Origin stories

Posted by dabloom

WN/MT July 3, 2020
Origin stories
2518 words

One.

Hunkering down this spring, we explored Ann Arbor’s Water Hill neighborhood during social-distanced walks and saw flags that anticipated the Fourth of July. Tomorrow’s holiday brings to mind Danielle Allen’s book, Our Declaration. The American national origin story centers around a representative democracy formed disruptively when 13 colony-states spun off from a parliamentary monarchy. Even at the start, the story was complicated by the colonial expropriation of lands from their indigenous inhabitants and enslavement of abducted Africans to build the economy. These matters remain unreconciled, and so some Americans today will display the flag upside down, take a knee, or illuminate irreconciliation in other ways.

As the number of states increased in America, state sovereignty contested federal authority over a variety of issues amidst economic crises, wars, environmental catastrophes, epidemics, and paradigm shifts in technology. Life got more complex with technology, subspecialization, regional interdependency, and the sheer scale of rising population. Many matters transcended state boundaries and demanded federal solutions. Consider, for example, a public debate in 1820 on the role of federal government in matters of personal health, public health, medical licensure, specialty certification, and health care economics versus a similar debate today. The debaters in 1820 would have scratched their heads wondering what possible business the government could claim in such issues, except possibly a limited responsibility for public health.

The basic Jeffersonian aspirations within the Declaration, however, seem to hold true and anchor most of the attempted solutions to the nation’s big and little problems. Those personal aspirations – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – bear repetition, especially now in July, 2020. It now takes great rhetorical acrobatics to discount the role of equitable public and personal health care in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in today’s complex world. A debate in 2020 over the roles of federal government in matters of personal health, public health, medical licensure, specialty certification, and health care economics would be quite different than that imagined debate of 1820.

One big effect of this pandemic may be that the public may find a way to build a new vision of government “by the people and for the people” that will fine-tune the aspiration of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to the complexities of 21st century civilization. Governmental responsibility for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” entails securities of personal freedoms, food, and employment, as well as public safety and public health. Any line placed between public health and personal health, or between public safety and personal safety is an arbitrary choice. These basic securities should be expected of any state or society, worthy of the term civilization.

Two.

Baseball comes to mind now, but this season is off to a slow start, if it happens at all. So meanwhile, a bit of time travel to the past is in order: a little more than ninety years ago (May, 1930) Ty Cobb threw out the first pitch at a new baseball park in Hamtramck, Michigan. [Picture below: 1928 International Newsreel photograph of Lou Gehrig on left, Tris Speaker, Ty Cobb, & Babe Ruth taken in April 1928.]

Cobb was a national celebrity who had retired from the Detroit Tigers in 1928 after 22 seasons and came back for opening day at Hamtramck, although he never actually played a game there. The new stadium, replacing Mack Park, would serve as one of the historic Negro League venues through 1951.

Mack Park had been home to the Detroit Stars, but after the grandstand burned down in 1929 the venue was relocated to the Hamtramck site, opening in May 1930. The Detroit Wolves took over for the Stars, in a new East-West league in 1932, but folded in the unfavorable economic times. The Detroit Stars was resurrected in 1933, but lasted only one more season at Hamtramck, that then lay empty. The Stars had a third life in 1937, but that too lasted only one more season. Detroit city acquired Hamtramck Stadium in 1940 and renovated it through Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration as part of a larger Veterans Park project. Hamtramck Stadium has since hosted high school and Little League games, but after 2012 it fell into disrepair and neglect. Of the 12 remaining Negro League stadiums only Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey and Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama were in use longer than Hamtramck.

Michigan has some puzzling names, in that the historic contexts of their origins have been lost to most people today. Hamtramck, more than most American communities, reflects dominating effects of immigration and displacement of native people. [Below: Site marker installed August 2014.]

Three.

Hamtramck, a tiny city surrounded by Detroit, had little commonality with Ann Arbor, only 44 miles away, in that spring of 1930 when the University of Michigan Medical School was reeling from the firing of Hugh Cabot in February as dean and chief of surgery. No dean would replace him for three years and the school’s executive committee assumed the role of dean. Frederick Coller was named chair of surgery and appointed Reed Nesbit as the head of urology, but he was a “head” with a single deputy. It’s unlikely that Nesbit and the University of Michigan community knew much about Hamtramck Stadium when it opened that May 1930, although Nesbit became a devoted fan of the Detroit Tigers and certainly knew the name, Ty Cobb. Hamtramck Stadium would become one of the important Negro League venues and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. [Below: Col. John Francis Hamtramck takes possession of Fort Lernout, part of mural at Detroit Water Building. Wikipedia.]

Jean-Francois Hamtramck (1756-1803), a French-Canadian soldier born in Montreal, came south to join the Continental Army and became a decorated officer in the Revolutionary War. He then served in the Northwest Indian War, displacing native American communities, and was the first commandant of Fort Wayne (Indiana). In 1796 he transferred to Fort Lernoult and the settlement of Detroit, where he died seven years later.

The Jay Treaty, designed by Alexander Hamilton and negotiated by John Jay in 1794, had ceded the fort from Britain to the United States effective 1796, when Col. Hamtramck moved there with 300 troops. Britain reclaimed the fort, by then named Fort Detroit, in the War of 1812. After the Battle of Lake Erie, the fort was returned to the U.S. and renamed Fort Shelby. In the aftermath of this and the Northwest Ordinance Act, territorial judge Augustus Woodward came to Detroit from Virginia with radical ideas on education that he deployed in the University of Michigania in 1817.

The town within Detroit that took Hamtramck’s name began as a farming community of German immigrants and incorporated as a village in 1901. There, the burgeoning Detroit Stove Works attracted industrial workers and shifted the demography from rural farmers to immigrant urban factory workers. By 1910 the Dodge Main Assembly Plant dominated the town, attracting new immigrants and within 20 years the town became heavily Polish and middle class. Of the thousands of factory workers in the 1920s, nearly 80% owned or were buying their own homes. Attracting a new generation of different immigrants, the town (2 square miles and 23,000 people) is now the most densely-populated and most ethnically diverse in the state and in 2015 became the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

Four.

Lessons of history. Each season brings particular infectious risks and in those days when Ty Cobb threw out that opening pitch at Hamtramck 90 years ago, parents were anxious about the summertime threat of polio to their children. Much less commonly, “infantile paralysis” also affected adults and such a victim, it was widely believed, was Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a successful politician when it struck him in 1921 at age 39. He spent years in recuperation, and even afterward continued to struggle with the sequelae of severe lower extremity weakness, that he masked from the public when re-entering the political world as Governor of New York in 1928 and ascending to presidency in 1933. In retrospect, it is more likely that Guillain-Barre was the cause of his neuropathy. The polio story would intersect with the University of Michigan story two decades later. [Below: Photo: Two early-1950s March of Dimes “Fight Infantile Paralysis” posters designed by artist John Falter (of Falls City, Nebraska). (History Nebraska 10645-1197, 10645-4333)]

In the summer of 1953, many children throughout the northern hemisphere contracted polio, a seasonal fear of parents. Two children of a UM faculty member in the Surgery Department and practitioner at St. Joe’s were among those diagnosed. They were hospitalized for three weeks in the old “Contagious Hospital” during the presumed infectious period and then transferred, when afebrile, to a large ward of 32 beds in University Hospital (Old Main) on 10 West for the next five months of complete bed rest wearing knee-high boots, to prevent contractions, 24 hours a day.

