My grandfather was grandfathered
And I call myself a historian. I never even knew he was a hero in World War 2
This one is personal. Well, heck, many of my posts are personal to a degree but this one is more personal than most because it’s about my grandfather, Dr. Milton A Reder. And it’s a little convoluted so bear with me, but it turns out that of all the heroes I’ve interviewed and written about, one of the most heroic was my own damn grandfather, and not because he was a hero to me, like often a father or grandfather is in a young boy’s life. He was a much better doctor than he was a grandfather or even a father, for that matter, and he was an awful husband to my grandmother, whom he divorced and who loved him until she died. So it might be understandable that I took it with a grain of salt when he told me about the time he yelled at General Patton.
It was on a beach, he said, and he was treating a wounded soldier when some dirt came flying into the foxhole or ditch where he was working. He said he yelled at the person to stop throwing dirt on his patient and discovered that the perpetrator was General Patton, who he said told him he was doing the right thing, and to keep treating the wounded soldier. He said that later Patton wanted him to be his doctor but he declined because his skills were needed elsewhere.
My great-grandmother, Anna Reder, liked to crochet. She crocheted in the morning. She crocheted in the afternoon, and she crocheted in the evening. And her son Milton, the youngest of her three children, grew up watching her crochet. My 90-year-old cousin Ariane Batterberry, recently spoke to two of my sisters about my grandfather, who was her uncle, and told them that as a result of watching his mother crochet all the time, his own fingers were so nimble that as a surgeon during the war, he was said to have saved a thousand eyes.
He graduated from medical school in 1922 and was an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist, as well as a plastic surgeon. I doubt that there are any records of his having treated Patton and even if there were I wouldn’t know how to find them. But his obituary in the New York Times mentioned that Patton was among his patients, many of whom were celebrities, including George C. Scott, who portrayed Patton in the movie of the same name; and Yul Brynner, who gave him tickets for my mother to see him in “The King and I.”
After the war he achieved a bit of notoriety. He pioneered a medical procedure called the sphenopalatine ganglion block, which involved the use of a roughly 10 percent solution of pharmaceutical cocaine applied by a cotton swab at the end of a long applicator to a group of nerves at the base of the nose.
In a 1984 “Intelligencer” article about him, New York Magazine wrote that “the Food and Drug Administration has not approved cocaine for pain therapy, but has no power to ban it because cocaine is ‘grandfathered’ as a pharmaceutical in use prior to the FDA’s drug-control authority.”
In 1989, The New York Post’s scandalmongering Page 6 devoted a whole column to my grandfather, whose practice exploded with people in all manner of pain calling for appointments. At about the same time, UPI ran the following article, which probably appeared in dozens of newspapers around the country:
A Park Avenue Doctor With a Star-Studded Patient List
NEW YORK -- A Park Avenue doctor with a star-studded patient list has been giving them $25 doses of cocaine to reduce their pain, but state health officials said Sunday they may soon bring a halt to the practice.
Dr. Milton Reder, 89 -- who has given cocaine treatments to celebrity clients including comedian David Brenner, entertainer Sonny Bono and divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson -- could face charges ranging from professional misconduct to felony drug possession, said Thomas Coffey, director of the state Department of Health’s Bureau of Controlled Substances.
‘Baloney,’ said the elderly doctor when told of the state investigation that found he was one of two or three doctors defying a New York County Medical Society ruling discounting the effectiveness of cocaine for blocking muscle and skeletal pain by placing it on swabs pressed to a nerve in the nose.
‘We’ll fight it,’ Reder vowed Sunday. ‘They’re interfering with the practice of medicine.’
Reder’s patients pay $25 a visit for him to insert cotton swab doused with a 10 to 15 percent liquid cocaine solution up their nose. The swabs are placed against a central nerve center, the sphenopalatine ganglion, in the rear of the nasal passages and connected to nerves throughout the body.
Coffey said the medical society stood firm in its belief that there was no scientific evidence that the practice, known as Sphenopalatine Ganglion Block, was effective in reducing pain.
The medical society issued its ruling last spring, and about 20 doctors in the New York area were warned to discontinue the treatment, Coffey said.
The society agreed to reevaluate its ruling at Reder’s request, but its view has not changed, he added.
If the medical group upholds its ruling in a decision expected Feb. 15, Reder could be brought up on charges by the state.
“We’re saying that’s not a legitimate use of cocaine,” he said. “Clearly people are going to get a legal hit of cocaine.
