Carl Ramus

Carl Ramus was a physician and surgeon before the byline “Carl Ramus, M.D.” appeared in Weird Tales. Born in Chicago in 1872, he studied at Rush Medical College and joined the U.S. Marine Hospital Service in 1899. The National Park Service records his work on Ellis Island over roughly twenty years, where physicians examined and treated arriving immigrants, and notes his service at the Public Health Service quarantine station in Honolulu. After publishing health books in the early 1920s, Ramus left public service and established a psychiatric practice.

His writing ranged beyond fiction. Marriage and Efficiency, Outwitting Middle Age and Behind the Scenes with Ourselves addressed health and everyday life. “The Scar,” his story in the April 1923 Weird Tales, carries his medical title in the byline and makes a surgical clue central to its mystery. The NPS account also records his later work aboard United Fruit Company ships and his interest in viola and classical music. Ramus died in 1963. The surviving record joins public health, popular medical writing and one brief appearance in pulp fiction without suggesting that the story’s crime plot came from his practice.