One of the children, our colleague Skip Campbell, recalls watching Medical Sciences I Building being built from the ground up as he lay in bed. The “Sister Kenney Treatment” involved hot steaming under wool blankets twice daily. Both Campbell children recovered, although Skip’s sister had a life-long limp due to unilateral muscle atrophy. Skip recalled: “Quite a few kids in that place died, including a little girl in our room. Remarkably, I don’t remember a single nurse, doctor or my parents wearing mask!” [Personal recollection, Darrell Campbell, Jr., May 1, 2020.]

Sister Elizabeth Kenney (1880-1952) was a self-trained Australian nurse. After experience in WWI and with the 1918 influenza epidemic who in 1942 opened a clinic in Brisbane where she utilized heat packs and exercise among other regimens for polio. She brought her ideas to the US and settled in Minneapolis where the city gave her a house and she taught and practiced for 11 years. That work would lead into a new field variously called Rehabilitation Medicine, Physical Therapy, and Physiotherapy. [Below, Nurse Kenney, August 4, 1915 enroute to service in the Great War. Wikipedia, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.]

The Salk vaccine and enormous clinical trial (largely funded by FDR’s March of Dimes) coordinated by his professor Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan in 1954 largely eliminated the risk and fear of polio in North America. Salk used “killed virus” in his vaccine and despite safety testing, some batches from Cuter Laboratories contained live virus later linked to over 250 cases of iatrogenic polio. Greater government oversight of vaccine production was called for, but ultimately an oral vaccine from Albert Sabin’s team proved safer and gave more lasting immunity, although U.S. authorities were not initially interested in anything but the Salk series of injections and Sabin had to conduct his first large scale trial in the Soviet Union in 1959. [Below: Photo: Nebraska clinical trial of the Salk polio vaccine, May 1954. From KOLN/KGIN-TV, Lincoln and Grand Island. (History Nebraska RG809-51)]

Polio testing children, May, 1954.

Five.

Shimomura Crossing the Delaware, a provocative self-portrait of the artist Roger Shimomura, is prominently displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, – a wonderful place to visit when museums open to the public again.

At first glance Shimomura seems to turn history upside down, but with a little contemplation his work amplifies the idea of the American Dream. The artist fairly claims that America is his country too in 2010 as much as it was that of George Washington, who is more traditionally envisioned crossing the Delaware River on December 25, 1776. Shimomura’s large and striking painting, created nearly 70 years after Executive Order 9066, recapitulates the 1851 work of Emanuel Leutze at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Washington Crossing the Delaware), but replaces Washington with Shimomura, the colonial troops with samurai warriors, and the geographical location with San Francisco Harbor and Angel Island, once a processing point for Asian immigrants.

In 1942, Shimomura, was not quite three years old when he and his family were forcibly relocated from their home in Seattle to an internment camp in Idaho. Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, signed two months after Pearl Harbor, caused this horrible trauma. That single presidential action designated military commanders to designate exclusion zones from which any American citizens or non-citizens could be excluded and relocated. Census data helped compile lists of such persons. Ultimately, 120,000 people, around two-thirds being U.S. citizens, were relocated to around 50 internment camps.

Ultimately, it is clear that the executive order and resulting program were based on “willful historical inaccuracies and intentional falsehoods,” according to a 1942 Naval Intelligence report that was suppressed by Roosevelt’s solicitor general Charles Fahey. The relocated people had posed no security threat, it was evident even at the time. Fear and ethnic bias left this terrible blemish on Roosevelt’s administration and the American narrative.

The point here is that each of us creates their own origin story from their history as they know it – built on individual identities, beliefs, and aspirations. George Washington and Roger Shimomura had theirs, you and I have ours, and George Floyd had his. Each is as remarkably different as they are similar, sharing remarkable fundamentalities. John F. Kennedy may have said it best in his speech at The American University, Washington, D.C., June 10, 1963: “For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal.”

Postscripts.

Another Shimomura.

Osamu Shimomura (1928-2018) is a name that rings a bell for biological scientists. Not directly related to the American painter, Osamu was born near Kyoto he was a 17-year-old living in the Nagasaki area when the atomic bomb exploded 25 km away, blinding him for about 30 seconds and then drenching him with the black rain of the fallout. Against the odds he survived, was educated, and achieved great academic success, culminating in a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2008 for his discovery of aequorin and green fluorescent protein.

Ed Tank reminiscences.

Sherman Silber: “I am very sorry to hear of Ed Tank’s passing. He taught me a lot from gender assignment in intersex cases to high diversion with pediatric hydronephrosis, which got me in deep trouble with some very opinionated and obstinate people. He taught me a lot about adrenogenital and testicular feminization, and the bigger issue of the origin of gender identity and SEX preference.”

Paul DeRidder: “I just read your latest “Matula Thoughts” and saw the article on Ed Tank. In my senior year of medical school, 1971, I took a rotation in Urology. Ed Tank was more or less my mentor. I remember him well. He was a determined surgeon, strong personality and great mentor. I remember his suggestion that I review a text in pediatric urology, which I diligently went to the library to review many times. He saw me in the library and was surprised that I was diligent enough to spent time reading the suggested text in my free time at the library. It was because of Ed, my feeling, that I was accepted to the Urology program as an intern, 1972. When I completed my training, Ed had moved to Portland and as I was looking West to set up practice, I contacted Ed and asked if there were any openings in the Portland region. HIs comment was “oh, no it is paradise here and we are saturated with Urologists.” He suggested I look elsewhere. Great guy!”

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts, this July, 2020.
David A. Bloom

Matula Thoughts August 2, 2019. Impressions

Posted by dabloom

Matula Thoughts

August 2, 2019

Impressions & metaphors:

Thoughts from a UMMS faculty member
2224 words/20 minutes

One.

