175 Years, 175 Stories: Part 3
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POETIC ADVOCACY
Sarah Gertrude “Gertie” Banks (M.D. 1873) was part of the second group of women to graduate from the Medical School. Only the second female physician in Detroit, Banks cared for many prominent families and citizens, including Clara Ford, a businesswoman and the wife of Henry Ford. Her patients also included the poorest of Detroit’s women and children. She founded the Free Dispensary for Women and Children at the Women’s Hospital and Foundling’s Home and was a patron of Detroit’s first free playground for children. Banks also fought for women’s suffrage alongside her friend, Susan B. Anthony. For Anthony’s 85th birthday in 1905, Banks wrote her a poem, which included this stanza:
Thou has sacrificed for women saintly, borne the taunts of man, thus, to free thy sisters, Susan — from tradition’s bitter brand.
Source: Medicine at Michigan, Summer 2019
Credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
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Cardiology legend
Albion Walter Hewlett, a founding father of cardiology, was the Medical School’s chief of medicine from 1908–1916. He made important contributions to our understanding of cardiac arrhythmias and their pharmacological treatment. At the time of his arrival at Michigan, Hewlett was considered the best young clinician in the country. He also was a major proponent of making medical practice more scientific, believing that a good medical school could only be great with a strong integrated research program. He is credited with bringing the first electrocardiogram machine to U-M in 1913.
Sources: U-M Department of Internal Medicine; Clinical Cardiology, Volume 16, Issue 1
Credit: U-M Bentley Historical Library
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WAS THE MEDICINE ON "M*A*S*H" REALISTIC?
Though TV medical dramas have gotten more graphic since the 1970s, they haven’t necessarily gotten more true to life. Walter Dishell (M.D. 1964) can vouch for that. For 11 years and more than 250 shows, Dishell served as medical advisor for “M*A*S*H,” the immensely popular comedy-drama starring Alan Alda as Hawkeye.
As military and medicine aficionados know, “M*A*S*H” stands for mobile army surgical hospital, and producers of the show wanted to depict the medical reality of those battlefield situations. The show was set during the Korean War in the 1950s, which presented a challenge for Dishell to make sure the medicine was not too advanced. “I remember they wanted to do a story on cortisone, but I had to tell them that it hadn’t been invented yet,” Dishell recalls. He did a lot of research on 1950s medicine and even co-wrote an episode with Alda in 1979 about a patient in need of an aortic graft.
Source: Medicine at Michigan, Fall 1999
Walter Dishell, M.D., and Alan Alda on the set of “M*A*S*H”
Credit: Courtesy of Walter Dishell
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A GOOD MOVE FOR OBSTETRICS AND GYNECOLOGY
When Warren H. Pearse, M.D. (Residency 1956), died, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) mourned his passing with this statement: “As the Executive Director of ACOG for 18 years his contributions to our organization, the profession of ob-gyn, and the women we serve were countless. He engineered and executed ACOG’s move to the Capitol in 1981 after determining that the organization needed to be closer to health care policy makers in Washington, D.C. Dr. Pearse was instrumental in procuring the land and oversaw the building of the headquarters. When he retired in 1993, the ACOG headquarters building was named the Warren H. Pearse Building in his honor.”
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LEADER IN PHARMACOGENETICS
Bert La Du (M.D. 1945) was chair of pharmacology from 1974–1980. He was internationally recognized for his work in pharmacogenetics, the study of how genes affect a patient’s response to medication. His research contributed to our understanding of the genetic variants of the serum cholinesterase enzymes in people who are unusually susceptible to the anesthetic succinylcholine. This genetic variant can cause prolonged paralysis and apnea.
Source: Ann Arbor News obituary
The state legislature tried to pressure the Medical School to hire a professor of homeopathy in the 1860s, but they refused. The Regents were compelled to open a homeopathic school when the legislature made an appropriation contingent upon it in 1973. The school existed from 1875–1922. This photo is of the Homeopathic School Nose & Throat Clinic.
