Irving Roy Rathgeb, Jr., MD (1913-1943). Physician, Surgeon, and Member of the United States Army Medical Corps

Irving Roy Rathgeb, Jr., MD was a young physician and surgeon who was born in Highland (Ulster County), New York on 7 March 1913. His father, Irving Roy Rathgeb, Sr. was a co-owner of the Rathgeb Knitting Mills which specialized in the production of sweaters. Rathgeb was an excellent student in primary and high school and later attended Colgate and Cornell universities. In 1934 he entered the Long Island College of Medicine from where he received his MD degree in 1938. Graduating in the upper third of his class, he obtained an internship at the Norwegian Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Because of his desire to become a surgeon, he was then accepted into the Department of Surgery at the St Louis Railway Company Hospital in Texarkana, Texas. Soon thereafter he joined the Texas National Guard while still continuing his training in surgery at the hospital and was commissioned as a First Lieutenant. He was assigned to the 111th Medical Regiment, 36th Infantry Division. Completing his residency in surgery at the hospital he was transferred to the US Army Medical Corps as a Captain. Once the US entered World War II, the 36th Infantry Division was transferred overseas and Rathgeb promoted to the rank of Major. The functions of the 111th Medical Regiment, of which Rathgeb was an essential part, was to serve as an evacuation hospital. This entailed the collecting and evacuating of the wounded soldiers from the front lines and taking them to medical facilities well behind the battle lines. This was a very high-risk responsibility since it regularly placed Rathgeb and his fellow medical personnel in the line of fire. In 1942 the 111th Regiment was temporarily posted to Eritrea in Eastern Africa. In early 1943 they were ordered to Cairo, Egypt in preparation for the allied invasion of Italy. On 23 March Rathgeb and seven of his medical team boarded a military plane for a flight to Cairo. About 50 miles south of Cairo, the plane encountered a severe sandstorm, and eventually crashed into a mountain peak and fell into a canyon. Initial search parties were unable to find the crash site and thus it was provisionally concluded that the plane might have crashed into the Red Sea. Rathgeb's family and the families of others on the flight were told that they were missing in action. After many months the crash site was found and the deceased victims of the accident removed and buried in a common grave in Suez, Egypt. Five years later in 1948, Rathgeb's remains and those of seven of his military companions were transferred to a common burial plot in the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2026 a slide rule bearing Rathgeb's name neatly printed and black ink both inside and outside of the rule's leather case was found in a desk drawer whose content had once belong to Duncan W. Clark, MD. Clark had graduated from the Long Island College of Medicine in 1936, two years before Rathgeb. Following his graduation, he had a close relationship with the medical school and its successor, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University. He served as Assistant Dean, Dean, Professor and Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health and later as Professor Emeritus. Clark passed away in 2007 at the age of 96. How Rathgeb's slide rule came into his possession is not known. However, its discovery enabled others many decades later to come to know Rathgeb as a remarkable and brilliant physician and surgeon whose great leadership abilities and surgical care contributions were never fully realized because he had given his life while serving others.