As a medical student, my first impressions of children’s surgery imprinted on my brain much like a duckling gets imprinted when it initially sees its mother, or whatever creature first walks by. I went to UCLA for surgery residency in 1971 and then to London for a year in 1976 to learn from David Innes Williams, a founder of pediatric urology (above, Shaftesbury Hospital, 1976). The experience was rich. At first I was as an observer and later served as a registrar, the UK version of my status in the U.S. Mr. Williams was the consummate professional and his attitude was reciprocated by patients, trainees, and staff. My first impression of “DI,” as we called him, was one of the perfect English gentlemen, with unparalleled expertise and skill in one’s field. I noticed that even the poorest families coming to see him dressed for the occasion, the men often wearing a coat and tie, and the children well-scrubbed up and disciplined. Formality was echoed by kind and polite staff (Sister Fay and Sister Val) and by Mr. Williams himself who invariably offered a proper English greeting.

Mr. Williams was always addressed as “MR. WILLIAMS”– the appropriate title for a surgeon in the British world of medicine since the days of King Henry VIII who chartered the Barber Surgeons Guild in 1544. The physicians (internists) had been chartered in 1522 and were addressed as “Doctor” and the surgeons, a very distinct class of practitioners were “Mr” back then and remain Mr. to this day. Additional medical customs and traditions persisted in the National Health System and when I was a clueless young American, a colleague then ahead of me in training, Mr. Robert Morgan, took me under his wing and kept me out of trouble. Just as British ways sometimes confused foreigners like me and American ways tended to befuddle the British who, for example, couldn’t understand why Henry Kissinger came to be addressed as Doctor.

I returned to London in 1986, as a young UM faculty member on leave under Ed McGuire, to serve as a locum tenens for several months. Sir David Innes Williams (above, recently knighted) had retired from a large administrative post in the National Health System (NHS) and his successor Phillip Ransley was the sole pediatric urologist in London. American colleagues were taking sequential turns filling the spot that soon became formalized with a second NHS pediatric urologist, who turned out to be Patrick Duffy, the registrar working with me those months in 1986. I was self-conscious to be sitting in the same chair and at the same desk Mr. Williams had used to see patients, but I seemed to be tolerated by staff and patients.

In the decade between my times working for the NHS, the dress code and sense of formality of the clinic visits had relaxed. Families were more causal in dress, perhaps reflecting acceleration in the pace of life, only occasionally putting on their Sunday best for clinic visits, more likely quickly assembled from work and school to rush to Great Ormond Street Hospital by tube, bus, or cab (rarely by car, because where could they park?). Nevertheless, greetings were not rushed, but rather were moments of catching one’s breath on both sides of the table, with casual inspection, mutual taking measure, and kind acknowledgements. Those first impressions the parents and children have of the physician/health care provider are lasting.

Two.

Life is a social business and medical practice and education are especially social. That’s why we have frequent visiting professorships, like the Duckett Lecture last month, with Chester Koh from Baylor. Chester spoke on medical devices and discussed cases with residents, who also observed his professionalism and communication skills.

[Above: Pediatric uroradiology conference with Chester; Below: Kate Kraft, Chester, John Park.]

The first words patient hear often set the stage for their entire relationship with a health care provider. It is no surprise that one of the more offensive introductory phrases patients report is: “Why are you here?” Clinicians never intend any offense, and I myself may have cluelessly used those words in past days, trying to figure out the needs of a patient. Health care providers have many pressures for excellence, self-education, relevance, academic productivity, and equanimity. Furthermore, they are belabored by systemic pressures that are, perhaps, the greatest drivers of professional burnout: organizational metrics, throughput demands, rigid schedules, mandatory web-learning programs (fire safety, compliance, “high reliability training,” new chaperone rules, opioid regulations, and other modules every year). Electronic health record systems set the stage – demanding entry of a chief complaint at the outset of each “encounter.”

To many patients, however, that first question, Why are you here, is a slap in the face, interpreted by some as an accusation (“why are you wasting my time?”) or is evidence of an unread letter of referral or poor preparation. Patients may be anxious, looking for reassurance, expertise, and kindness. Parents with sick children will be especially distressed and for them, “Why are you here?” is a poor choice of the starting position for the physician or provider. If you put yourself in the place of the mother in Gari Melchers’ painting after the hassle and expense of getting to the clinic with your baby, you might not respond favorably to that question. If the provider was, perhaps, “burned-out” from a busy clinic schedule, the electronic health record, systemic mandatory demands, and short ancillary staffing, it is very likely that the mother with the sick baby was equally stressed, if not more so.

[Mother and Child. Gari Melchers. C, 1906. Institute of Art. Chicago.]

Three.

White Coat Ceremony. The stethoscope, invented in 1816 by René Laënnec in Paris, is not just an effective tool for auscultation, it is an equally effective metaphor for listening, which is itself a metaphor for seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing the needs of a patient and family. [Below: Laënnec, National Library of Medicine. Below: Laennec’s 1819 monograph.]

Laënnec died of cavitating tuberculosis at age 45 on August 13, 1826 in Kerlouanec, leaving a wife but no children. [Ariel Roguin. René Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781-1826): the man behind the stethoscope. Clin Med Res. 4(3):230-235, 2006.]

The meme of the physician as a listener and observer is worth preserving, especially in this day of corporate medicine and formulaic encounters based on electronic medical record work flow. To institutionalize this idea of listening, our medical school began giving all entering medical students top-of-the-line stethoscopes on their first day of school at the White Coat Ceremony on 2004. The instruments were gifts from the clinical departments and some friends of the medical school interested in the actual and metaphoric listening skills of our “next generation” of physicians. Some of the best listeners in health care are themselves hearing-impaired and have trained themselves to go beyond casual vocal encounter with patients to discriminating perception of their patients with all senses.

[Above & below: UM White Coat Ceremony July 27, 2019.]

White Coat Ceremonies date back only to 1989 when, at the University of Chicago, a professor complained that first-year students “were showing up in shorts and baseball caps … where the patients are pouring their hearts out.” Dean of Students Norma Wagoner responded by starting a ceremony where students were supplied with white coats and instructed: “for any session where we have patients present, we expect you to look like professionals, wear the white coat, and behave appropriately.” [Peter M. Warren. “For new medical students, white coats are a warmup. Los Angeles Times. October 18, 1999.]

In 1993 Dean Linda Lewis at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, joined with the Arnold P. Gold Foundation to sponsor a white coat ceremony that is mirrored in medical, dental, and osteopathic schools today, among many other health professional schools. (Today, many of these medical schools bear the new names of their modern benefactors.) The white coat as a uniform of a health care provider is importantly a symbol of personal hygiene and responsibility. [Below: White Coat Syndrome, 2008, by Pat Curry, RN.]

The matula was the most prominent symbol of the medical profession for 650 years, as evidenced in art of the times, until Laënnec’s stethoscope in 1816 and the white coat even more recently. What the prominent symbols of the healing professions will be a century from now remains to be seen, but with luck regarding human destiny they won’t revert to the Aesculapian staff and matula.

Four.

