A Successful Life and Untimely Death

Henry Lewis Phillips was a very successful Welsh tailor who came to America in search of opportunity. He founded a tailor company, and when he had enough money, he sent for his wife to come across the pond to America. The Phillips family quickly became one of importance. Henry, at one point in time, hired the most people in Selinsgrove at his tailor shop, which helped bring trade to Selinsgrove. Henry had twelve children, six boys and six girls. One of those boys was Wendell, who led a notable life filled with potential until it was shortened by a deadly plague.

Wendell marched his medical career forward in Philadelphia as a resident physician at St. Agnes Hospital. There, he met Ruth Hass, a Philadelphian woman who in the short year of knowing Wendell married him and moved to Corvallis, Oregon, in August 1916. Ruth was willing to drop everything and anything to move across the country for Wendell to run Oregon State University’s new student clinic. But upon receiving the news that the United States had joined the first World War, Wendell resigned in 1918 to move with his wife to Camp Lee, Virginia, to volunteer for the U.S. military.

Civilian doctors made up the majority of the military’s medical corps, at a ratio of 1:62. (Centennial Commission) Upon arriving at Camp Lee in August of 1918, Wendell was commissioned as a 1st lieutenant, a rank given to enlistees who showed good promise as officers. Wendell was trained at the army’s medical school, assigned to work specifically for the ear, nose, and throat branches of service. While waiting for orders to be sent to France as a field medic, he succumbed to the first wave of influenza in the U.S. Influenza’s first wave hit the world in 1918, affecting 20-40% of the U.S. Army and Navy. (Historical Museum, 2008; Byerly, 2010) Influenza was made even more deadly by the fact that many of the nation’s doctors were overseas serving as medics in the war.  Fifty million to one hundred million people died during the influenza outbreak. Wendell was unfortunate enough to pass away in October that same year, at the age of 35. He was the third man to die in service from Selinsgrove and the first from his direct family.

Wendell, along with many other Selinsgrove men, proudly volunteered to serve. Although his life was cut short, the patriotism and eagerness to heal others that Wendell lived by carried on long past his death.

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