Lamar Soutter Exhibit - His Medical School and Residency Years

Voyage on the Effie M. Morrissey

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Source: Photo by Jack B. Angel, Assistant Engineer -- Ernestina Collection

Source: Slide collection of H. B. Wheeler, M.D.

Upon graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1935 Soutter signed on to a voyage with the famous Captain Robert A. Bartlett (1875-1946), who had been part of Admiral Robert Peary's group that discovered the North Pole in 1909. Bartlett (pictured at left top) had bought an old schooner, the Effie M. Morrissey, in 1926 and had been conducting oceanographic expeditions in the Arctic for various scientific organizations.

This particular expedition to northwest Greenland in 1935 was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum, and the National Museum. Soutter was ship's doctor and chief science officer. Captain Bartlett conducted the hydrographic and mineral studies and Dr. Soutter gathered plankton and fish samples. Soutter himself conducted almost 100 plankton experiments, many at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning in the full daylight of the midnight sun. These experiments provided a foundation of knowledge of the sea and its inhabitants in cold climates. The expedition was also commissioned to bring back a live baby walrus for the Bronx Zoo and to make plaster casts of a narwhal, a small Arctic whale, for a future Smithsonian exhibit. The 1935 trip also included a visit to the Peary monument at Cape York, Northwest Greenland.

Web Resources for Further Information:

The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum - Robert Abram Bartlett

The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum - The Effie M. Morrissey

The Schooner Ernestina

Effie M. Morrissey (Wikipedia)

Canadian Heroes in Fact and Fiction - Captain Robert Bartlett

Robert Bartlett (Wikipedia)

Sources used for this page:

The Schooner Ernestina web site
Slide collection of H. B. Wheeler, M.D., Harry M. Haidak Distinguished Professor of Surgery, Emeritus
Explorations and Field-Work of the Smithsonian Institution in 1935, Publ. 3382, 1936.