The moral universe. The compelling imagery of a moral universe is a comforting metaphor. In 1958 Dr. Martin Luther King wrote “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” in The Gospel Messenger, noting it to be a known aphorism. He used it again in 1964 for commencement exercises at Wesleyan University. The phrase has a deep history, traceable to 1853 and “A Collection of Ten Sermons of Religion” by Theodore Parker, Unitarian minister, American transcendalist, and abolitionist. A book in 1918, “Readings from Great Authors,” quoted Parker. A columnist in the Cleveland Plain Dealer reiterated the phrase, but omitted the word “moral” in 1932. The phrase has been since repeated on many occasions such as in a 1940 New Year version by Rabbi Jacob Kohn in Los Angeles: “Our faith is kept alive by the knowledge, founded on long experience, that the arc of history is long and bends toward justice.” President Obama used the phrase and credited Dr. King in 2009. [Above: Chagall Windows. Art Institute of Chicago.] Whereas some things in life are described as “soul-crushing,” this phrase is soul-compelling.

The physical universe and the universe created by the collective brains of Homo sapiens overlap and the human one increasingly changes the other, at least for the present in the Anthropocene moment. The change is simultaneously creative and destruction – think Mona Lisa or the miracles of contemporary health care versus genocide and environmental deterioration. But if we accept the fact that the human universe is ours to create, then we must recognize that it is (it should be or it can be) a moral universe, thus validating the aspiration of King and those who came before and after him with this belief.

The idea of a universe is a human construction and belief in a moral universe is a particularly human invention. Not eager to invite liturgical criticism, few can deny that Homo sapiens has built extensively around concepts of spiritual faith. But such is the nature of our species to imagine, discover, plan, and pass the information we find and create along to successive generations. In that sense, it is up to us to build that moral universe within the gargantuan amoral physical universe around us.

Five.

Ann Arbor August. In much of the northern hemisphere, August is a time for vacation, although the modern workplace of 52 weeks and 365 days per year, and 24 hours per day, requires some people at work every minute such that August is no longer a month of universal leisure time. I recall that when the yearly calendar was unveiled to my surgical internship group at UCLA in July, 1971, the first vacation assignment (namely July), went to the most hyperactive of our class, who was expecting to dive immediately into the world of operating rooms, intensive care units, conferences, and clinics.

That intern was very displeased at being told to “stand down” for his first month. The rest of us, I suspect, would have been more accommodating. In the end, he accommodated just fine, and over the course of a distinguished career, Ron Busuttil ended up as chair of the surgical department at UCLA himself. Summer or winter today, the life of a resident provides more downtime and one expects that our new PGY1s will have time for the pleasures of Michigan this month and next.

The Ann Arbor Farmers’ Market (above), operating since 1919, is a lovely feature of our community – a perfect example of Adam Smith’s second-best quotation (a favorite of John Wei):

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”

[Below: top, local farm sales; local idiosyncrasy – Wolf Man; bottom, Sweet Dirt – Melissa Richard’s Ann Arbor ice cream]

Michigan Urology has its own centennial this year. We begin this celebration next month, 100 years after Hugh Cabot came to Ann Arbor, recruited by Dean Victor Vaughan, and will conclude it in the autumn of 2020, to coincide with Cabot’s first academic year at the University of Michigan. Cabot brought modern urology to Michigan in the multiple dimensions of clinical care, education, research, and the international stage.

Postscript

Gari Melchers (1860-1932), whose Mother and Child was shown earlier, originally from Detroit, was awarded an LL.D. from UM in 1913. His impression of Victor Vaughan was presented to the university in 1916.

Melchers’s Theodore Roosevelt, originally in the Detroit Freer Collection, is now at the Smithsonian Freer-Sackler Galleries. [Donaldson BM. An Appreciation of Gari Melchers (1860-1932). Michigan Alumnus, Quarterly Review. 1934. P. 506-511.]

As you enjoy August we prepare for the Michigan Urology Centennial, marking the start of modern urology in Ann Arbor under Hugh Cabot.

• Centennial Celebration launch, Nesbit Society Annual meeting October 3-5, 2019, Ann Arbor.
• AUA Nesbit Society reception May 17, 2020, Washington, DC.
• Centennial Gala Celebration. Nesbit Society Annual Meeting, September 24-26, 2020, Ann Arbor.

David A. Bloom
University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

Independence

Posted by dabloom

Matula Thoughts July 5, 2019

Independence Day

2055 words

Above: American flag. Copyright: Sticks Object Art & Furniture, Des Moines, Iowa.
Private collection, with permission.

“Paul Revere? Ain’t he the Yankee who had to go for help?” – old Texas joke. [DH Fischer. Paul Revere’s Ride. Oxford University Press, 1994.]

One.

July 4, 1776, meant different things to different people of the time. The British Parliament, indigenous peoples, enslaved workers in colonial states, southern planters, northern industrialists, loyalists of King George III, colonial rabble rousers, federalists, antifederalists, abolitionists, France, Spain, Irish Protestants, or Irish Catholics – to consider just some of the stakeholders – each had their own view of the matter.

Paul Revere’s midnight ride on April 18, 1775, was an iconic event leading up to Independence Day the following year, although its role as an actual tipping point between colonial discomfort with Britain’s royal authority over it and explosion into full-blown revolutionary action is beyond this essay. Causality aside, Revere’s ride inspired popular imagination, legend, and poetry. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, published nearly 85 years later in January, 1861, in The Atlantic Magazine, reverberates in my brain, having learned it in my grade school yet another century later: “Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere …” That meme had legs and the idea of 13 United States of America became a reality and eventually transformed into the idea of a nation.

American regionalist painter Grant Wood (1892-1942) imagined the midnight ride from a bird’s-eye perspective in 1931 (above). You can view the original in Washington DC at the SAAM. The tiny detail in front of the church repeats the once-common misperception that horses gallop with all four legs in the air, extended front and back (below, top). Grant Wood either didn’t know better or else was deliberately naïve in using the archaic style. He was not really a student of the art of motion, his work only occasionally depicting moving objects such as the impending calamity in Death on the Ridge Road, painted in 1935 (below, bottom).

Two.

We celebrated independence for our chief residents and fellows last month at the Art Museum of the University of Michigan. [Above: chiefs, courtesy Ankita Shah] The Museum had its origin in 1910 as Alumni Hall and I have fond attachments to it, not just because of the appearance, the contents, and its generous uses to the university and the public, but personally as well because our youngest daughter was married there, the Shirley Chang Gallery is housed there, and my late friend Helmut Stern left much of his great collection there as well.

Most graduations are moments of personal liberation and independence. Residents and fellows usually jump from an intense paradigm of responsibilities, schedules, and education to the freedom of their practices of urology, although that world has become more constrained than a generation ago. The idea of the “private practitioner” in health care, especially for surgical specialists is ancient history, although even back in those old days when most urologists entered small groups, they carried the discipline and professionalism of their training mentors and programs with them, out into the world.

