On the morning of April 14, according to one source,
first class passenger, Mrs. Henry Birkhardt Harris, 36, had tripped and fallen down one of the stair cases, breaking a small bone in her arm, which had been covered in a plaster cast by Assistant surgeon Simpson. Another account states that Mrs. Harris fell down the first class (grand staircase and broke her elbow. This account states that she had her arm set by Dr. Henry William Frauenthal of New York City, not by the ship’s surgeon or assistant surgeon. The woman found out that Dr. Frauenthal was on board and requested his services.
He was considered one of the country’s foremost pioneer joint specialists (orthopedic surgeon) (Butler 40). Dr. Frauenthal studied medicine at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He established a hospital for joint diseases in 1906. Mrs. Harris survived the sinking of Titanic, as did the doctor and his wife. In the morning, after being taken off the lifeboat, she was observed to have a broken arm.
On May 11, 1912, Ada Patterson interviewed Mrs. Harris for the New York Evening Journal said she was “black garbed, with her right arm immovable in a plaster cast. Titanic, Women and Children First, states that in 1958, Mrs. Harris, who had previously met
Walter Lord, the author of A Night to Remember, went to see the movie of the same name (Geller 51). She couldn’t sit through the whole film because of the memories it brought back. She remembers sitting in her stateroom with her husband Henry.
Earlier in the day she had slipped on a teacake coming down the stairs to her cabin from the reading room and had broken her arm. The pain was intense and she was unable to sleep. As she sat with her arm in a sling across her chest in two bath robes to ward off the chill that had invaded the ship, she noticed that her clothing on the hangers in the wardrobe were swaying. They continued to sway until the engines stopped.
