Vidrine Family History

My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Vidrine. Her father was Moise; her grandfather, Leon. I am related to Dr. Vidrine through my maternal side.

The LSU School of Medicine had an unusual beginning—a two-hour meeting of the LSU Board of Supervisors on Saturday, January 3, 1931, in Gov. Huey Long’s suite at the Roosevelt (now the Fairmont) Hotel in downtown New Orleans. Long is said to have attended in his pajamas. The meeting was dominated by the Governor, who was the driving force in establishing a medical school within the LSU system. With little discussion, the Board passed a resolution establishing a school, and selected Dr. Arthur Vidrine to be its first dean.

Dr. Vidrine, superintendent of Charity Hospital, was Long’s nominee. A surgeon who had graduated from Tulane School of Medicine, Dr. Vidrine had also been a Rhodes Scholar. He was later given approval by the Charity Hospital Board of Supervisors to retain his position as superintendent while serving as dean. In 1935 Vidrine would make an unsuccessful attempt to save Long’s life after Long was shot in Baton Rouge. He served as Dean until 1937.

Gov. Long’s motivation in establishing a state school of medicine was not based on personal antagonism toward Tulane University, although this story still flourishes. According to his chief biographer, T. Harry Williams, Gov. Long had been concerned about the lack of medical care for poor and middle-income people from the time he became governor. After studying the state’s medical education facilities, he concluded that inadequate medical care resulted from a statewide shortage of doctors. Tulane could not provide enough doctors in Long’s view, and its high tuition prevented many students from considering it.

Once Gov. Long achieved the important preliminaries of legally establishing the School and selecting its dean, he allowed Dr. Vidrine and his aides to assume the responsibility for the practical organization of the school, including choosing faculty and ensuring that the new medical center science building would be ready for the students in the fall of 1931.
On Thursday, October 1, 1931, the LSU School of Medicine received it first students, a small transfer class of juniors and a larger class of freshmen. Only one floor of the LSU Medical Center building was opened when classes started. The eight-story structure, built in the midst of the old Charity Hospital complex, had many art deco features. The most dramatic was over the foyer—a large silver-colored plaster bas-relief, “the Conquest of Yellow Fever,” celebrating the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission led by Dr. Walter Reed in Cuba in 1900. One of the Commission’s four members, Dr. Aristides Agramonte, was appointed LSU’s first head of tropical medicine.

Unfortunately, Dr. Agramonte died the summer before the school opened. The school purchased his personal library, which formed the nucleus of the school’s library.

Dr. Arthur Vidrine was a medical doctor from Ville Platte, Louisiana. He is best known for operating on radical politician Huey Pierce Long after Long was shot. He was educated at Tulane University, the University of Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and at hospitals in London and Paris. Vidrine was named superintendent of Charity Hospital in New Orleans. In May 1931 Governor Long appointed Vidrine dean of the newly established Louisiana State University Medical School in New Orleans.

Vidrine operated on Long in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on September 9, 1935, after Long had been shot. It became necessary to perform the two-hour operation, during which Vidrine repaired two small wounds in the colon and sutured the abdomen closed, when the two surgeons Long had called for from New Orleans were delayed. Vidrine was later criticized by other doctors for failing to recognize a kidney wound that caused internal bleeding and ultimately led to Long's death.

Founded in 1737 by a wealthy French sailor, Charity is one of the oldest general hospitals in the U. S. Its troubles began in 1928 when Huey Long kicked out the old director, appointed in his place Surgeon Arthur Vidrine, a promising young man scarcely out of medical school. Then Huey invited Cajuns, Creoles and hillbillies to come on in for quick cures. Result: patients were packed two and three in a bed, many sleeping in the halls, under crumbling plaster.

When Huey was shot, Dr. Vidrine operated on him, against the advice of some more conservative surgeons. After Huey's death, an unfair cloud of suspicion drove Dr. Vidrine from Charity, and in 1936 he was succeeded by Dr. George Sam Bel, a courtly Creole. Last year, shortly before the new hospital was finished, Dr. Bel died. New Orleanians whispered that he had killed himself, suspected that he was involved in some dark construction scandal. But the elderly heart specialist, his colleagues proved, was felled by a heart attack.