Our graduation at the Art Museum was much more about character and culture than personal liberation. Junior residents presented the life stories of the graduating chiefs with grace and humor. Ella Doerge (story told by Rita Jen) will go to London for fellowship with Tim O’Brien at Guy’s Hospital. Ted Lee (story told by Matt Lee) will undertake a three-year Boston Children’s Hospital Fellowship. Zach Koloff (story told by Chris Russell) will also go to Boston to a first-rate Lahey Clinic – affiliated practice. Parth Shah (story told by Michael Fenstermaker) will join the excellent USMD Urology group in Dallas-Fort Worth. Over the five years these chiefs spent with us they became physicians, surgeons, and urologists that I’d trust in a heartbeat with the care of friends, family, or myself.

Our fellows were profiled two weeks ago in What’s New. Deborah Kaye (Society of Urologic Oncology/Health Services Research Fellow) will join the Duke faculty. Nnenaya Agochukwu (Global Health Services Research/RWJ Fellow) will undertake a second fellowship, this being at the University of California in San Francisco in reconstructive urology. Irene Crescenze (Female Pelvic Medicine Reconstructive Surgery Fellow) will join the Ohio State University faculty, under chair Cheryl Lee (Nesbit 1977).

Faculty awards went to Professors Matt Davenport and Jim Shields of the Department of Radiology and Chris Sonnenday of the Department of Surgery who have been essential collaborators with urology. Professor Alon Weizer was recognized as the Team Player of the Year. Among his many gifts, Alon is both a great virtuoso surgeon and a selfless team player, a very rare combination of talents. Vesna Ivancic, the embodiment of professionalism, was recognized for that crucial characteristic of a physician-teacher. The residents presented two awards to faculty: Sapan Ambani was given the Silver Cystoscope Award and Khaled Hafez was given the Julian Wan Award for Excellence in Resident Mentorship.

Chair Palapattu supervised a great evening and the new awards were wonderful additions. Kudos to Program Directors Kate Kraft and Sapan Ambani, Nesbit Society President Mike Kozminski, and Lora Allen. The evening was especially enjoyable for me, freed of responsibility for being sure all went well and the bill was paid.

Three.

New folks. Here in Ann Arbor we didn’t need a Paul Revere to announce the good news that our new residents and fellows joined us a few days ago and thankfully no calamities were encountered enroute. Joel Berends from San Antonio is the first-ever recipient of the American Urological Association and Urology Care Foundation Physician Scientist Training Award that will take him from now through June 20, 2027. Anna Faris from Cleveland Clinic, Mahir Maruf from Ross University in Florida, Catherine Nam from Emory, and Alexander Zhu from Des Moines University have also joined Michigan Urology and their program will go through 2024. The annual residency refreshment of July is always eagerly anticipated, although why it happens this particular month of the year and not at the beginning of the fall semester, as is usual in academics, is an interesting question, possibly due to coincidence with start of the common fiscal year of hospitals. [Below: AA Farmers’ Market]

Four.

Chang Lecture. From 2007 to 2018 the Urology Department held a series of yearly lectures on art and medicine, to celebrate Dr. Cheng-Yang Chang for his educational and clinical roles at Michigan Urology and his work in pediatric urology. Dr. Chang’s father, Chang Ku-Nien, was a master painter of 20th century Chinese art and much of his work resides at the UM Art Museum. The Shirley Chang Gallery, named for Dr. Chang’s late wife, is a peaceful and beautiful refuge. [below: Shirley Chang Gallery]

Dr. Chang began training under Reed Nesbit and completed the program here under Reed Nesbit and Jack Lapides in 1967. His two Chang sons remain closely tied to Michigan Urology. Ted completed training in urology under Ed McGuire in 1996 and is now in practice in Albany, working near another great Michigan urology alumnus Barry Kogan. Ted’s older son, Kevin, recently graduated from UM, but is headed for the business/informational technology world. Hamilton, UM 1989, is an investment banker in Chicago and one of Michigan urology’s greatest advocates. [Below: Ku-Nien Chang. Taiwan Cross Island Highway, 1967. UMMA.] While it seemed appropriate to sunset the yearly Chang Lecture series when the urology chair turned over to Ganesh Palapattu, the idea of intertwined art and medicine lives on in our department and periodic Chang art and medicine events are likely to appear.

The Chang Lectures had three objectives. The first two were: celebration of an important and worthy Michigan Urology family and the responsibilities of universities to offer “public goods” – open lectures on general topics (even from a specialized department such as urology). The third goal relates to a belief that discussions of the conjunctions of art and medicine belong in medical schools and health care training programs. Art and medicine converge at the human interior. For artists, that interior is a matter of intellect, soul, hope, aspiration, fear, grief, love, and beauty. For those of us who tend to the contingencies of physical bodies, the interior is a matter of brains, bones, organs, fluids, cells, systems, and naturally includes our visible integument. When we began the lectures, visual art took center stage, although no art form was out of bounds and Joel Howell’s inspiring talk in 2009 focused on music.

Five.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum (acronym, SAAM) is a favorite stop in Washington, DC. Once known as the National Portrait Gallery, SAAM is a wonderful place for a quick visit, something less feasible at most other Smithsonian museums, but you certainly can spend a day at the SAAM where Paul Revere’s Ride by Grant Wood resides. When you happen by there, the Daguerre monument on the museum’s Seventh Street side is worth a look. Daguerre’s work grew into modern photography that would show how horses actually gallop.

Leland Stanford, a horseman among other things, commissioned photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) to study galloping horses photographically. The gallop is too fast for human eyes to analyze and for centuries visual artists depicted all four legs were simultaneously in the air, extended forwards in the front and backwards in the rear, during a gallop. On June 15, 1878 Muybridge depicted Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, a series of 24 pictures in rapid succession and its 24 frames constitute the first moving picture. The gait analysis showed that when all four feet were simultaneously in the air the legs were gathered below the belly of the horse rather than extended front and back. Sallie Gardner was Stanford’s Kentucky-bred mare and the jockey was named Gilbert Domm.

[May 4, 2019; Louisville, KY, USA; Luis Saez aboard Maximum Security (7) crosses the finish line during the 145th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs. Mandatory Credit: Jerry Lai-USA TODAY Sports – 12643976]

Luis Saez riding Maximum Security crossed the finish line at the 145th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, May 4, 2019, ahead of the thundering herd, but was disqualified for interference with other horses. [Above: Reuters photograph] One hopes the interference was accidental, but rules are rules, the photographic evidence of the interference was self-evident, and it’s reassuring to find occasional evidence that the end doesn’t always justify the means. The arc of the moral universe may be long, but sometimes we live long enough to see it bend toward truth.