Photo: U-M Bentley Historical Library
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Pandemic voice of reason
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, “people wanted information,” says Preeti Malani, M.D., M.S.J. (Residency 1998, Fellowship 2000). But that was hard to come by. “What you knew in the morning was different in the afternoon. And that was different in the evening.”
As chief health officer of the University of Michigan at the time, Malani had the daunting task of keeping the campus safe and communicating the latest information.
“As a Michigan grad, in some ways I was made for that moment. You learned resilience at every stage of your education and training,” says Malani, who is now professor of internal medicine and special advisor to the president of U-M. As an undergrad at U-M, she created a major for herself in medical journalism and also majored in communications. Add to that a master’s in journalism and her expertise in infectious disease, and you’ve got a person uniquely well suited to meet the needs of 2020.
Malani had to communicate important health information quickly, clearly, and without creating any undue anxiety. She also reminded people that COVID was not the only risk to consider — for example, the risk of loneliness experienced by an elderly relative if no one visits.
She was the voice of reason — and reassurance — for many people at that turbulent time, appearing frequently on Michigan Radio (now Michigan Public), being quoted in most of the major national news sources, and even writing an article for the New York Times on managing pandemic health risks on college campuses. (The journalist in her is particularly proud of the latter.)
To keep herself grounded, she took nature walks with friends and colleagues — and her family’s pandemic puppy, Sully — meeting neighbors, and discovering beauty she hadn’t noticed before.
“There was this shared trauma of that time for people,” she says. “But, especially early on, there was also understanding, forgiveness, and kindness.” And there were many losses, from lost lives to lost ways of living. “It’s emotional to think about it, even five years later. We’re still grieving those losses.”
—Katie Whitney
Credit: Leisa Thompson, Michigan Photography
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A VISIONARY IN MEDICAL GENETICS
After graduating from the Medical School, Harold Falls (M.D. 1936, Residency 1942) spent his entire career at U-M where, in 1941, he helped found the U-M Heredity Clinic — the first of its kind in the country. He began investigating the links between heredity and eye diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and retinoblastoma, which laid the foundation for modern ophthalmic genetics.
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COOLEY'S ANEMIA
Thomas B. Cooley (M.D. 1895) was a pediatrician and hematologist who began serving as the city of Detroit’s first pediatrician in 1905. As the medical director of the Babies’ Milk Fund, Cooley helped to reduce Detroit’s high infant mortality rate. During World War I, Cooley led several projects in France to help children orphaned by war as part of his work as the assistant chief of the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross. He is perhaps best known for discovering a form of childhood anemia that once carried his name. Cooley’s Anemia — now known as beta thalassemia — is a rare inherited blood disorder that he first identified in 1925 while working at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan.
Source: Cooley’s Anemia Foundation
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RENOWNED HEPATOLOGIST
In his youth, Carroll Moton Leevy (M.D. 1944) worked at his parents’ mortuary business, where he noticed many deaths of Black people were due to inadequate health care. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the National Youth Administration’s advisory committee, created to document inadequacies in education and health care due to racial prejudice. Leevy was barred from attending medical school in his home state of South Carolina because he was Black, so he came to U-M. He spent much of his renowned career in hepatology at the New Jersey Medical School (which has since been dissolved), and his work contributed significantly to our understanding of the basic functions of the liver.
Source: South Carolina Encyclopedia
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IDENTIFYING GENETIC MARKERS OF DISEASE
Karen L. Mohlke (Ph.D. 1996, postdoctoral training 1998) is professor and associate chair for research in the Department of Genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mohlke’s research focuses on the human genetic basis of common metabolic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, dyslipidemia, and cardiovascular disease, as well as their related quantitative traits. Her research identifies and characterizes the effects of genetic variants on genes and disease-relevant cell functions. She has published more than 250 papers that have been cited more than 100,000 times, and her research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for 20 years.
Clinically, this is its own virus. It’s not the flu. It’s not SARS. It’s something different … It’s more serious than the flu.
