There is but one speck of blight on the guileless and honorable career of Paul Dudley White, noted Boston cardiologist, discovered as my wife read aloud from Our Hearts Were Young and Gay .

In June of “the year of our Lord I shan’t say which” (deduction suggests it was around 1920), young Bryn Mawr college students Cornelia Otis Skinner and her friend Emily Kimbrough set sail for Europe. At their first shipboard dinner, Cornelia reported, “Our outlook brightened … when we found ourselves next to two young doctors. Their names were Paul White and Joseph Aub and they are now among Boston’s most distinguished physicians, but at that time were freshly hatched out of medical school” and just old enough to be “in that glamorous category of ‘older men.’ ”

The foursome enjoyed one another’s company at deck tennis and otherwise waltzing about ship for the several days of the voyage, until Cornelia fell ill. Joe Aub made the diagnosis of measles on inspecting her throat, and Paul White confirmed it, after which she recalled that her probable exposure was at a nursery school she had recently visited in Montreal.

Cornelia was determined that nobody must know about it, lest she be kept aboard, missing her rendezvous with her parents at Southampton and isolated for the duration of her illness in a quarantine hospital in Hamburg. “Emily would not report my contagious condition to the ship’s doctor and neither would Paul or Joe. They might be disbarred or unfrocked or whatever it is that happens to medical men, but they’d throw in their lot with ours and take the risk.”

An elaborate ruse was perpetrated as Cornelia became more and more ill, culminating in her exaggerated dress and garish makeup to pass quarantine on leaving the ship, supported on one side by her friend Emily and on the other by our hero, Paul White. “They stood me between them so that in case I collapsed they’d be there to break my fall. I flashed a ghastly smile like a ballet-dancer’s at the inspector, who merely shuddered and passed me as rapidly as possible. … The only persons who paid any attention to me were the other passengers who stared in bewilderment at the white veil and that art of the theatre make-up which gleamed through it.”

Safely delivered to her parents and ensconced in a portside hotel, Cornelia wrote, “Paul White stayed on in Southampton for a few days. … He made certain my rash had come forth as it should and that despite the risk involved in landing with a temperature of 102° I was not going to have pneumonia. Then he went on his way.”

“When I think not only of his generosity in sacrificing so much of his holiday time, but of his saving me from that fate worse than death, the German quarantine camp, I am his for life at any time if he ever wants me (Dr. White of Boston please note).”

Joe went traveling in France. Paul went on to London to study with Thomas Lewis and later to marry Ina Reid, not Cornelia, and Cornelia went on to become a popular writer and stage performer of the day.

Thus records a typical humane act, if a singular deception, in the distinguished life of our pioneer cardiologue-epidemiologue, Paul Dudley White!