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 he did an internship in Mexico, where he contracted polio. Polio permanently weakened his legs, he didn't have to use a cane but he would never be up to a lot of physical labor again, making that trip to Germany all the more special since after that there was no way he would be physically up to working his way on a steamboat. Yet 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, doing his residency, and Jean was in college near her hometown of Winder, Georgia. They each liked what they saw though, and they were married two weeks after Jean graduated from college. 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 the damage he'd taken 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 he and one female doctor were the only pediatricians in Montgomery and the surrounding areas during WWII. During WWII, while in Montgomery he contracted TB, though at the time they weren't entirely sure that was the case, that weakened his lungs and stayed in his system for the rest of his life.
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, from the TB that resurged when his immune system was suppressed by medications he was on for other medical problems.
1 Daniel, William A. The Adolescent Patient. Saint Louis: C. V. Mosby Co, 1970.