Biography
Bill Daniel went back to the School of Medicine at Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois, for starters. However, during his last summer in medical school while travelling with friends in Mexico, he contracted polio. While the polio left some lingering weakness, on the bright side it was during his convalescence that he first started to exchange letters with a young woman named Jean Kimball.
Jean Kimball, later Jean Kimball Daniel, at age 21
After Bill recovered he and Jean began to see each other, which was no mean trick since Bill was in Chicago, in medical school, and Jean was attending Brenau College (now Brenau University) near her hometown of Winder, Georgia. They each liked what they saw though, and they were married one week after their respective graduations. Bill would later joke that the only way he got such a beautiful woman to marry him was that she fell for him through his letters before she saw him.
When WWII came Bill tried to volunteer, but due to some lingering weakness from polio, the only classification they would take him on for was a limited one that wouldn't provide any health care coverage for Jean and their children, so he declined. Instead, the recruiters asked him if he'd be willing to go down to Montgomery, Alabama, as most of the doctors there had joined up. He did, and was one of the only pediatricians in Montgomery and the surrounding areas during WWII.
Later, Bill was involved in Project Hope in its early days, going on the advance team to the host country to clear the way for the Project Hope ship to visit. Between working with Project Hope in places like Sri Lanka and Ecuador, and his own vacations, Bill traveled all over the world, continuing what he'd started in Germany in 1936.
Professionally he did very well, he helped establish the Adolescent Medicine program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, one of the first such programs in the country. He did ground-breaking research while there on the importance of sleep as related to the release of hormones during adolescence, and published one of the first textbooks on adolescent medicine.1 The William A. Daniel, Jr. Adolescent Health Center at the UAB Department of Pediatrics is named after him.
Bill died in 1998, at 84, and is much missed by all of us.
1 Daniel, William A. The Adolescent Patient. Saint Louis: C. V. Mosby Co, 1970.