 1950 and were each other’s true loves, mutual admirers, and life partners until Mary Stuart passed away in 2006. A Columbia faculty member wrote of him, “This young man’s personality is way off the beaten track, and cannot be evaluated by the customary methods.”
After training at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia where he was Chief Resident in Medicine, and spending a year at the NIH, he opened a practice in Endocrinology on Spruce Street where he practiced for sixty years. He also consulted regularly for the employees of Strawbridge and Clothier as well as the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded at Stockley, Delaware. He was beloved by his patients, his guiding philosophy being the adage, “Listen to your patient – he’s telling you his diagnosis.” His patients also told him their stories which gave him an education in all things Philadelphia, the city he passionately loved and which he went on to chronicle in this online blog. Many of these blogs were adapted into a history-oriented tour book, Philadelphia Revelations: Twenty Tours of the Delaware Valley.
He was a true Renaissance Man, interested in everything and everyone, remembering everything he read or heard in complete detail, and endowed with a penetrating intellect which cut to the heart of whatever was being discussed, whether it be medicine, history, literature, economics, investments, politics, science or even lawn care for his home in Haddonfield, NJ where he and his wife raised their four children. He was an “early adopter.” Memories of his children from the 1960s include being taken to visit his colleagues working on the UNIVAC computer at Penn; the air-mail version of the London Economist on the dining room table; and his work on developing a proprietary medical office software using Fortran. His dedication to patients and to his profession extended to his many years representing Pennsylvania to the American Medical Association.
After retiring from his practice in 2003, he started his pioneering “just-in-time” Ross & Perry publishing company, which printed more than 300 new and reprint titles, ranging from Flight Manual for the SR-71 Blackbird Spy Plane (his best seller!) to Terse Verse, a collection of a hundred mostly humorous haikus. He authored four books. In 2013 at age 88, he ran as a Republican for New Jersey Assemblyman for the 6th district (he lost).
A gregarious extrovert, he loved meeting his fellow Philadelphians well into his nineties at the Shakespeare Society, the Global Interdependence Center, the College of Physicians, the Right Angle Club, the Union League, the Haddonfield 65 Club, and the Franklin Inn. He faithfully attended Quaker Meeting in Haddonfield NJ for over 60 years. Later in life he was fortunate to be joined in his life, travels, and adventures by his dear friend Dr. Janice Gordon.
He passed away peacefully, held in the Light and surrounded by his family as they sang to him and read aloud the love letters that he and his wife penned throughout their courtship. In addition to his children – George, Miriam, Margaret, and Stuart – he leaves his three children-in-law, eight grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and his younger brother, John.
A memorial service, followed by a reception, will be held at the Friends Meeting in Haddonfield New Jersey on April 1 at one in the afternoon. Memorial contributions may be sent to Haddonfield Friends Meeting, 47 Friends Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ 08033.
Right next to Haddonfield is another town called Tavistock. It contains four houses, quite large ones, and a perfectly beautiful country club. This geo-political curiosity came about only partly because Haddonfield is dry, no liquor. The present location was created during national Prohibition (of alcohol) when it didn't matter what the local option said. The really devastating local ordinance was a prohibition of playing golf on Sunday. It is probably correct that abolishing liquor is a good way to keep the town looking pristine, so that Haddonfield's continuing dryness had something to do with maintaining real estate values in addition to maintaining sobriety, in the minds of local property owners. This stance was certainly vindicated when a race track was built a mile or so away, and local residents could easily imagine all sorts of high life that might grow up in the shadow of a race course. Haddonfield learned what it thought was the lesson in this, and continues to prohibit alcohol sales (consumption is of course quite another matter) after the repeal of the Volstead Act. So Sam Fulton and the other founding fathers of Tavistock probably knew what they were doing. The existence of Tavistock is the best evidence of the shrewd thought processes in town because in some minds you can't have a country club without liquor. You also can't have much of a golf course without some hills, and hills like Tavistock are in short supply in southern New Jersey. Sam Fulton wanted the place neat and tidy; as Mayor of the four-house town, he passed an ordinance that the birds were required to fly upside down. The legal and political defenses of this oddment seem well planned and emotionally quite prepared to dismember any politician who seeks to make trouble for something odd which isn't entirely accidental.
