Pulse
Stamp Act
Hematologist Robert A. Kyle, M.D., had always had a fleeting interest in postage stamps, but it wasn’t until he was hospitalized with a lumbar disc injury in 1965 that he became a stamp collector. To help pass the time during what he jokingly recalls as the “40 days and 40 nights” he lay in bed in Saint Marys Hospital in Rochester, Kyle thumbed through thick volumes of the Scott catalog of postage stamps, identifying stamps he had already collected and looking for new ones related to two of his favorite subjects: blood transfusion and cancer. “I then collected all of the blood transfusion stamps that had been issued,” he says. “At that time, there were about 150.”
A world-renowned hematologist, Kyle has spent the last 50 years doing research and treating patients with multiple myeloma and related diseases at the Mayo Clinic. He has been collecting stamps related to blood transfusion, cancer, and blood-related diseases such as malaria and AIDS for most of that time. By the mid-1960s, his collection of cancer stamps had earned him recognition at stamp shows and national awards including the John B. Brain Medal from the Trans-Mississippi Philatelic Society in 1968 and the distinguished topical philatelist designation from the American Topical Association in 1982.
The Mongolian Stamp
As Kyle was building his collection, one particular stamp eluded him. Issued in Mongolia in 1963, it commemorated blood donors. He scoured stamp shops on the East and West coasts to no avail. Then one day in 1967, Marc Shampo, Ph.D., a medical editor Kyle worked with at Mayo, showed up in Kyle’s office with a shoebox containing some of the many stamps he had collected since childhood. “Lo and behold, he had two of those Mongolian stamps in there,” Kyle says, smiling. “And he gave me one of them.”
It was the beginning of a nearly 50-year friendship and partnership that has revolved around a shared love of postage stamps.
“Guess how much that Mongolian stamp was worth?” Kyle asks teasingly as they discuss their hobby on a cold January morning.
“Five cents,” Shampo gleefully whispers.
“Forty cents,” Kyle corrects.
“We never thought of money,” Shampo says. Which is probably a good thing. Although some unique or rare stamps have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the value of most stamps is much more modest, from a few cents to a few dollars, they say. “We weren’t interested in the value. We’re interested in the stories behind the stamps.”
Those stories have been the subject of hundreds of coauthored vignettes Shampo and Kyle have published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Mayo Clinic Proceedings, and Minnesota Medicine. The short pieces detail the sometimes hidden histories of medical breakthroughs and research as told in tiny bits and pieces on postage stamps.
A Poor Kid’s Hobby
Shampo, who was a professor and journal editor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh before he joined the Mayo Scientific Publications section in 1962, began collecting stamps in the late 1920s when he was just 5 or 6 years old. “I came from a big, poor family. Nobody owned anything. We shared everything. I was tired of sharing things,” Shampo recalls. “I said ‘I want something that belongs to me.’ So I started collecting stamps because nobody else wanted to.”
After he began working at Mayo, a place where, Shampo says, everybody specializes in something, he wanted a niche of his own. “When I came here, I became a stamp collector specializing in medicine.”
Although he retired from Mayo in 1989, Shampo has continued to collect and write about stamps. In the office he shares with other Mayo emeritus staff, his stamp collection fills some 70 three-ring binders, each tidily organized by the birth date of the person featured on the stamp. His collection includes a 1971 Egyptian stamp featuring Hesy Ra, an Egyptian physician who lived during Egypt’s third dynasty, and a stamp honoring Huang Ti, known as China’s Yellow Emperor, who ruled from 2697 BC to 2597 BC and is credited with the invention of traditional Chinese medicine. His oldest stamp dates from 1869. It’s a miniature reproduction of John Trumble’s painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Five physicians were among the Declaration’s signatories, he notes.
HIV and AIDS on Stamps
The red ribbon symbolizing AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) has been the subject of stamps issued by nearly all countries to raise awareness and money for research. These are examples from China, the United States, and Macedonia.
