The following transcript was dictated from audio recording made of the memorial service for James Rose Watson and Charles Gray Watson on January 16, 2000. An audio recording of this memorial is available.
Good morning. My name is John Braasch. I was fortunate enough to have a sister marry Jim Watson and I would like to tell you a little story. Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, Dr. Charles Watson and wife were blessed with a son whom they named James Rose Watson. The Rose came from a branch of the family which lived not too far from Pittsburgh in the North and West side. As a child he showed great promise. He was good scholastically, he knew how to interact with his fellow beings, and he was good athletically.
In due course, he graduated from college and was admitted to Harvard Medical School. While in Boston he became acquainted with Marion who was attending [Erskin] School for Young Ladies in the Boston area. Following graduation, he obtained an fellowship at the Mayo Clinic, where Marion lived, and I must tell you that our father was on the graduate education committee there and as such he had access to the records on all, especially male, fellows and he carefully screened these and suitable ones were invited to our house for dinner to meet his daughters. You perhaps didn't know my sister but she was always about ten steps ahead of the game and this sequence was preempted by meeting Jim in Boston and it was no contest from then on. They were married in Rochester and, I'm happy to say, lived happily ever after.
During his time there, Jim served on the service of W. J. Mayo. As you perhaps know, the Mayos were two brothers, but one of them was more equal than the other and that was W. J.. He took a liking to Jim and as Jim was preparing to return to Pittsburgh to practice with his father, he suggested that he might wish to stay at Mayos for a little further training. This of course meant that he would be looked at for a staff position which meant automatic prominence in American surgery in those days. Jim turned it down to return to Pittsburgh, in the middle of the Depression, to start a surgical practice. This was no mean feat. However, he practiced with his father and several things helped him along the way. Some of you know this but in the 1930s one night they were called to Providence Hospital to take care of a stab wound to the heart and in those days there weren't ready blood banks and it became apparent that this patient needed a transfusion badly, and so they with ordinary sponges, which in those days were dug up out of the sea and sterilized, they retrieved some of the blood and passed it through cheese cloth and put it back [intervenously]. This was quite a trick for the time. Now a days at the University of Pittsburgh they can give 40 units of blood in about 10 minutes with special equipment but in those days this was something. This was dramatized on a radio series called the "March of Time". This of course did great help to Jim's practice which continued to grow.
The war came along. He enlisted in the United States Army Medical Corps and was sent to the South Pacific. He spent two and a half years there mostly in New Guinea during which time he contracted a very bad case of Hepatitis and came close to dying. Fortunately he returned and continued with the practice which his father worked long beyond retirement years to preserve for him and he became one of the most prominent surgeons in Pennsylvania and the prominent surgeon in Pittsburgh and, of course, a role model for his family.
Jim had great empathy for his family and this, fortunately for me, included brothers in law. I can remember one christmas when we spent it in Pittsburgh, in [Rosyln] Farms, when I was an Intern and very short of sleep. To my surprise, although I didn't notice it much at the time, my wife and I slept in Marion and Jim's bedroom -- I in Jim's bed. At 2:00am the phone rang and I picked it up and thinking I was still back as an intern in a hospital said "Hello?" and this voice said "Dr. Watson?" and I replied "This is Braasch, you called the wrong number" and hung up. Jim was very thoughtful. He never told me the bad side of what happened when care was ... I'm sure that the person got somebody else but that definitely was in bad form. But in further visits I was always excluded from the telephone.
Jim's passion as was mentioned was medicine, only second to his family. He has been described by people as being courtly, but with a twinkle in his eye. He was very ethical, he did everything right, he was very smart, and he was a great guy. Like father ... like son.