In 2010, trouble came to Tavistock. Then-Governor Corzine merged the school district of Tavistock with the school district of Haddonfield. The total of four houses in Tavistock collectively only had one child in school, so the burden on Haddonfield wasn't very bad, but the school taxes on Tavistock appeared to be in for a serious upgrade. Tavistock hadn't been founded as a tax haven, but over the years it became so in a minor way. The four houses in Tavistock were remarkably opulent, and of course, they were only paying school taxes to send one or two children to neighboring schools, so they were effectively taxed much less than the residents of the towns who had the schools. Using the old police maxim of cui bono (who has a motive?), one might suspect someone in Haddonfield of stirring up this little class warfare stunt. However, it turns out there are four school districts in New Jersey who are similarly affected, so it seems likely that someone did some research in Trenton. Whether the Target was someone in Tavistock, or someone in Pine Valley, or someone in the other two places, is presently unknown. Sooner or later someone will talk, of course. And since this is the Soprano State, someone else may end up with concrete overshoes.
ONCE Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1781, there emerged the usual reluctance of troops on both sides to get killed for a dispute that was already settled. The British monarchy had ample experience with wars and fully expected to exploit this trait of exhausted soldiers at the end of one. It was clear to the British the colonies could neither be reconciled nor forcibly subdued. What was not clear was how much national advantage might still be extracted from a peace conference. Bluffs and intransigence might still achieve what bayonets could not. Seasoned diplomats are accustomed to such manipulation, but the new American nation only had Benjamin Franklin grown equal to it, representing Pennsylvania and Massachusetts with the British Ministry for several years. Beyond that, however, a particularly American trait was emerging to quit the game before the last card is played. During the Nineteenth century, anticipating and resisting that irresolute temptation came to be called, Character.
The American Revolutionary Army was seldom well-fed, never well armed. Hardly anyone expected a war lasting eight years, or the British regulars to be so mean and effective. Major General Benedict Arnold had seemed like our perfect soldier but turned traitor while in charge of a major defense position at West Point, New York. Conditions for wives and children at home were bad. And the Congress in Philadelphia was willing to inflate the currency, hold back soldiers' pay, pinch pennies on supplies. Other colonies frequently promised to send more soldiers than they actually supplied. Not that they were proud of themselves; they skulked. Surely, some state legislatures and representatives were better than others, but they are almost impossible to identify, now. They all must have been somewhat complicit, or we would have heard more of them denouncing each other. It must have been supremely painful for Washington to receive promises of troops and supplies that he privately doubted, and then to be obliged to assure his troop's help was forthcoming. Inevitable disillusionment discredited him more than the Governors who put him in that position. The British troops surely shared their enemy's reluctance to get killed for a war that was over. They partied and roistered in New York, but who knows what general in London might suddenly order an attack on Washington at Newburgh, just to make overall British defeat seem less humiliating.
Headquarters, Newburgh NY
During sixteen months of this agony, Washington wrote many letters to state Governors, keeping them informed while asking for their help. The custodians of the Headquarters museum proudly show the various tables and chairs for his aides to translate French and Spanish, to make thirteen copies of just about everything, and careful files of all correspondence. Washington was an organized person, they say, or else his chief of staff was organized. Someone like Alexander Hamilton, perhaps. Out of all this headquarters communication system gradually emerged the system of Circulars. The General was in a position to see huge deficiencies in the government system for which he dedicated his life, and apparently grew haunted by the idea that all this suffering would be for nothing if the government which emerged was anything like what he was now seeing. His Circulars to the governors began to take on the style of outlining what kind of government the United States ought to have. It must, for example, acquire federal power; the states must turn over more of their own power to the decisions of a single executive. It must pay its debts; a mighty nation does not chisel its creditors. It must suppress the inclination to squabble and think the worst of one another. It must, in his phrase, be virtuous.