French scientist Luc Montagnier is one of two virologists credited with first identifying the virus causing AIDS; but he is the only one thus far to have been honored on a stamp.
In May 1983, Montagnier published his work done at the Pasteur Institute in Paris on his isolation of a T-lymphotropic retrovirus in a patient with AIDS that he named LAV (lymphadenopathy-associated virus) and cited as the cause of AIDS. Later, this virus was found to be virtually identical to the HTLV (human T-cell lymphotropic virus) discovered by Robert Charles Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. A dispute between Gallo and Montagnier began in 1985 and was settled in 1987, when both researchers were credited for their contributions. In 1986, LAV and HTLV-3 were determined to be identical and were renamed human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.
Montagnier is pictured on a stamp from Bhutan issued in 2000. Images and text courtesy of Marc Shampo, Ph.D., Robert A. Kyle, M.D., and D.P. Steensma, M.D.
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Shampo’s stamp collection is broader in scope than Kyle’s, although neither man knows how many stamps he owns. “I’ve never counted,” Kyle says, adding that his collection isn’t as extensive as Shampo’s and is more specialized. Over the years, the two have found their differences complementary.
Stamp Stories
When a JAMA editor first contacted Kyle in the mid-1960s about editing some vignettes about stamps, Kyle asked to bring Shampo in on the project. “Marc was a professional writer,” he says.
For more than 20 years, one or two of their stamp vignettes appeared in each issue of JAMA, usually filling space at the end of a feature article. They published their first collection of vignettes in 1970 and a second one in 1980. But in the mid-1980s, the journal’s leadership changed and the new editor wasn’t interested in the vignettes. Kyle and Shampo found a new home for their writings in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, where they have continued to publish new vignettes when space permits. They published a third collection of those vignettes two years ago. A fourth book, coauthored by Shampo, Kyle, and former Mayo medical editor Werner Heidel, M.D., Famous Personalities Honored on Stamps: Links to Medicine, is in production at Vantage Press.
The forthcoming book uncovers lesser-known facts about the connections between famous people featured on stamps and medicine. For example, the teaching methods of educator Maria Montessori, who was featured on a stamp from India issued in 1970—the 100th anniversary of her birth—were an outgrowth of her work with children as a physician in an Italian psychiatric clinic. Aviator Charles Lindberg, best known for his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, has been featured on stamps from many countries. But few know that he also contributed to medical research, working with French surgeon Alexis Carrel to develop a perfusion pump, a forerunner of the modern heart-lung machine. German adventurer Karl Friedrich Heironymus, more widely known as Baron von Munchhausen, was honored on a German stamp issued in 1970 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of his birth. His propensity for exaggerated storytelling attracted the attention of Sir Richard Asher, a British physician, who named a syndrome after Munchhausen in 1951.
Famous Personalities Honored on Stamps includes dozens of such stories. And there are thousands more to be told, Shampo says. Now both in their 80s, Shampo and Kyle say that finding and acquiring new stamps has become harder. They used to purchase stamps from other collectors like themselves. Now they have to search through the catalogs of the big stamp companies, often with little information to go on—just a person’s name, the country that issued the stamp, and the date. In recent years, Kyle says he hasn’t had time to do more than make lists of the stamps he hopes to acquire.
“It’s very time-consuming,” Shampo says. “People don’t realize.”
They acknowledge stamp collecting isn’t as popular as it once was, either, perhaps because letters are quickly being replaced by emails, texts, and tweets. “It isn’t a dying thing, but it’s fading,” Shampo says with a touch of sadness.
The move to electronic communications hasn’t lessened the sometimes highly political competition for placement on a postage stamp, however. The Mayo Clinic was featured on a stamp in 1964, in honor of its 100th anniversary. Kyle has the stamp framed in his office. “That’s as pretty a cachet as you’re going to get,” Shampo says.—J. Trout Lowen