Temples of the Future

Fred Remer had needs.  But in the depths of the Great Depression, the Town of Greenwich was not quick to meet the needs of its laboratory director.  On this particular day in 1938 he was wishing he had an up-to-date analytical balance, to replace the one that had been there since the laboratory opened over two decades before.

Frederick M. Remer had been hired to reopen the laboratory of the Greenwich Department of Health in 1931, in its new location in the Town Hall on Greenwich Avenue, which would one day become
 the Senior Center.  He had come to Greenwich two years before, and worked at Greenwich Hospital.  Perhaps he had been recommended to the Department by Dr. Louise Larrimore, the hospital pathologist who had been doing the Health Department’s laboratory work on a referral basis for six years.  Mr. Remer came from Michigan, where he had been in charge of two hospital laboratories, after having studied chemistry in the Marines during the Great War.  Appointed State Chemist by Governor Wilbur Cross in 1931, he maintained a certified laboratory in his home.  That day in 1938 he was proud of having just been cited as “one of the three men in the United States who could put a hair under a microscope and tell at once the sex, complexion, race, physical condition and approximate age of the person from whose head it came” (Posterity would have liked to know who did the citing, but the citation made it into his obituary).

On that day in 1938 he had a new worry.  Dr. Ira Hiscock, the Yale professor who had studied the Greenwich Health Department a decade before, was working with the Greenwich Health Officer to prepare a new Code of Public Health for the Town. Mr. Remer expected that this would produce a substantial increase in the number of tests he was expected to perform.  In his annual reports he had put in a request for a laboratory assistant to clean the lab, sterilize equipment and perform the laborious process of preparing bacteriological culture media.  He actually had an assistant, Mrs. Nellie Reynolds, but she only worked part of one day a week, and it would be good if her hours could be extended.  In 1934 Mr. Remer was expressing his “deep regret” that he could not honor requests for specialized testing.  The next year he requested a new table, a cupboard, and apparatus for testing milk, water and sewage.  The next year he listed the tests that were in demand but that he couldn’t do, such as blood counts and lead in blood. He was to repeat his requests for equipment and technical help as the years went by, and his workload increased: 2400, then 3000, then 3900 tests per year.  But although the Town of Greenwich had appropriated money to hire 1600 unemployed men to work on the roads when the Depression started, there were few funds available for public health.

Frederick Remer reached the final straw in his report for 1941:

"Rather than repeat all recommendations previously made, attention is called to the words of the immortal Pasteur:  'Take interest, I implore you, in those sacred dwellings which are designated by the expressive term LABORATORY.  Demand that they be multiplied, that they be adorned.  These are temples of the future- temples of well-being and happiness.  There it is that humanity grows greater, stronger, better'" 

  

The laboratory was to be adorned with the new analytical balance (which is still there), but Mr. Remer never saw it.  A month after he quoted Pasteur, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor and World War II began.  Frederick Remer resigned to serve his country, and did not return after the war, becoming an educator instead.  His dozen years at Greenwich were marked by a struggle to meet the laboratory needs of the Town in a time of scarce resources.  The Greenwich Department of Health Laboratory has always been concerned to use available resources to their fullest benefit.

Sources:

Greenwich Health Department Annual Reports:  1925, 1926, 1931, 1936, 1940, 1941

Greenwich Time, 1956

Hiscock, “Survey of Greenwich”, 1925