Postscript

Independence Day celebrates the first days of the American nation, as proclaimed in the astonishing Declaration of Independence, a beautiful piece of prose hammered out by committee with compromises made. The Constitution, produced also by a team, is a clunkier set of rules and regulations that was amended more than a year later with some ideas many of its signers took for granted and assumed the original Constitution offered no constraints on essential freedoms in a democracy. James Madison, principal author, finally was convinced that certain amendments were necessary including explicit enumerations of specific freedoms that people needed from government. The original Bill of Rights listed explicit protection for freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly, and the right to lobby the government for redress of grievances. These were listed in the Third Article of the Bill of Rights that became incorporated in the First Amendment of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. The original First Article of the Bill of Rights dealt with the formula for representation in the House of Representatives and the Second Article specified details of laws related to compensation of the representatives.

Historian Gordon Wood, who once taught at Michigan and was popularized in a scene of a Harvard Square tavern argument in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting, once wrote: “… it was Madison’s personal prestige and his dogged persistence that saw the amendments through the Congress. There might have been a federal Constitution without Madison but certainly no Bill of Rights.” [Representation in the American Revolution, University of Virginia Press (Charlottesville, VA), 1969. (ISBN 978-0813927220)]

Human potential – with its science, technology, knowledge, and truth – is severely deformed and stunted when government restricts freedom of speech. Freedom of religion, the press, assembly, and the right to petition actions of government necessarily follow freedom of speech. Truth, equality, and the rights of The First Amendment come close to being the most basic secular principles of humanity and are always at risk and threatened in every civilization.

David A. Bloom
University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

Sunrises, sunsets, & summer imaginations

Posted by dabloom

Matula Thoughts Aug 3, 2018

Sunrises, sunsets, summer imaginations & facts

3951 words

One.

Michigan sunrises and sunsets are hard to beat this time of the year. [Above: Michigan sunrise: Campbell Cottage, Platte Lake, 6 AM July 9, 2018.] Regional newcomers find our summer nights come late, due to the fact that Michigan is about as far west and north as you can go in the U.S. eastern time zone. The western claim seems to be a true fact, at a tiny corner of Ontonagon County in the Porcupine Mountains, west of Silver City, Michigan (89.887453 west and 46.766675 north). The nearest named place on the map is Lafayette Landing, northeast along the Lake Superior shoreline (longitude 89.8407 west, latitude 46.7991 north) where August sunsets will be late and no doubt amazing.

Michigan still stretches further west to Gogebic County, but all four Michigan counties bordering Wisconsin are in the Central Time Zone (Gogebic, Iron, Dickinson, Menominee). If you extended the entire Eastern Time zone to a line drawn south from Lafayette Landing, the zone would incorporate Madison, Chicago, Memphis, Jackson, and Bogalusa, Louisiana (89.83881 west, 30.780556). Michigan comes close regarding the northern claim, but the most northern U.S. mainland place in the eastern time zone is actually Estcourt Station in Aroostook County, Maine, at a latitude of 47.4582 north with a population of 4, barely displacing Eagle Harbor in Keweenaw County, Michigan, at 47.45 north, 88.156 west (population 76).

However, if you are willing to navigate to Isle Royale National Park, you can expand the northerly claim. Even better, Isle Royale has 450 minor islands and Gull Island may be the most north (48.2622 north, 88.26472 west). Rock of Ages Lighthouse is further west in Lake Superior, (89.3133 west, 47.86667 north), but not as west as Lafayette Landing. Possibly some real navigators could improve on these claims of fact, all derived from maps and Internet.

New house officers are a big academic feature of summer at the University of Michigan. We select them carefully and anticipate their arrival eagerly. This is sunrise for their most critical phase of medical training, graduate medical education (GME), where they learn the art, science, and skills of their careers as doctors, a phase more intense than medical school and may take more than twice as long. New trainees and new faculty (see item eight) regenerate our department and our field. Joining us as residents (postgraduate level 1 or PGY 1) last month: Kyle Johnson from University of South Carolina, Katie Marchetti from UM, Roberto Navarrete from Wake Forest, and Javier Santiago from Baylor. Joining us as fellows are: Giulia Lane from the University of Minnesota and Jeff Tosoian from Johns Hopkins. Their starting month was intense, after undergoing extensive onboarding processes, but their time off in Ann Arbor and environs should be pleasant with long sunny days to enjoy the Summer Festival, Art Fair, Farmers Market, Purple Rose Theater, Metro Parks, Detroit Tigers, restaurants, Manchester United vs. Liverpool at Michigan Stadium, and regional explorations, among countless other opportunities. All too soon daylight will shorten, work will intensify, as the full academic season unfolds next month and 2019 lines up in the batter’s box.

[Above: Lake Michigan sunset, Esch Road Beach near Empire, August 18, 8:43 PM 2011. Below: Sunset & rainbow, Grand Haven, July 22, 9:15 PM, photo credit, Carol Spahlinger.]

Two.

The term Michiganders surprised me the first few times I heard it after arriving in Ann Arbor in 1984 but now, accustomed to it, I occasionally use it myself. Michigander is a demonym, although a favorite author, John McPhee, didn’t include it among citations of other examples, such as Mancunians, Minneapolitans, Providentians, Haligonians, and Liverpudlians [McPhee. Draft No. 4. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. p. 173.] Sense of place matters deeply to most people, defining personal identity in large part. As much as Vonnegut deflated the notion of self-identification with organizations or geography, as for example being a Hoosier, pride of place memes are important. [Cat’s Cradle, 1963.]

In addition to its soccer team, Liverpool brings up memories of the Beatles, however pediatric urologists and pediatric surgeons of my vintage also think of Mr. Herbert Johnston (above, c. 1986), who practiced at the famed Alder Hey Children’s Hospital where innovations of safe prolonged general anesthesia advanced the range of pediatric surgery and urology. From its first public demonstration in 1846 until the mid 20th century, general anesthesia carried significant morbidity and mortality risks that increased with the duration of anesthetic time, so procedures had to be brief. With safe induction, tracheal intubation, controlled gas flow, and vital sign monitoring, surgical procedures grew in length and complexity. Blood gas, end-tidal CO2, and peripheral oxygen saturation measurement further enhanced safety and permitted extraordinary interventions including cardiac operations, organ transplantation, extensive cancer extirpations, and major bodily reconstructions. With operating rooms less tense and frantic, background music became commonplace and, given the popularity and sheer quantity of Beatles tunes, it is likely to hear them during surgery in operating rooms around the world today.

Soccer, or European football dominated many conversations in our department last month and in spite of the loss of his beloved British team the day before, Khurshid Ghani sportingly hosted a backyard viewing of the World Cup final between France and Croatia (below). Last weekend at Michigan Stadium, Liverpool defeated Manchester United 4:1 during their U.S. tour, jumping the Liverpudlian factor in operating rooms around the world from two-pronged to three-pronged when conversations turn to soccer, before or after, but never during “time-outs” of course.