“We do have evidence that at least for a half dozen people, that is their motivation,” Coffey said, although he stressed he was not referring to the celebrity clients.
“People are going to doctors for drugs for purposes of abuse,” he said.
But Reder insisted, “Nobody in 50 years has ever gotten addicted to it. I’m not using it for anything except to get rid of their pain.”
Brenner swears by the treatment.
“I’ve seen real miracles in that office,” Brenner told the Daily News Sunday, listing double scoliosis of the spine, a herniated disk, sciatica in both legs and a degenerative disease of the vertebrae among his ailments.
“I’ve tried everything. There was one guy who would put vitamins and marijuana on your chest. It was a joke. I couldn’t walk 14 years ago. This cured me.”
Brenner said the treatment did not get him high.
“I used to blow a lot of coke.” he said. “I know what coke can do. I saw it destroy my friendFreddie Prinze. If there was the slightest resemblance to what I used to feel when I was high, I would have walked out.”
Reder said his past patients included Winston Churchill, George Patton and Pablo Picasso.
Mitchelson told the Daily News that Reder was the only doctor able to relieve his “cluster headaches.”
Bono told the newspaper he received treatment from Reder in 1968 for acute sciatica “almost to the pont of paralysis.” He said he was able to walk within 20 minutes. “I thought it was weird. But it really worked,” he said.
The former New York Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford said, “Toots Shor brought me in there. It must have been the late ‘50s or early ‘60s. I was still pitching. And I was having trouble with my shoulder. He puts these cotton swabs up your nose. And my shoulder felt better the next day.”
All this negative publicity resulted in his office being flooded with new patients, and he was already seeing 50 to 70 patients a day. (Incidentally, when he began his practice he charged $25 for the procedure, and he never raised the price, while doctors he trained charged as much as $500 and that was often was covered by insurance.)
All these new patients created a problem, because his longtime secretary, Ruth, refused to work any more than her regular hours. So my mother volunteered me; and my cousin Marty, another of his grandsons, also helped out in the office. For all the controversy, while I never had the procedure, I saw enough of his patients with severe back pain after multiple surgeries, with cluster headaches, who swore that the relief, even if temporary, provided by the treatment was the only thing that enabled them to function.
And it was during this time that I asked him to tell me about his experiences in the war, but all he told me was the story about Patton. Considering the fact that Patton died in an accident in December of 1945, I don’t know if he treated Patton for pain, but I would like to think he did. He told Marty another story, not about the war, but about the gangster Lucky Luciano, who was one of his patients. Because he kept cocaine in the office, Gramps had two doors at the entrance and both were double locked. And when he came to work one morning, both doors were still locked, and there was a thousand dollars on the counter.
My grandfather died in 1992 at the age of 92. His obituary was in the New York Times as well as in many other publications.
Milton Reder, Doctor, Dies at 92; Treated Pain With Aid of Cocaine
Dr. Milton Reder, an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist whose medical practice in Manhattan spanned nearly 70 years, died on Sunday at his home on the Upper East Side. Dr. Reder, who became known as a doctor for celebrities and for banishing pain with legally bought cocaine, was 92 years old.
Ill for some time, he died of natural causes but was at his Park Avenue practice as recently as Saturday.
Born in Dayton, Ohio, and raised in New York City, Dr. Reder received his license in 1922 upon graduation from New York University Medical School. In private practice, he also performed plastic and reconstructive surgery but left that field in the 1950’s to focus on the relief of pain.
A 10 Percent Solution
For some 50 years Dr. Reder swabbed his patients’ nostrils with a 10 percent cocaine solution to deaden nerves for ailments like severe headaches, back pains or ringing ears. Those who took their pains to him included notables like Hedy Lamarr, Gen. George S. Patton, George Burns and David Brenner.
He was one of 20 Manhattan physicians who in 1987 were asked by state health officials, concerned about cocaine addiction, to substitute nonaddictive painkillers. Most of them did. But Dr. Reder told an interviewer in 1989 that the request had been prompted by “hysteria” and that none of his patients had ever got “high” or had become addicted to cocaine, which he obtained from pharmaceutical companies.
He said he was unconcerned about possible legal action and continued to use cocaine as medicine because, he said, nothing worked like it did to shut out acute pains. Nevertheless, Dr. Reder switched to officially endorsed drugs like the local anesthetic Xylocaine about that time.
I’m hoping to go down to New York City within the next couple of weeks to see my cousin Ariane and get some more of the story, as well as some other family history. So there will probably be more in a future Substack.