Otto's Gangrene

The Plath family doctor brought surgeon Halsey B. Loder to the Plaths' house in Winthrop to examine Otto Plath's gangrenous foot. Gangrene is rotting flesh and looks and smells like it, and hurts so terribly that patients can't bear the weight of a bedsheet. Dr. Loder told Otto's wife Aurelia that to save Otto's life he needed his leg amputated from the thigh.

Aurelia Plath's Letters Home narrative of Otto's decline describes a textbook case of untreated diabetes, two or three miserable years start to finish. Their children barely knew a healthy father. All the same Otto, a biologist, refused to see any doctor until his toes turned gray and black. The amputation was performed at Boston's Deaconess Hospital on October 12, 1940.

Halsey Beach Loder (1884-1966) was a "society surgeon" held in the highest esteem among New England physicians and patients. A visiting and consulting surgeon at nearly every Boston-area hospital, Loder was an employee of none: He was his own boss, in 1939 working 42 weeks. [1] Otto had the best available care. Yet three weeks after surgery Otto had not yet gone home. On Nov. 5 Loder phoned Aurelia to say Otto had died. Then Aurelia had to pay the medical bill and funeral expenses. [2]

Before Otto left home for the surgery, seven-year-old Sylvia Plath made two haunting pencil drawings of her sick father at home in his bed. Each image centers on Otto Plath's dreadfully swollen foot sticking up from his cover sheet. Sylvia drew the same scene twice and one is more finished. Bonham's auctioned and sold those drawings, not to me, so view them here. 

Aurelia captioned and dated the drawings (October 7, 1940) and in one of them, traced over Sylvia's outline of Otto's affected foot.

It was Dr. Loder who had said to Aurelia, "How could such a brilliant man be so stupid."

[Photo] The Boston American, Sept. 18, 1926, p. 2. Caption: "Dr. Loder is the surgeon who amputated the leg of Mrs. Pauline LeRoy French, New York and Newport society leader."

[1] U.S. federal census 1940, Mass., Suffolk, Boston, 15-213.

[2] Aurelia Plath to Linda Wagner-Martin, 27 March 1988: “I set aside the $2,000 out of the $5,000 (which was all the insurance [Otto] had) and the private room, the nurse, the operation fee (which Dr. Loder made very modest)”. $2,000 in 1940 equals $45,000 in 2024.