When he was 99, the good doctor played his 1694 Stradivarius at Carnegie Hall. At 100, he was honored by Congress as the nation's oldest worker.
Even after that, every weekday he continued to don his three-piece suit and bow tie and drive himself to his office at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. Arriving at 8 a.m., he would assume his white lab coat and spend the next eight hours editing the Annals of Clinical and Laboratory Science, which he started three decades ago.
He maintained that routine, including practicing the violin an hour every night, until shortly before his death March 9 at the age of 104.
Dr. F. William Sunderman, who died at his home in Philadelphia, was an internist and clinical scientist. When he lacked an answer to a problem, he performed research.
That's how he came to develop the method for measuring glucose in the blood, dubbed the Sunderman sugar tube, and became one of the first doctors to use insulin to revive a person from diabetic coma.
That's how, as a medical director for the Manhattan Project in World War II, he developed an antidote to the toxic nickel carbonyl gas used by workers to make atomic weapons. He tested it first, of course, on himself.
And that's how he discovered why doctors observed a high incidence of lead poisoning in policemen. He simply weighed the bullets at a shooting range and found they were lighter after leaving the gun, concluding that the "lost" lead went into the air and officers' lungs.
So it was only natural that when he lived long enough to be asked the secret of longevity, Sunderman sought the answer scientifically. He tried to draw blood from long-lived giant tortoises on the Galapagos Islands, intending to analyze it for clues. But the effort was unsuccessful.
Sunderman had to fall back on the empirical experience of his own long and accomplished life. Components of longevity, he decided, seemed to be strong parents, a good education, two happy marriages, devoted children, a sense of humor, no tobacco, little alcohol, good diet, music and work. Especially work.
"I want to live," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1998, when he reached the century mark and was asked why he kept working. "I have friends who retire and go down to Florida. They play golf. They end up drinking more liquor. Then they get bored and die. Well, I want to live.
