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In this issue, Robert A. Kyle, MD, shares his passion
for philately – or stamp collecting, for the uninitiated
– and the surprising stories behind some postage
stamps. Dr. Kyle is professor of medicine and laboratory medicine and pathology at Mayo Clinic College
of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota.
A selection of international stamps
promoting blood donation and
transfusion.
Hemo-philately:
Robert A. Kyle, MD
When did you become interested in stamp collecting?
I have had a passing interest in postage stamps ever since I was young, but I
didn’t pay much attention to it until I was hospitalized due to a lumbar disc
problem in 1965. Fortunately, I recovered without surgery, but I was in the
hospital for 40 days and 40 nights. As you can imagine, I had a good deal of
spare time. That’s when I rekindled my interest in stamps.
While I was hospitalized, I looked through the four volumes of the Scott
Catalogues of Postage Stamps, which include philatelic information on
every stamp that had been published from every country in the world. I went
through these massive books page by page, stamp by stamp, looking for any
stamps that were related to hematology, blood transfusion, cancer, or any
hematologic malignancy.
I was able to obtain these stamps, and then, with a friend in Philadelphia,
wrote a couple of papers on the subject of philately and blood transfusion.
We urged the United States Postal Service to publish a stamp honoring blood
transfusion, with the goal of stimulating people’s interests in becoming blood
donors.
Well, we wrote articles, we talked about it whenever we could, and we
wrote letters to the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee in Washington,
DC, but our pleas fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, the American Association of
Blood Banks learned of our efforts and were able to spread the message – lo
and behold, in 1971, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp devoted to blood
transfusion, and I was invited to the First Day Ceremony in New York.
Are there other ways in which your life in hematology and your interest in
philately have intersected?
Both my wife and I collect hematology-related stamps and exhibit at several
local, regional, and national stamp meetings. By doing so, we have become
acquainted with a number of other medical philatelists.
In the late 1960s, the associate editor of the Journal of the American
Medical Association – a fellow philatelist – asked me to revamp a collection
of biographical vignettes on persons who had been honored on stamps. Marc
Shampo, PhD, another colleague at Mayo Clinic who was interested in medical
philately, and I co-authored a collection of these biographies in book form,
which was published by JAMA.
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We actually continued to publish these vignettes over almost 20
years in JAMA, and since then we’ve written them for the Mayo Clinic
Proceedings. I’ve never counted them, but I would estimate that we’ve
published at least 500, possibly 600, of these vignettes. We’ve also
published two more volumes of the vignettes and a book on physicians,
medical students, or scientists not known for their medical contributions
but honored on stamps for other reasons. For instance, we included Ernest
Hemingway, who was an ambulance driver during World War I, and Charles
Lindbergh who contributed to the development of the first perfusion
pump, a forerunner to the modern heart-lung machine.
I am pleased to have received several honors and awards for my stamps
and for writing in the stamp-collecting world. I was awarded the John Brain
Medal in the late 1960s. In 1980, I earned the Myrtle Watt Award for Medical
Philately Journalism for the vignettes that I authored. I also became active in
the American Topical Association, a large philatelic organization, and became
president of its Medical Subjects Unit for five years, as well as being named a
Distinguished Topical Philatelist in 1982.
How many stamps do you have in your collection?
Well, I haven’t stopped to count, but I do have a goodly number of albums,
which are bound books to store and preserve stamps.
Are there any stamps in your collection that you’re particularly proud of?
As I was building my collection, I was looking for a postage stamp issued by
Mongolia that honored and promoted blood transfusion. I attempted to get
that stamp, but I could not find it; I looked for it in philately shops everywhere
I travelled, but it eluded me. I even enlisted colleagues and fellow medical
philatelists to help find it.
Finally, I had a stroke of luck: Marc Shampo was given a shoebox full of
stamps, and, much to my surprise, two of those stamps were the elusive
Mongolian stamp. He was kind enough to give me