questionnaire “the death of a surgeon with whom I had expected to
practice medicine caused me to leave the medical school and go into
business.”^6 He had earned his bachelor’s degree from Yale College in
1880, and then continued at the Medical School in New Haven while
playing for the football team, acting as the team captain.
Another setback had occurred in 1882: Camp injured his knee in
practice, thus ending his playing career. Camp had likely suffered an ACL
or meniscus tear, and in the late 19th century, there was not a single
operation for any type of sports knee injury. Even a relatively minor knee
injury resulted in the termination of an active life.
In the Cro-Magnon days of collegiate football, injuries were common
and deaths occurred with shocking regularity, and by 1905, some Ivy
League schools suspended their football operations. That same year,
eighteen college students died and there were 149 serious accidents.^7
President Roosevelt himself summoned Walter Camp and representatives
from Harvard and Princeton to the White House to respond to demands for
the abolition of football in America.^8 Within a year, the Intercollegiate
Athletic Association of the United States (forerunner to the NCAA) was
formed, with Walter Camp at the helm of the rules committee.
The Yale-Princeton game was 125 years ago. What medical technology
was at Mr. Camp’s disposal?
Nothing.
Prior to our modern age, sports medicine just a century ago almost
exactly mirrored gladiatorial times, with sophistication no better than an
emphasis on eating meat, taking a cold bath after a competition, and have
a rubdown in the training room. It shouldn’t be too surprising that eighteen
college students died in 1905 while playing a violent, largely unregulated
sport with essentially no advanced medical treatment available.
When a player suffered an open (“compound”) ankle fracture, he faced
a potential death sentence. In the Franco-Prussian War the mortality rate
of a lower leg fracture was 50 percent; in World War I, the mortality rate
for an open femur fracture was a startling 80 percent. Nobody worried that
Joe Theismann might die on that fateful Monday night game in 1985, nor
did any viewer contemplate Ed McCaffrey’s mortality when he suffered a
similar open tibia fracture in a game broadcast on Monday Night Football
September 10, 2001 (just hours before the 9/11 terror attacks).