Two emphatic views of the new country emerged from Washington's time in Newburgh. The inability of the government to pay its soldiers, suffering or no suffering, was particularly agonizing. And the close call he had with threatened mutiny made it much worse. Robert Morris had run out of tricks and instructed him the central issue was for the Federal government to be able to levy taxes for servicing the debt, which would make it possible to borrow still more through leverage. Washington never forgot this episode, and at several points, during his later presidency, it guided him well. The other episode which made a lasting impression was to some degree his own fault. He was so impassioned in his hatred of monarchy that his closest friends, Hamilton and the two Morrises -- who had never seen much to criticize in a monarchy -- essentially gave up on trying to persuade him, and took the side of General Gates the hero of Saratoga in a planned mutiny. Washington put it down with nothing but the power of his personality and a little play-acting with his bifocals, but he almost lost the confrontation in an instant. Washington had many close calls with death on the battlefield, but these two near-defeats pretty much shaped the rest of his life as our first President. Indeed these two hatreds, of debt and monarchy, continue to characterize many Americans to a degree that others would describe as unreasonable.
And then he made a mistake. As a way of proving his lack of personal motive, he announced in advance he would be leaving public service forever. Today, every lame duck knows that's a bad idea, even when you mean it. And while he may have sincerely thought he meant it at the time, events show he really didn't. Although he probably didn't want to be indispensable, circumstances made him so. He discovered how little he knew of the technical details of government, and thus how much he needed James Madison's help. Washington lacked skill in managing finance; having depended on Robert Morris throughout the war, he needed Alexander Hamilton at least to handle a peaceful economy. But there was no running away from the central issue; he would be forced to recognize how much he overshadowed anyone else in demeanor, and so, how unlikely it was that anyone else could bully others into cooperating. He was a great-souled person, in Aristotle's phrase. Franklin alone perhaps understood and privately doubted that even Washington could pull it off. Washington's Circulars were driving him straight toward seeking the Presidency he widely proclaimed he did not want and would not accept. And thereby he threatened the one thing in life he prized more than any other: his word of honor to keep his promises.
Ed Wood had been Chairman of the Department of Medicine of The Pennsylvania Hospital for 21 years. A distinguished research cardiologist, he was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, graduated from Davidson College and then from Harvard Medical School after a two-year stint in the Navy. His most distinguished research was least known because of its wartime secrecy, involving ten flights during atomic explosions. The Medical Clinic of the Pennsylvania Hospital was re-named in his honor the J. Edwin Wood Clinic.
Ed ran the Boston Marathon five times, the last at the age of 63. Members of the Right Angle Club will long remember his soft Virginia accent, and the long string of somewhat off-color stories he told with it.
Peter Shaw Hanson, Sr.
Peter Shaw Hanson, Sr. 1925-2010.
Pete was born in Cleveland OH and graduated from Western Reserve Academy and the University of Virginia. He worked for U.S. Steel Corp. for 35 years, eventually as the official in charge of the Morrisville, PA unit which at the time it was built was the largest steel producer in the world.
He was an avid golfer and sailor, belonging to the Merion Golf Club, the Quail Valley Golf Club in Vero Beach, and the Vero Beach Yacht Club. He moved away from us to a new home in Florida about five years before his death and died in the VNA Hospice House in Vero Beach.
We will miss both of these dear friends and honored officers, and extend our sympathies to their families.
HOWARD Callaway is an old friend and an expert historian of the War of 1812. This is the two hundredth anniversary of that war, so Howard is in demand as a speaker. At a recent meeting of the Right Angle Club, he gave a fascinating recital of his analysis of the reasons for the war, and its subsequent upheavals in American politics. The audience at the Club stayed well beyond the allotted hour to ask questions and finally had to be sent home by the moderator. We will here try to summarize his views fairly.
American impressions of this war come largely from Henry Adams, who wrote a nine-volume history of it, concluding it was a senseless muddle. Henry Adams however, was the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and the great-grandson of John Adams, both of whom were active participants of the event, its causes, or its consequences. He later killed himself, having displayed fugues of depression in his autobiographical Education of Henry Adams. No matter how serene his writing style, you have to be a little careful about the views of such an involved person. New England hated this war almost universally, not a single Federalist congressman or Senator voted for it, and the Federalist political party essentially dissolved as a consequence of it. New England even considered secession. In particular, maritime New England hated the two-year embargo on European trade which Thomas Jefferson had imposed as a measure short of war. Since Jefferson had stripped the Army down to 3000 soldiers and the Navy down to a single ship -- he didn't have many choices. Great Britain at that time had eight hundred ships in its navy. When it came, the war was mainly supported by the more rural South and West of the nation. It was the war of the "republican" political party of Jefferson and Madison, actively demonstrating that Virginia had defeated the Federalists and now would dominate American politics for decades. Regardless of details, the War of 1812 made it clear that New England was not the central essence of America any longer; the rest of the country would not follow its lead.
