The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard, by Peter Wortsman (preface)

the Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard PROFILES OF SELECTED DISTINGUISHED GRADUATES OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY VAGELOS COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS

peter wortsman

PREFACE Taking Doctors’ Histories

my earliest memory of a doctor’s visit involves a colossal hypodermic needle loaded with adrenalin thrust by our family physician, Dr. Goldberg, into my rump that made my legs twitch uncontrollably but brought speedy relief to my asthma. Not an easy quid pro quo for a child to fathom. The follow-up to that and subsequent visits invariably involved some bitter pill or noxious tasting liquid I was compelled to swallow. Throughout childhood and well into adulthood, I continued to associate doctors with pain and bitterness.

All of my associations with the medical profession changed in 1987 when I had the great good fortune to start work as managing editor of alumni publications for the P&S Alumni Association and alumni news writer for the journal Columbia Medicine (formerly called P&S). In that capacity it has been my privilege and my pleasure to interview and profile many of America’s most distinguished physicians and surgeons, all graduates of the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, traditionally known by the acronym P&S. I have been taking doctors’ histories now, so to speak, for some three decades. The doctors I’ve interviewed have charted new fields of medicine, resolved longstanding biochemical mysteries, discovered the causes and cures and established the genetic bases of diseases, developed vaccines, pioneered new surgical procedures, and helped stop devastating epidemics. Some have run hospitals, medical schools, universities, the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, various city health departments, and major pharmaceutical concerns. Others climbed mountains and made landmark findings in high altitude physiology, flew to outer

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space, practiced at the White House, and conducted humanitarian missions to care for imperiled populations in the United States and abroad. Others, still, wrote pioneering papers, edited prestigious medical journals, and authored prize-winning tomes and bestselling novels. In each case, whether or not their accomplishments might be deemed strictly medical, their clinical training, the scientific thinking, rigor and thoroughness, and humanistic values inculcated at P&S had a formative influence on their thinking and practice.

The following profiles of notable alumni appeared from 1987 to 2018 in consecutive issues of Columbia Medicine. Some of my subjects have since moved on to other endeavors and challenges, and some, alas, have passed on. While leaving the profiles in substance as they first appeared in print, I have, when appropriate, added brief updates.

To my lasting regret, I missed out on interviewing several notable individuals, including the industrialist, philanthropist, and self-styled “citizen diplomat” Armand Hammer ‘21, with whom I envisioned discussing his tête-à-têtes with Vladimir Lenin and other movers and shakers of the twentieth century, and the novelist Walker Percy ‘41, with whom I would have loved to sip mint juleps and talk literary turkey. Both fell ill and passed away at the time I attempted to make contact. There are, no doubt, many other remarkable P&S-schooled MDs whom I’ve missed along the way. Given the size and scope of this book, I was ultimately obliged to select a limited number of the profiles I wrote for inclusion.

A word about my working method. At its best, if the interviewer has done his or her homework, and the respondent is sufficiently relaxed and forthcoming, the interview can be an exhilarating experience, an amalgam of a Platonic dialogue, a psychoanalytic session, and an episode of the old TV show “This Is Your Life,” enlightening for both parties, and hopefully also for the reader of these profiles as a third participant after the fact. In the words of one of my distinguished subjects, child psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Coles ’54, “All interviews, one hopes, become jointly conducted.”

It is my belief and my credo as an interviewer that everyone has a tale to tell and is dying to tell it, and that if in the course of your research you discover the right psychological key to unlock your subject, the story will come pouring out.

In the case of the great baby doctor-turned political activist, Benjamin Spock ‘29, for instance, I was struck by his attachment to the ocean, and the fact that he had always lived either near a beach or in a boat bobbing on a big body of water. When I asked what the ocean meant to him, his eyes lit up. He revealed, in a kind of free association, that his father had been a prominent railroad lawyer, and that he somehow associated boats and the ocean, the fluid world, with his mother, and by extension, with pediatrics.

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Then there was the interview with P. Roy Vagelos ‘54, retired chair and CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. In doing research I discovered that the initial P. in his name stood for Pindaros. “I would like to start this interview with a poem,” I paused, “an ode to healing,” again I paused, “by your namesake, I believe. You were named for the poet Pindar, were you not?” Dr. Vagelos smiled. The interview went well. And Merck’s head of public relations, who was also present, took me aside afterwards to say he’d learned something new.

Among my greatest thrills in the course of conducting these interviews was talking to astronaut-surgeon Story Musgrave ‘64, upon my request, reclining in a capsule in position for take-off at NASA headquarters in Houston; visiting the Oval Office of the White House with the late Burton J. Lee III ‘56, physician to President George H. W. Bush; shadowing internist Karen Kinsell ‘93 in her rural practice in a hard-hit hamlet in southern Georgia; and spending a day at Solano State Prison, a maximum security facility in California, interviewing lifers whose lives had been turned around by the late pediatrician-turned substance abuse specialist, Davida Coady ‘65.

A medical mosaic of sorts, these doctors’ histories invert the stethoscope, as it were, permitting the reader to listen in on the heartbeat of American medicine at its best.

Peter Wortsman

praise for

the Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard “In these profiles of some of America’s most notable, influential, and fascinating MDs, Peter Wortsman merges social history, theory of the professions, and an intimate local cultural anthropology of Columbia University’s medical center. Our Columbian history provides a microcosm of the history of medicine writ large, showing the obligatory interweaving of clinical practice and basic science breakthroughs. The Caring Heirs of Doctor Samuel Bard will be an inestimable resource for all interested in medicine and its interface with society, as well as a source of inspiration to medical students and applicants to medical school.”

rita charon , MD, PhD, Professor and Chair of Medical Humanities and Ethics and Executive Director of Columbia Narrative Medicine

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ISBN: 978-0-231-19128-9

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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