Three.

The Chang Lecture last month connected me to Joel Babb, an artist living in Maine. Having spent many childhood summers in Maine I jump at the chance to reconnect there, obvious demonym notwithstanding. Joel’s depiction of the first successful renal transplantation, on display at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, was featured in our Chang Lecture, and Joel was very generous with permissions and digital files. He created the painting with the help of its principle innovator, the late Joe Murray, a close friend of my former professor at UCLA, Will Goodwin [Above: Joel Babb, self-portrait with dog, Ruskin. Below: Joe Murray visiting UM and a younger DABc. 1990.]

The First Renal Transplantation shows a large team of two operating teams and consultants necessary for that landmark event in 1954. [Below: study for First Renal Transplantation, Joel Babb.]

Joel sent us other examples of his work including the first face transplant in the Western Hemisphere, and a book by Carl Little, Nature & Culture, The Art of Joel Babb. [University Press of New England, 2012]

Medical care, initially a simple one-to-one expression of human empathy, has expanded to team-based efforts that blend science and the art of humanism. The balance is asymmetric according to teams, individuals, and locations. Organizational culture largely determines the blend, varying from day to day and hour to hour, as is true for most human efforts. Intrinsic to the humanism of medical care are principles of equity and kindness, although these are susceptible to submersion by political and economic milieus, whether based on consumerism, capitalism, socialism, or any other “ism” other than humanism. Some new meme of universal humanism is an existential necessity for our species, but it is expressed far too weakly and drowned out by larger themes of place and personal identity. That new meme must somehow embrace deep respect for all places and identities, but it seems sadly faint just now.

Four.

Place, whether urban space or landscape, has been a dominant part of Babb’s work and his surgical paintings seemed, at first glance, a departure. Sense of physical place gives familiarity and security, whether pastoral landscape, city, neighborhood, occupational, or particular health care location – operating room, ICU, emergency room. The human need for relevance makes us seek that sense of place in teams, although exaggerated sense of place, is destructive, leading to smugness, self-importance, or xenophobia. In the sense of teams, then, as place, Babb’s surgical paintings are really no departure from theme.

When sense of place is disrupted, particularly for reasons beyond an individual’s control, the disturbance must be unimaginable for those of us naïve to such grim experience. An astonishing statistic appeared in a recent book review in The Lancet by Jennifer Leaning: “One out of every 113 people in the world is either an asylum seeker, a refugee, or internally displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).” [The Lancet. 390:2136, 2017.] The book at issue, Refugee by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, brings a new category of refugee into play in increasing numbers, the climate refugee. It seems that we owe it to ourselves, as a species, to secure safety of place – the idea of home – through our governments, and to mitigate it as best we can when we encounter its disruption. This should be a cardinal responsibility of the civilization we maintain for ourselves and build for our successors.

Disturbance of personal homeostasis threatens the most immediate sense of place, namely bodily place. Loss of limb, organ, or essential function carves away a person’s ultimate and closest geographic identity, the individual physical and mental place of self. The immediate human corporal reality, physical integrity, is our most fundamental place and we locate ourselves, we see ourselves most literally, in the image of our own faces. The face is the most essential part of identity, evidenced by facial recognition by self-learning algorithms. Loss of face, once an exaggerated figure of speech, is the penultimate reduction of “being.”

Joel Babb’s painting of the full face transplantation (above) demonstrates an extraordinary realization of human imagination and civilization, the capability to replace a human face. That painting carries his work across the spectrum of the human experience of place, from landscapes, to cityscapes, and then to the core visible essence of ourselves and its new mutability with full facial transplantation. For the story behind the face transplant, Joel referred me to an article by Raffi Khatchadourian. The patient, Dallas Wiens, was electrocuted in a boom lift when he contacted a high voltage line while painting a church roof in Fort Worth. [Transfiguration. The New Yorker. February, 2012.]

Five.

Imagination and reality go back and forth, and it is sometimes difficult to know the priority of chicken or egg. Human imagination has been wildly in play since our earliest days, as with the Lowenmensch chimera (above), a figurine from the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000 years ago) of a lion head on a man’s body, found in a German cave in 1939. One wonders what that artist was thinking while fashioning the figure, what god or superhero was imagined in the work. The Sphinx at Gaza, a more recent reverse example, with a woman’s head on a lion’s body.

The imagined miracle of transplantation is a related theme, wherein body parts could be exchanged. Saints Cosmas and Damian, twin Arabic physicians and Christian martyrs, practiced in the third century Roman province of Syria, now the town of Yumurtalik in Turkey. The story of their transplantation of an Ethiopian’s leg to a white man was their big miracle (Above: 16th century, Entstanden in Württembergisches Landesmuseum, Stuttgart, Wikipedia.). Details are sketchy, histocompatibility uncertain, but positive outcome must be inferred, otherwise how else could the miracle be explained?

The enduring meme of chimerism, returned with the zitiron, a mythical “merman” illustrated in Meydenbach’s natural history encyclopedia of 1491 (above: Wikipedia). The figure of a man-fish is suited up with armaments for battle. A more appealing chimera is The Little Mermaid story of Hans Christian Anderson in 1837 that reverberates in The Little Mermaid Statue, on Langelinie Promenade in Copenhagen, having survived vandalism, decapitations, and a 6-month sojourn in Shanghai. The story echoes again in Ron Howard’s 1984 film, Splash, with Daryl Hannah. [Below: Edvard Eriksen statue in Copenhagen, 1913]

As imagination informs reality, laboratory chimeras and body-part transplantations are now commonplace facts of life. I recently ran into colleague John McGee in a hospital corridor and noticed his chimeric lapel pin, the logo of his transplantation society. [Below: Dr. John Magee with pin.]

Six.

Challenged by modern medical practice, in technology-intensive specialties such as urology, residents and fellows may wish they could splice several contradictory heads on themselves to balance empathy and science, kindness and detachment, to better serve their patients. Our trainees can become adept at transplantation and making laboratory chimeras, but fundamental traits of humanity are more difficult to acquire and perfect.

Just after sending the May edition of this column, I came across a Piece of my Mind in JAMA by the well-known medical oncologist Marc Garnick, an oncologist who became a patient, reeling from bladder cancer and then confronting non-Hodgkin lymphoma the following year. His concluding paragraph captured my aspiration for our profession.

“The patient-physician relationship is unique among any other human experience, something to be understood and appreciated. By filling in the gaps and tending to the patient’s broader needs – not just those pertaining to diagnosis and therapy, but the fuller context in which treatment occurs, all of us – patients, physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, staff, and humanity – stand to benefit.” [Garnick. JAMA. 319:2079, 2018.]