Henry Adams
His opponents called it "Mr.Madison's War", and the bad management of it certainly damaged the later reputation of the principal author of the Bill of Rights, perhaps the Constitution. It's pretty hard to maintain the image of a Founding Father when you get us into a war that could not be won and was not even conducted well. Whatever Madison's early skill as a political philosopher, his later execution as its chief officer was a shambles. He was indeed a clever politician, never completely revealing his true beliefs, so it is a question how much he was really in favor of the war, and to what degree he could merely see how the wind was blowing. It might be argued, for example, that a supporter of the constitutional intent that Congress would declare wars, the president would only command them, might well have been yielding reluctantly to his party's clear wishes. Howard does not think so.
There was no time to expand on the evidence, but our speaker is convinced that Madison and the whole "Republican" party were anxious to sever the cultural ties to England and turn the nation to looking Westward. Certainly that was Jefferson's view, and certainly, the nation entered a century of turning its back on Europe, England in particular, becoming in one word, isolationist. That's the sort of grand strategy which might offer coherence to the subsequent Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt reversals of attitudes, which contain a major element of anglophilia.
Quite a lot to think about, considering what a bumbling rout the War seemed to be in 1812.
REFERENCES
Alexander James Dallas: An Exposition of the Causes and Character H.C. Callaway ISBN-13: 978-1906716288
The Federal Reserve is an example of an argument between two viewpoints, better left unresolved than settled in favor of either extreme. In that particular 1913 case, it was a question whether the national currency should be a total government function or a totally private one, and we finally settled on a hybrid institution. It searches for the merits of both viewpoints, continuously and permanently. Healthcare seems another example of a vital function best managed by continuous tension, not by anybody's victory. Look at the question of the uninsured, which quite naturally many insurance companies describe as a disgrace. It was however soon discovered that many people didn't want health insurance enough to pay for it. In the background, a small group of insurance actuaries began to mutter that it gets to be a problem if no one is left uninsured since insurance depends on market prices to establish their premiums. Insurance was never designed to set prices, it was designed to pay them.
Furthermore, there is that thing called Moral Hazard. There are reasons to believe the medical cost is already 30% too high, just because nobody spends his own money as freely as somebody else's money. A large pool of uninsured medical transactions establishes a standard that invisibly constrains people with insurance from spending recklessly. Remove that, and spending volume will increase, followed by prices.
And finally, if everybody could buy insurance at the same price no matter when they bought it ("Community Rating"), you would find that people will hold back until they are in the ambulance before they sign an application. It's like buying fire insurance when the building is already burning. Healthy people won't buy it, so again the price has to go up.
For these reasons-- prices, the volume of service, and Moral Hazard -- universal health insurance at Community rates is a bad idea. Because no one likes to be pushed around, compulsory universal health insurance is an even worse political idea. The Republicans convinced themselves it was such a bad idea, that they could just let the Liberals go ahead with getting badly punished when the public came to its senses. It is not the function of this book to explore why things didn't work out their way or didn't work out that way, soon enough. We did have a problem, misleadingly called the uninsured problem, of thirty million people presenting themselves at hospitals without the money to pay. It wasn't their fault, it wasn't the fault of the insurance, it was just a problem. Somehow, it was decided to go ahead with compulsory universal health insurance to solve it.
Obamacare began with a stirring call to help the forty million uninsured Americans obtain healthcare insurance, by subsidizing them if necessary. When an enormous proposal was finally laid out in detail, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that after spending a trillion dollars, thirty million people would still remain uninsured. In rough figures, there would be eight million in jail, another eight million too mentally impaired to support themselves, and twelve million illegal aliens.
If I had been faced with this problem, and given a trillion dollars to deal with it in ten years, there is no doubt I would have deep-sixed the insurance proposal, and proposed three programs, a program for Prison Inmates, a program for the Mentally Impaired, and a medical program for Illegal Immigrants. After that, I would have turned my attention to a devastating stock market crash, several wars, and the struggling inner-city school systems. If I handled all that, there wouldn't have been time for much else, so I would probably have left everything else to my successor in office.
