An outstanding ophthalmologist, Jim Duke, in his mind’s eye, could clearly see F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17, for Jim owned and lived in the Baltimore house in which Fitzgerald completed Tender Is the Night.
Upon joining us in the summer of 1942, Jim had begun collecting the author’s works and other material related to his life. Some years before Jim died Oct. 16, 2012, he donated his collection to Princeton.
A Tampa, Fla., native, Jim was a 1942 graduate of Virginia’s Staunton Military Academy. He earned a medical degree at Johns Hopkins and trained in pathology at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. During the Korean War, he served as an Army captain in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colo. He then returned to Hopkins to head its ophthalmic pathology department. “As a teacher,” said a colleague, “he was exacting and made us toe the mark when studying the pathology slides. He also had a wonderful sense of humor.”
“Ready for a change of pace” (as he himself put it), Jim opened his private practice in 1968, serving patients until retirement in 1982 and continuing (as his attorney said) “a wonderful lifestyle as a Southern gentleman.”