Lucien E. Morris, MD, Aqualumnus, Inventor, Academic and Historian

Lucien E. Morris, inventor of the Copper Kettle, the first precision anesthetic vaporizer, died peacefully at his home in Seattle, Washington, on November 15, 2011, two weeks before his 97th birthday. He was one of four remaining Aqualumni, the doctors who trained with Dr. Ralph Waters at the University of Wisconsin. His life epitomized Waters’ admonition “to teach doctors to go out and teach other doctors” the medical specialty of anesthesiology. Lucien was born November 30, 1914, at his maternal grandparents’ home in Mattoon, Illinois.1 Lucien’s father was a Harvard-trained biochemist teaching at his first post-graduate appointment in the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1918, he was appointed Head of Biochemistry at the Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Lucien’s sister, Marcia, was born when he was six years old and added to his memories of a happy early childhood. Family vacations were to northern Canada, planned to ease Lucien’s seasonal hay fever. This established a pattern that Lucien would follow in his young adult years. Tragedy struck when Lucien’s father was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis, the most common cause of mortality at the time. This necessitated a sanitarium stay at Saranac Lake, New York, that separated him from the family in 1925. He died a year later following a pulmonary lobectomy, never having returned home. Lucien, at age 11, became the last male in the Morris line. The family remained in their Cleveland Heights home with help from Lucien’s paternal grandmother who provided a modest monthly stipend that sustained them through the Great Depression. Lucien was a good student with an interest in the sciences, and he found ways to keep himself in spending money through his hobbies, notably stamp collecting and photography. In high school he discovered fencing, a sport that would come to figure prominently in providing his future education. The family was able to continue to vacation in Canada, where Lucien’s interest in camping and canoeing was nurtured. After graduating from high school in 1932, Lucien matriculated at Oberlin College, a small undergraduate institution near Cleveland with a reputation for academic excellence (Figure 1). Lucien pursued a degree in chemistry. He worked in food service, a “board job,” first washing dishes and then as a waiter in a women’s dorm dining hall. He joined the fencing club and in addition to honing his skill as a competitive fencer, he became the spokesman and manager of the team and convinced Oberlin’s athletic department to make fencing an intercollegiate sport. With a degree in chemistry, Lucien chose to follow in his father’s footsteps with graduate studies in biochemistry. He secured a position at Western Reserve University that included a teaching fellowship. As a laboratory instructor for medical and dental students, he received free tuition and a stipend of $65 a month. Wishing to stay physically active, Lucien investigated practicing with the neighboring Case Institute of Technology fencing team and discovered they were in need of coach. He served as the volunteer head coach for the next seven years. The team developed sufficiently to win five of eleven competitions against Big Ten schools between 1941 and 1943. Part of Lucien’s own curriculum included medical school courses. He wanted to understand what his students, as future practitioners, needed to know about biochemistry to make his teaching more relevant. Lucien decided to take the full medical course of study. He was able to maintain his teaching fellowship in biochemistry, but soon recognized that obtaining a medical degree would enhance his future opportunities. In 1939, Lucien met a young Canadian woman studying Public Health Nutrition, Jean Pinder, who was taking biochemistry with the dental students. Their friendship blossomed. They were engaged in the spring of 1941 and married in June of 1942 (Figure Fig. 1. Lucien Morris, probably at the time of his graduation from Oberlin College in 1936. Photo courtesy of Don Morris from the Oberlin College Archives. 2). Jean had completed her master’s degree, and Lucien was beginning his senior year of medical school. Due to the war and the need for doctors, the medical curriculum was accelerated and vacations and holidays were cancelled. Lucien’s medical program became full time with no time for his teaching fellowship. That in turn meant that his stipend and tuition-free education ended. Jean’s job as an assistant nutritionist for the City of Cleveland provided a salary that was insufficient for the last year of medical school tuition. Lucien shared his difficult financial situation with the Athletic Director at Case, who made arrangements to pay the last year of tuition. With the addition of other part-time work, including guiding a previously scheduled canoe trip to the Temagami Lake district of Canada, Lucien was able to complete the year. Because of the wartime expedited schedule, Lucien was graduated in February 1943. In April, Lucien began his internship at Grasslands Hospital in Valhalla, New York. By coincidence, the superintendent of the hospital had been a biochemistry student of Lucien’s father and was helpful in providing married living quarters and facilitating a job for Jean. While Lucien had seen surgery and