ECMS Stethoscope Newsletter Summer 2023 Issue

the Stethoscope

the Stethoscope

Quarterly Newsletter of the Erie County Medical Society

Newsletter of the Erie County Medical Society

• Summer 2023 Issue

A Message From Your President

Hello, fellow physicians of the Erie County Medical Society,

It is hard to believe that this is my last letter to all of you, as my 2-year tenure is coming to a close. It has truly been an honor to serve the medical society as the president, and I hope that you have found our updates informational.

Kelli DeSanctis, DO President, ECMS

Kaela Luchs Association Executive kluchs@pamedsoc.org

Phone: 833-770-1542

Administrative Office/ Mailing Address: 400 Winding Creek Blvd. Mechanicsburg, PA 17050

eriecountymedicalsociety.org

This past February, we had the opportunity to hold an event for our members within our early career physicians’ section, to provide a variety of services, from medical malpractice and liability, financial planning advice, and practice management, to physician addiction and burnout. It was a very well-attended event and the information provided was very well received. We hope to provide similar events in the future.

As we head into the summer months, ECMS hopes to create and promote many different membership engagement opportunities your way. One of our upcoming events is our Summer Outing which is scheduled for July. Last year we held a Women in Medicine event, which we plan to hold this September. Also in the fall, towards the end of October, is the PAMED House of Delegates. Every November we hold our Annual Health Expo at the Millcreek Mall, and we will also hold our Annual Business Meeting and Inaugural Social this winter. You can find more information on these events within this edition of this e-newsletter and follow along with updates whether it be through e-mail, our social media, or our website page.

While the past two years have quickly passed, we have returned to hosting a variety of meetings, whether in-person, on a variety of virtual platforms, or hybrid components. These are essential to the development and member networking, as well as promoting the standards of medical care, and ethics within the medical profession, and serving the public with important and reliable health information, all of which are within the mission of Erie County Medical Society. Continued thanks to our administrative staff within PAMED for their efforts. A special thanks to our Erie County Medical Society board members, and Dr. Amanda Wincik, who will be taking over as president this winter. Their overall collaboration and support in their current roles have led to successful years throughout the medical society. Finally, thank you to the entire membership, as it has been an honor to serve as your president. You all have been a motivation to us from the work you provide effortlessly to complete every day, for your patients to the service you provide to the community. Our membership is full of encouraging emerging leaders, alongside those past and present. Erie County Medical Society’s future is inspiring as we all continue to work together.

In good health,

Kelli DeSanctis, DO

Smoke in the Shadows

John Reilly, M.D.

Dawn in New York City finds the Bellevue Hospital Emergency Department relatively quiet – the night’s “festivities” having played out by 2 a.m. and the staff enjoying a brief respite as the city slowly wakes up. Naturally, this break in the action is more likely to be enjoyed on weekday mornings. Wednesday morning, May 25, 1977 certainly fit that bill. Then a 4th year surgical resident, I was grabbing a cup of coffee in the ER when, at about 7:30 a.m., a call came through to the desk that ambulances were transporting several patients evacuated from a fire in Midtown. One after another, the casualties arrived, more than a dozen, all but one of them suffering smoke inhalation and many lifeless on arrival. The treatment rooms were suffused with the scent of smoke. I assisted with the mechanics of resuscitation and as I stepped back, I observed that, save for a uniformed fireman, all of the victims were young men and all were unclothed. Also unusual was the conspicuous absence of the crescendo of plaintive cries of family members who would ordinarily surge the ER waiting room desperately seeking hope in the midst of tragedy. The explanation for this unconventional scene became clear when word was “passed around” that these men were victims of a fire in the Everard Baths – an establishment known to provide a private and anonymous space for gay men to gather, generally at night. Indeed, the New York Times reported that “80 - 100 men” had fled the fire “clad only in towels or in their underwear”. Not surprising, then, was the Times’ observation that the known dead were more likely to have been “identified by friends rather than family members.”

Built in 1888 by financier James Everard as a traditional Turkish Bath promoting “general health and fitness”, by 1919 the establishment had become the target of police raids responding to complaints of “lewd behavior”. Doree Shafrir, writing for BuzzFeed in 2016, noted that for decades bathhouses stood on the “fringes of lawfulness” serving as social refuges for gay lives consigned to secrecy and shame. Characterized by Michael Rumaker in his book “A Day and a Night at the Baths”, the Everard, with 135 six by four-foot mattress cubicles separated by wooden half-wall partitions, was the “most venerable, loathed and affectionately esteemed baths in all of New York”. It was said, as reported by Ms. Shafrir, to have been visited by men from all social strata including celebrities such as Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Rudolph Nureyev and the gay rights activist Larry Kramer.