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H. Clifford Lane (M.D. 1976, Residency 1979) spoke to Science magazine in March 2020. At the time, he was Anthony Fauci’s deputy at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and had just returned from a trip to China to see how they were handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Source: “Quarantined at home now, U.S. scientist describes his visit to China’s hot zone,” Science, March 6, 2020.
I liked science and I liked helping people. The only career I could think of that combined the two was medicine.
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George Zuidema, M.D., told an interviewer in 1994. Early in his career, Zuidema worked for the U.S. Air Force, where his work on gravitational stress was later used in NASA’s Apollo program. He was director of the section of surgical sciences at Johns Hopkins for 20 years before becoming the executive vice provost for medical affairs at U-M, where he helped combine the Medical School and clinical enterprise into an integrated health system. During his 10-year tenure at U-M, he oversaw the establishment of cancer and geriatric centers, many outpatient clinics, and a marked expansion of research facilities.
Sources: Obituaries from Johns Hopkins Medicine and Medicine at Michigan, Fall 2020
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Nobel winner
Born in Halifax, Nova Soctia in 1901, Charles Brenton Huggins came to the U.S. for medical school, earning an M.D. at Harvard University in 1924. He then did a residency in surgery at U-M with Frederick Coller. During his research career at the University of Chicago Medical School, he investigated how sex hormones influence prostate function, eventually discovering hormone therapies to treat prostate cancer. For this discovery, he received the 1966 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Source: University of Chicago obituary
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A SURGEON AT WAR
Before the U.S. entered World War I, American physicians volunteered to care for soldiers in French and English hospitals. Frederick A. Coller, M.D., first volunteered as a member of the Harvard Medical Unit. He served in France and England, and later as a member of the U.S. Army during the last stages of the war. Coller documented his service in albums filled with the photographs and mementos he collected.
In 1920, Coller became a professor of surgery at U-M. His work achieved such prominence in the world of surgery that his students created the Frederick A. Coller Surgical Society, which now has about 200 members from across the U.S. and internationally.
[Image caption:] Pictured here at top right is Coller’s initial travel document. At bottom left is an image capturing life inside a wartime hospital ward. And, at bottom right, Coller (at right) poses in front of the Warren House Inn, a 19th century pub still standing in rural England.
Sources: “A surgeon at war,” Medicine at Michigan, Fall 2016, Frederick A. Coller Society
FIRSTS
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Pioneering Pediatric Neurosurgeon
In 1987, Ben Carson (M.D. 1977) led a team of surgeons in the first-known successful separation of conjoined twins. In 2008, he received the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He served as the 17th U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017–2021.
Source: JHU Gazette, June 23, 2008
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NITRIC OXIDE: TOXIC OR ESSENTIAL?
Once upon a time, the toxic gas nitric oxide was not believed to be produced by mammals; it was better known as an ingredient of cigarette smoke and smog. But Michael Marletta, Ph.D., who was the John G. Searle Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Medical School from 1987–2001, discovered that it plays an important role in the human immune system. Thanks in part to Marletta’s research, nitric oxide is now known to be involved in a wide range of physiological processes in humans and animals. It helps regulate blood pressure, mediates the ability of nitroglycerine to alleviate the effects of angina, and influences the immune defense system. Marletta’s findings have influenced the treatment of toxic shock syndrome, inflammation, and carcinogenesis — and earned him a MacArthur “genius grant.”
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DOCTOR, NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER, SCHOOL BOARD PRESIDENT
After graduating from the Medical School, Emma E. Bower (M.D. 1883) moved to Detroit to practice medicine. An illness in the family led to her return to Ann Arbor and to U-M hospital. In addition to her work as a physician, Bower became one of the state’s first female newspaper editors as the editor and publisher of the Ann Arbor Democrat. Bower was a prominent suffragist and served on the Ann Arbor School Board decades before women could vote. She also held leadership roles in the Ladies of the Maccabees, the first fraternal organization operated exclusively by women.
Source: “Emma E. Bower: A Woman of Her Own Ideas,” Ann Arbor District Library
Credit for newspaper: Courtesy of the Ann Arbor District Library Archives