Jewish Activities in the Metropolitan Area

Doctors and their wives do not admit that they are down and out. Even in the depression times they take it on the chin with a heroism that is startling. Statistics show that years of preparation and study for medicine rarely result in an average income of more than twenty-five hundred dollars annually. With the development of medical centers and pay clinics many a doctor has found that making both ends meet is about the toughest kind of a surgical operation to handle.

Here is where the Physicians’ Wives League comes to the rescue. Founded eight years ago, it proposes to aid financially and without any humiliation, those physicians and physician’s widows who are left stranded and without means of support.

Its president, Elizabeth Ferber, wife of Dr. Julius Ferber, described the beginning and progress of the society last night, in her home on 242 Second avenue. She has been actively engaged in social work ever since her high school days. Her sympathetic understanding of people together with her marked executive ability fit her ably for her task. She spoke with enthusiasm and earnestness of the project that has occupied a good deal of her time in the last seven years.

“The idea for the League originated with Mrs. Rose Climenko, herself a doctor’s widow,” said Mrs. Ferber. She called a meeting January, 1926, at the Hotel Astor. About three hundred doctors’ wives attended.

There she presented a graphic picture of the hardships she had endured in reestablishing herself financially. She told of her struggle in supporting her five children alone, and suggested that it would be a splendid idea if physicians’ wives would band together to protect other physicians’ widows in similar situations. The idea took root and I was asked to draw up a workable program, which I did.

DOCTORING FOR DOCTOR

From an organization of one hundred and twenty members the society has increased to five hundred. Limited in its activities to the city of New York, it has in its short period of existence already financed and aided some three hundred and fifty physicians’ widows. It has helped to re-establish over fifty doctors, most of them once well to do men with good practices. In the last three years the organization has supported eighteen widows who are receiving on the average of thirty dollars per month. Three old gentile women physicians are receiving pensions from the League.

“The principal object of the members, however, is to eliminate the sting of complaint characteristic of most charities, that ‘the remedy is worse than the disease.’ The attempt is made to administer relief with as little pain as possible.

“It takes a doctor to appreciate that idea,” said Mrs. Ferber.