It is noteworthy that the decade of the ’70’s in New York City had witnessed the emergence of a fully open gay urban culture. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 had, for many, pulled down the walls of the closet by breaking the hold of organized crime on gay bars as well as the routine experience of police harassment. Beyond the emergence of the Gay Pride Movement, the proliferation of gay bars and clubs and the publication of gay newspapers and magazines, Midtown Manhattan and Greenwich Village reflected a triumphant lifestyle offering and embodying success and taste carried with selfconfidence and social freedom. And yet, despite the increasingly powerful impact of the mainstream gay culture, bathhouses like the Everard remained the seedier, less regulated and increasingly unsafe sanctuary for those who still sought anonymity and, in some cases, promiscuity.

According to the New York Times, the fire was reported to have begun in a mattress, was extinguished, smoldered and re-erupted at 7 a.m. filling the building with dense smoke. Electrical power had been

continued on page 4

Smoke in the Shadows

continued from page 3

cut off by the flames. A sprinkler system, mandated after an inspection over a year before, was in place but the installed pipes remained detached and dangling. The windows had been covered up with insulation and paneling. There were no fire escapes. The New York Daily News reported that “patrons were left trapped and screaming in dense smoke, some hanging from the windows crying for help”. The News further reported that “200 fireman and 32 pieces of equipment arrived” shortly after 7 a.m. by which time “three stories of the rear of the building had collapsed”. At least a dozen men had been brought down from windows by firemen.

Though destroyed, the Everard would be rebuilt and reopened.

There was a sad and ironic epilogue to the reporting of the lethal Everard fire. Newspapers, including the New York Times, felt it “fit to print” the names, ages and addresses of the dead, “effectively outing” those who, in life, sought nothing more than anonymity in their private lives.

Ms. Shafrir viewed the Everard fire as representing the “beginning of the end of the brief exuberant heyday of New York City Gay Nightlife.” More ominously and to that point, on July 3, 1981, the New York Times ran a story headlined: “Rare Cancer Seen in Homosexuals”. Kaposi’s Sarcoma had been found with an accelerating frequency among gay men, the majority of these cases presenting at Bellevue. The scourge of AIDS was yet to be fully realized. The epidemiology, pathophysiology and management of HIV were yet to be understood.

I left New York for Erie in 1978. When I returned for a visit in 1983, the city I left was unrecognizable. The gay subculture had retreated from Midtown. Greenwich Village, once wall-to-wall with buoyant, boisterous celebrants, had become a ghost town along the streets of which ailing men dragged their gaunt lesion-maculated bodies, too ill to despair of the precipitous loss of the vigor and appeal of their youth.

In 1986, the reborn Everard was shut down by the City of New York being cited, along with other bath houses, as a venue for promiscuous sex promoting the spread of AIDS.

By the end of the 80s, the majority of beds at Bellevue had come to be dedicated to the care of AIDS patients.