But unfortunately that isn't the way things turned out, so I devoted my retirement years to health care reform, real health care reform, instead of to improving my golf handicap. Most of what I have to say is drawn from sixty years of practicing Medicine, in eleven hospitals, in three neighboring states as a consultant, and thirty years in AMA medical economics activity. I am still more or less on the faculty of two medical schools and have been elected to my share of positions of honor in the profession.
In 1980, I wrote a book called The Hospital That Ate Chicago , was invited to White House functions, and together with John McClaughry, devised the concept of Health Savings Accounts.
As to this book itself, it was very hard work for almost a year. I apologize to Leopold von Ranke, the father of historical documentation, for not living up to his standards. But it has been too much of a scramble to keep up with breaking events in the Compulsory Health Insurance field to worry about that; there are undoubtedly some unintentional mistakes, no harm intended. I wish I could live long enough to look back on this perplexing episode with more balance and write a sequel that would satisfy my critics. At my age, it probably isn't in the cards.
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No matter how it is accomplished, a program designed to solve these three problems would contain three different approaches, which have very little to do with each other. The other three hundred million citizens are right to be concerned about disrupting the program which addresses their needs fairly well, even though it is not denied that thirty million others fall through the cracks. The dominant healthcare system has many defects, but they remain mostly unaddressed. The thirty million do not have their problems addressed at all, because the sources of the deficiency are not primarily financial. It certainly seems we needed three programs to address three specific problems, and we needed a fourth searching examination of the program design for the remaining three hundred million. Because medical care is constantly changing, mostly for the better, single pieces of legislation are surely destined for obsolescence as soon as they are written. One big law, or even forty little laws, cannot possibly anticipate the discovery of a cure for cancer, or the appearance of a new epidemic like HIV, capable of killing millions of people in every walk of life. We need an institution, not a political victory, or defeat. Nor do we need another century of legislative turmoil.
The components of this institution should include an appropriate voice for government with links to the oversight committees in Congress and the judiciary. It should include a voice for persons trained in the science of medical care, with links to organized medicine. And it should have the power to investigate the scientific and economic issues, utilizing the resources of the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration. No doubt, other power centers will demand representation. At first, this organization should be given time to sort itself out, investigating and reporting, but leaving regulatory action to existing institutions until the new organization can persuade the nation it is ready for enforcement powers. Even then, it might be better to create new agencies with enforcement power, leaving a national medical advisory Institution whose power derives from its demonstrated ability to suggest the right approach. If it does not quickly acquire such prestige, it has been poorly designed.
Perhaps it should be left vague and sketchy. Why don't we begin with a Medical Constitutional Convention, allowing them to battle it out behind closed doors for a few months? And reminding them from the outset, that the 1787 Constitutional Convention achieved its best design features after it had been returned to the people for ratification.
109 Volumes
Philadephia: America's Capital, 1774-1800 The Continental Congress met in Philadelphia from 1774 to 1788. Next, the new republic had its capital here from 1790 to 1800. Thoroughly Quaker Philadelphia was in the center of the founding twenty-five years when, and where, the enduring political institutions of America emerged.
Philadelphia: Decline and Fall (1900-2060) The world's richest industrial city in 1900, was defeated and dejected by 1950. Why? Digby Baltzell blamed it on the Quakers. Others blame the Erie Canal, and Andrew Jackson, or maybe Martin van Buren. Some say the city-county consolidation of 1858. Others blame the unions. We rather favor the decline of family business and the rise of the modern corporation in its place.
Originally the "lower counties" of Pennsylvania, and thus one of three Quaker colonies founded by William Penn, Delaware has developed its own set of traditions and history.
Start in Philadelphia, take two days to tour around Delaware Bay. Down the New Jersey side to Cape May, ferry over to Lewes, tour up to Dover and New Castle, visit Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, Brandywine Battlefield and art museum, then back to Philadelphia. Try it!
Millions of eye patients have been asked to read the passage from Franklin's autobiography, "I walked up Market Street, etc." which is commonly printed on eye-test cards. Here's your chance to do it.
In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
Grievances provoking the American Revolutionary War left many Philadelphians unprovoked. Loyalists often fled to Canada, especially Kingston, Ontario. Decades later the flow of dissidents reversed, Canadian anti-royalists taking refuge south of the border.
