Allan Appel Photo
Stan and Jane Tamarkin and Wessel “Patient Zero” Klein at Morris Wessel’s funeral.
“I met Morris [Dr. Morris Wessel] when I was 20 minutes old.
“I provided Morris invaluable data for the paper he eventually wrote on infantile colic. I was the largest bar on his graph.
“I remained a patient until I was 24, when he tactfully suggested I should no longer be seeing a pediatrician.”
So Susan Klein remembered Dr. Morris Wessel, who died on Saturday at age 98 , in one of many tributes offered for the legendary New Haven pediatrician, medical mentor, and child advocate at his funeral Monday.
She spoke beside Wessel’s simple coffin, draped by a deep blue cloth with a beige Star of David upon it. Like so many others, she had a story to tell about an intuitive healer whose gifts would remain in the memories of children and parents for decades and decades.
Paul Wessel, one of four children of Morris and Irmgard Wessel, described Klein as “patient zero,” that is the youngest of innumerable patients and their parents who, along with colleagues, friends, and family, filled the Shure Funeral Home on George Street at a moving service presided over by Rabbi Rona Shapiro of Congregation Bnai Jacob.
Shapiro called him a “doctors’ doctor.” Other speakers praised him for his pioneering work against child corporal punishment, for addressing children directly and their parents, for taking seriously the death of children’s pets and the effect of the deaths of grandparents on a family, and for helping to found Connecticut Hospice.
Shapiro speculated that such achievements might have emerged from Wessel’s lifelong pondering on death deriving from the loss of his own father at an early age to the influenza epidemic of 1918.
The service was full of warmth and memories of a man who had learned a masterful touch — clinical, intellectual, and humanistic all at the same time.
Jane Tamarkin, whose four kids were Wessel’s patients and who wrote and sang a song for him at his retirement party in 1993, recalled a sign always up in his office: “What if they had a war and nobody came?”
“He would give you an endless amount of time,” recalled her husband, Stan. “He always wanted to talk, to get a sense of the parents, the environment, to exchange ideas.”
Klein, who along with her parents became family friends with the Wessels, was one of the organizers of that 1993 retirement party, which drew 600 people. Klein said that after the event she collected four albums thick with photographs, cards, and notes of appreciation from patients, which Wessel enjoyed looking through in his final years.
Klein demonstrated the Wessel pinch.
Klein also pinched her arm and revealed the trick that Wessel had invented for her when she was 10 or 11 and he had diagnosed an allergy to dust and ragweed requiring her to receive weekly shots.
“He knew it was painful,” she recalled. So they devised a scheme: She bunched up her skin and would say “pinch please.” Then he would stick in the needle.”
Those visits not only cured Klein. They also taught her how to take the bus by herself from her home in Westville to Wessel’s downtown office.
Friend and colleague Brodnicki.
Chet Brodnicki recalled a different kind of relationship. A social worker, not a physician, Brodnicki came to the Clifford Beers Clinic, where Wessel was for 35 years consulting pediatrician. As director Brodnicki was in effect Wessel’s boss, but “one doesn’t supervise Morris,” he recalled.
“He was the one who knew the New Haven community and kept us informed of issues. He was the epitome of a child advocate. It was a blessing to be Morris’s ‘boss,’” Brodnicki recalled.
Former colleagues Anderson and Sandillo.
It was in fact hard to find someone without a Wessel story. Nurse Donna Sandillo, who worked in his office for 37 years, recalled that after having her own biological child she decided to adopt another child. She sought Wessel’s advice.
He gave her a name, told her the person to talk to and to invoke him, “and now I’m the mother of a beautiful 14 year old [Korean] daughter,” she said.
Sandillo said that the practice goes on with Wessel’s younger associates, including Dr. Robert Anderson, who was also in attendance. They still use the baby scale that was the first one in Dr. Wessel’s office; it weighs kids up to 30 pounds.
Shure’s Klatzkin.
Even Rob Klatzkin, who works at the Shure Funeral Home and was organizing the pall bearers at the end of the service, had his own Wessel story.
He said when their son was about 3 years old and had a cough, his wife called Wessel. Even before she articulated the problem, he said to her, “‘You’re going on vacation, right’?
“But how did you know?’
“‘I heard it in your voice.”
And that was exactly it; the Klatzkins wanted to know if it was OK to take their son with them. The man who treated children by treating the whole family got the picture fast, even if he wasn’t there. He could hear the essential information in the voice.
“He was so intuitive. It was incredible,” recalled Klatzkin, whose son recovered from his cough just fine and is today 45 years old.
Calls such as the Klatzkins’ often came into the Wessels’ home between 6 and 7 p.m., the hour Wessel got home to be with and have dinner with his family.
Paul Wessel said he knew his father not as the celebrated pediatrician, whom he wished he had appreciated more in life, but as a “pair of great jeans,” comfortable, and always there.
Dinner hour with dad meant that watching Star Trek on TV had to be interrupted, but son has long forgiven father and come to appreciate what he accomplished. Listening to his father’s conversations “during those dinners, we learned a lot about medicine.” Among those lessons, for example, were that if a fish hook is stuck in a child’s finger, the best approach is to pull it through. Also, while it’s good to change diapers a lot, the more important fact to note is the frequency of a child’s bowel movements, Wessel recalled
After the services, the black hearse carrying Dr. Wessel’s body was accompanied by a long line of cars for interment at the Jewish cemetery on Wintergreen Avenue. Shiva, or the period of mourning when guests keep the bereaved family company, was held Monday night and will be held again Tuesday from 6:30 to 8:30 at the family home at 61 Elmwood Rd., where Wessel continued to live until his death.