ECMS New and Reinstated Members

New

Htay Htay Aung, MD

Andrew Ashby Barrett, MD

Francesca Lina Bellantino, MD

Nicholas Belleza, DO

Evan Callahan, DO

Pranav Cannanbilla, DO

David Christopher Carrington, MD

Max Cornell, MD, MPH

Parke Allan Dalglish, DO

Alana Donaldson Dasgupta, MD

Sacha Marion De Souza, MD

Meradith Dickensheets, DO

Thomas M Dugan, MD

Zachary Wade Dusckas, MD

Lisa Francazio English, MD

Doug John Finkle, DO

Simone Geraud, MD

Ruby Grewal, MD

Terry Jon Henry, MD

Osmin Adonis Herrera, DO

Maciek Jurecki, MD

Joshua Kessack, DO

Yousuf Khan

Dorcas Isidora Lacayo Allen, MD

Joseph R Lunn, DO

Brandon Robert Madura, DO

Bhavana Makkapati, MD

Blaine Lee Massey, DO

Ryan Mcloughlin, MD

John R Mingey, MD

Michael Mosa, MD

Tu Nguyen, MD

Kevin Nickerson, MD

Cori Michaela Odwak, MD

Ian Flanery Osburn, MD

Carlos Julio Racedo Africano, MD

Joseph Rauscher, MD

Andrew McFarland Rogers, MD

Anuja Manju Sabapathy, MD

Rachael Sanford

Julia Serbati

Sohale Shakoor, DO

Umar Shariff, MD

Eman Shreteh, DO

Saniya Singh

Samantha Slawson, DO

Lucas Scott Smith, DO

Matt James Steiner, MD

Tonia Tiewul, MD

Michael Mason Tiller, MD, FACS

Zerline Tiu-Snyderman, MD

Allison J Wahoff, DO

Rebecca Wolff

Reinstated

Brian Bansidhar , DO

Eric Wright Bernstein, MD

Mihir Deepak Buch, DO

Rahul Chandra, MD

Ravi Kumar Chekka, MD

Amie S Coffman, DO

Richard L Cogley, MD

Frederick J Dudenhoefer, MD

Michael Richard Evankovich, MD

Francis Darrell Ferdinand, MD, FACS

Peter Vincent Finelli, DO

Bradley P Fox, MD

Daniel Stuart Gloekler, MD

Eric Goodrich, DO

Benjamin Aaron Greenberger, MD

Frederick Charles Havko, MD, FACEP

Robert David Hower, DO

Anthony Raymond Ignocheck, MD

Ines K Kananda, DO

Samuel Allen Kim, MD

Divya Koradia, MD

Carl Gregory Lauer, MD

David Charles Lesseski, DO

Brian Thomas McQuone, DO

Andrew Leonard Mecca, MD

Michael Miller, DO

Herbert John Morrow III, DO

James P Ohr, DO

David Esohwode Overare, MD

Andres Hernan Pena, MD

Richard William Petrella, MD

Vincent B Proy, MD

Logan Michael Pyle, DO

Joseph E Rowane, DO

Erin Elizabeth Shaffer, DO

Harshit Shah, MD

David Hunter Snow, DO

Conrad James Stachelek, MD

Jeremy Guy Stone, MD

Jennifer Carey Stull, DO

Zeba Aziz Syed, MD

Susheel Narain Thekkiam Muralidharan, MD

Kevin Albert Thomas, DO

Svetlana Feyster Tishchenko, DO

Timothy C Trageser, MD

Lydia Angelique Travnik, DO

Michael Lynn Webster, MD

Jeffrey Zoltan, MD

Erie County Medical Society Board Members

Erie County Medical Society Board Members

Erie County Medical Society Board Members

Kelli DeSanctis, DO

At-Large

At-Large

At-Large

At-Large

Timothy

At-Large

That warm benevolence of heart

Jeffrey P. McGovern, MD

One need only reside in the Erie region for a short time before spying on a placard or flag with the words: “Don’t give up the ship.” Those words are rightly attributed to Oliver Hazard Perry, who during the fateful Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812, carried the flag bearing these same words from the badly damaged US Lawrence to his new flagship US Niagara. The rest, as is often said, is history. What happened after these heady few hours on the lake to this young naval man is linked to another viral scourge, one that would be eventually controlled by other giants in medicine.

Born near Wakefield, Rhode Island on August 23, 1785, Oliver Hazard Perry, named for an uncle lost at sea (history.navy.mil), decided on a naval career at the age of 13. His father, Christopher Perry, captain of the US frigate General Greene, in a gentle act of nepotism recommended his son for a midshipman appointment. Over the next 6 years from 1799-1805 he participated in the “small wars” with France and the Barbary pirates. He received his first command on the schooner Revenge in 1809. Unfortunately, the ship suffered damage from skirmishes and storms while on patrol in the southern waters near Charleston, South Carolina. Perry would also “suffer illness” in the warm climate which was prescient for the illness which would ultimately claim his life. In 1811, the Revenge struck a reef in heavy fog in the northern waters near Block Island, where his request for a new assignment brought him. Following exoneration in his necessary court martial, he returned to Rhode Island, married his sweetheart, Elizabeth Champlin Mason, who bore him 5 children.

Perry remained unemployed until May of 1812 when the threat of war with Great Britain loomed. The loss of trade and the issue of impressment moved James Madison to declare

war on the great sea power. While many of his friends gained glory on the earliest of US frigates, he only commanded a small flotilla of gunboats in Newport, Rhode Island. Desperate for glory, he petitioned on his own a friend, Isaac Chauncey, who by good fortune, was desperate for an experienced officer for a flotilla under rapid construction on Lake Erie (near the present-day Cascade Street). We know the rest of the story. Following successful construction of the flotilla, “Perry’s Luck,” a frequent reference in literature about the Commander, would bring him on September 13, 1813, to engage the British in the Detroit, Queen Charlotte and other ships. Although his flagship Lawrence was badly damaged in the fray, he transferred to the Niagara along with the flag bearing the famous words, “Don’t Give Up The Ship,” the last words of his friend captain Lawrence. Rallying to return to battle he delivered a full broadside at the Detroit and Queen Charlotte, and the battle ended at 2:50 p.m. He sent his famous message to then General Harrison: “We have met the enemy and they are ours…” The history traveler will note that this quote is emblazoned on two sister statues of Perry in both Perry Square in Erie and Newport.

