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Henry Alden Bunker died on March 20, 1953. During the last weeks of his life, it was not his physical illness but his inability to do his work that made him impatient. He was quiet, unassuming, not a little self-conscious and self-effacing in manner, a steady worker whose patience matched his meticulous accuracy and his devotion to intellectual incisiveness. Modest to a fault, he was endowed with a sense of quiet irony and an inoffensive sarcasm which few can blend as he did with a lightness of touch, delightful understatement, and a shy casualness of quick wit. When he gave praise, his favorite epithets were felicitous and impeccable. The pompous, the discordant, the insincere often impelled him to apostrophize: 'Oh God! Oh Montreal!'.
Bunker was a scholar, and not an ordinary one. His formal education alone did not account for his great scholarship. He graduated from a high school in Brooklyn, from Harvard College in 1910, and from Harvard Medical School in 1915 when he was twenty-six years old. Those were busy years, for between college and medical school he taught school in Roxbury, Massachusetts. After his internship in Boston City Hospital, he worked at Boston Psychopathic Hospital under Southard, who inspired a whole generation of American psychiatrists and who knew how to bring out what was most creative and original in so many of his students.
The First World War claimed Bunker, as it claimed the efforts of a number of young physicians. The War over, Bunker became a general practitioner in Medfield, Massachusetts (1919-1921). Two years later he accepted the post of Medical Director in Veterans Hospital 81 in New York City—one of the first and best institutions of its kind which was organized under the