This victory, though celebrated as a singular event in the war, was to be Perry’s swan song. His new command of the Java came too late as peace was declared between the warring nations. Perry’s luck seemed to continue to run out in a controversy with marine captain, John Heath. On a mission with the Java to the Mediterranean, two of Heath’s marines jumped ship and deserted. The incident led to blows between Perry and Heath when Heath, in the sordid climate of dueling, challenged Perry to a duel. At the same place in Hoboken where Burr felled Hamilton, Heath fired his shot, but Perry did not return the shot, maintaining his honor. A second incident embroiled the commander

continued on page 4

That warm benevolence of heart

continued from page 3

in an altercation with the former captain of the Niagara during the battle of Lake Erie, James Elliott. Elliott, in keeping with the sordid culture, challenged Perry to a duel, but Perry sought to put an end to this “repugnant business” and filed court martial papers against Elliott. The Secretary of the Navy and President Monroe sought to settle this issue which would be scandalous given the fame and connections of these two officers. Monroe charged Perry with a diplomatic mission to Venezuela to congratulate President Simon Bolivar on forming a republican government. Sailing on board the US John Adams, Perry arrived off of the mouth of the Orinoco River on July 15, 1819. He transferred to the US Nonsuch to sail up the Orinoco River to Angostura, then the capital of Venezuela. He stayed in the capital with the new president on his diplomatic mission until August 15, but in the interim 20 men under his command contracted yellow fever, of whom 5 perished. Anxious to return to “fresh breezes” in Trinidad, he sailed rapidly on the Nonsuch but two days later was feverish and rapidly deteriorated. He died at 300 p.m. on his 34th birthday, August 23, 1819. He was eventually interred in Rhode Island, honored with the Congressional Medal of Honor.

It would seem that “Perry’s luck” did indeed run out. Sent on a diplomatic mission to Venezuela to defuse a scandalous altercation, he and his shipmates sailed right into the belly of the beast. Even as recent as 1948 (The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, s128: Issue 3) the Orinoco River Basin has harbored Yellow Fever (YF). The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated (WHO, 1992) 200,000 cases and 30,000

deaths attributable to YF mostly in South America and sub-Saharan Africa. Its complex ecology is mostly due to increased rainfall and temperature with increased incidence in South America from January to May (shortly before the US Nonsuch plied the Orinoco River). The manifestation of YF in Perry and 5 of his mates was severe as opposed to the majority in whom YF is asymptomatic. Years later YF claimed the lives of over 22,00 French as they labored to build the nascent Panama Canal. It was through medical giants like Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, who laid out convincing data to attribute the disease to mosquitos, then Dr Walter Reed, who tested Finlay’s theories, to Dr William Gorgas, who put the theories to practical test with fumigation (Texas Standard December 11, 2019) that the disease was better controlled. The YF vaccine was finally developed in the 1930’s after isolation of the Asibi strain of YF (Trans R Soc Trop Med Hyg 1936; 29:481529). Workers standing on the shoulders of physicians then as now can live and work in a world constantly threatened by viral scourges. Today we carry on the work of those giants to care for those with “that warm benevolence of heart” (letter from Benjamin Hazard to Sarah Perry, mother of Oliver; December 14, 1819). Don’t give up this ship!

’ s SocialGet

WHAT IS A FRONTLINE GROUP?

A “Frontline Group” is how PAMED identifies those groups with 100% physician membership. The benefits include:

• Group discounts

• Ability to split the invoice between multiple locations (satellites) or to one corporate entity (Parent)

• Group invoicing, which streamlines the membership process

• Free administrative staff membership

• Opportunity to attend monthly 30-minute webinars, held the first Thursday of every month, covering the most pertinent topics in PA, only offered to Frontline Groups

• Ability for two administrators to attend the bi-annual Practice Manager meetings

• Access to bonus materials from trusted vendors, like Norcal

ECMS Summer 2023 FrontLine Groups as of June 2023