This relationship is embodied in conversation that may merely begin and end with an initial “History and physical exam” moment, but might further develop over days, weeks, or years of a relationship. Whether limited to a single encounter or developed over time, that conversation has the potential to yield practical therapeutic value and even spiritual meaning to both patient and physician. I don’t mean to overstate or understate the idea of the conversation. It can be a mundane exchange of facts and desires from a patient, eliciting understanding and perhaps therapy from the provider. Yet, even at the simplest level, it is built on integrity and trust. If more ensues, so much the better.

Seven.

Chang Lecture notes. We began this series of talks in 2008 to honor Dr. Cheng-Yang Chang, who initiated a pediatric urology focus here in Ann Arbor. His father, Ku-nien Chang was a famous artist of the landscape literati style in China and Taiwan, and over 80 of his works are rotated through exhibits at our UM Art Museum, in the Shirley Chang Gallery. The lecture series was a particular enthusiasm of my term as chair and, expecting a successor, it seems suitable to conclude this series of talks, with great appreciation to all those who supported it with their interest and presence. In its way, the Chang Lecture series has fulfilled some part of our obligation as a university in offering things to public audiences – public goods.

Some shout outs are in order. Emily Soto has catered this event from the start. In the audience with many friends, colleagues, and members of our department were 2 former Medical School Deans, Allen Lichter and Jim Woolliscroft. Bob and Janet Bahnson came from Columbus with George and Tina Skestos. [Above: Emily, David, and daughter-in-law Aimee Soto with DAB. Below: Bob, George, Janet, Tina.]

George, three-time UM degree recipient, has the only Maize and Blue box at The Ohio State Horseshoe Stadium. Bob is former chair of urology at Ohio State, and Cheryl Lee, Nesbit alum 1997 is current urology chair. Hamilton and Lilly Chang joined us from Chicago, and Ted Chang and Mary Gallant drove from Albany. Our most distant attendee was Otto Lin from Hong Kong, industrial and systems engineer, although I suspect his main purpose in Ann Arbor was to visit his daughter, Associate Professor Ann Lin of the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy (below).

Eight.

Art Fair. With a new season of GME beginning in July we initiate our first major academic events during the Art Fair, starting with the Chang lecture on Art and Medicine late Thursday afternoon and then Duckett and Lapides lectures and teaching sessions on Friday morning, while the administrative staff simultaneously holds professional development training. Then, for most people, the afternoon is free as a sort of yearly “birthday present.” In this way, we drastically close down all but the most urgent clinical operations in the interest of education and recreation.

The John W. Duckett Visiting Professor began in 1997 in honor of a foundational figure in pediatric urology and friend and mentor to me as well of Michigan Urology. John had passed away unexpectedly and we began this series in his honor. Doug Canning of CHOP was our first Duckett lecturer and this year Rosalia Misseri, of Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, spoke about “Closing the loop: lessons learning by the pediatric urologist caring for the adult spina bifida patient.” The Lapides Lecture began in 2006 and this year it was given by Hadley Wood of the Cleveland Clinic, who has defined the field of urologic congenitalism. Her talk was “Applications and pitfalls in the use of video urodynamics in adult congenital neuropathic bladder.” Robust discussion with residents and faculty in attendance was robust and enhanced by the fact that Drs. Misseri and Wood had met the residents and fellows over the dinner the previous evening, while the Chang Lecture group had a simultaneous event at another site. [Above: Friday afternoon at the Art Fair. [Below: Hadley Wood with Rosalia Misseri and husband MortGreen, pediatric anesthesiologist at Riley.] Appended to this posting is a list of Chang speakers.

Peggy Duckett and George Drach, of Philadelphia have been with us from the start of this academic/Art Fair convergence. George and Peggy announced their engagement here in Ann Arbor to us on Jim Montie’s deck during the third Duckett Lecture season. George gives socioeconomic, philosophical, or practical talks during our Friday sessions, and this year spoke about the Urological Knife. If any readers want to know what that’s all about, he is available to give the lecture again.

[Above: Martha Bloom, George and Peggy.]

Nine.

Bomalaski Scholars. In 2014 Dave Bomalaski (Nesbit pediatric urology fellow 1996) and his wife Sue (above) generously endowed a recurring scholarship for a resident to explore a career in pediatric urology.

Julian Wan presented the award this year to Lauren Corona, PGY 3 (above & below). Previous Bomalaski scholars were Duncan Morhardt (Nesbit 2017), who is starting fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital, Courtney Streur (Nesbit 2018), and Ted Lee (Nesbit 2019), who will follow Duncan to Boston in 2 years.

Two new faculty join us this year, both in the pediatric division – Courtney Streur and Bryan Sack (below). After training in Birmingham, Alabama, Courtney joined us for a 3-year fellowship with a masters degree in health services research. Bryan trained at Medical College of Wisconsin and then fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital. [Devin & Courtney, Bryan & Melissa.]

Michigan Urology now has 7 pediatric urology faculty, 6 in endo-stone, 6 in neuropelvic reconstructive urology, 3 in sexual reproductive, 4 in general urology, 5 in community urology in Muskegon at West Shore Urology, and 13 in uro-oncology, and 4 faculty in our fulltime research cadre. Six faculty cover VA positions and we have multiple joint faculty with other departments, as well as a number of adjunct faculty.

Ten.

Diversity enriches nightscapes of Michigan, Maine, and all other places in innumerable ways. Tree frogs and lightening bugs are distinctive sounds and sights of Ann Arbor summer nights, starting up in June and disappearing around September. In the dark winter months, I’ll be longing see and hear them again. Diversity makes the natural world work, a fundamental fact obvious to any scientist or any other rational thinker. The most prominent living spokesperson for biodiversity, E.O. Wilson, visited Michigan as convocation speaker for our Life Sciences Institute (2004) and to receive an honorary degree (2009) as noted in our previous essays . I recently spotted this new portrait of him at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. [Above: by Jennie Summerall, 2006]

I hear frogs most summer nights when walking my dog, Molly. The chorus frogs, genus Pseudacris, comprise a genus in the Hylidae family named according to their sounds (“false locusts”) and the Northern spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer) may be the noisy males I hear, advertising their social interests by means of their ancient social media. The Linnaean system of classification divides life into kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, geni, and species. Scientific nomenclature dictates that names of taxa above the genus level (families, orders, etc.) should be in roman type, but those at genus level or below are italicized. Wikipedia explains that the order of frogs and toads, the Anura, is divided into three suborders: the Archaeobatrachia, Mesobatrachia, and Neobatrachia. That last suborder (neo=new, batrachian = frogs) accounts for most anurans and consists of over 5,000 species, some of which live in trees, the so called arboreal frogs. Many frogs around here belong to the Hylidae family. Twelve frog species are listed among the amphibians of Michigan, including the Cope’s gray tree frog (Hyla chrysoscelis) and the Gray tree frog (Hyla versicolor). The American green tree frog (Hyla cinerea), extensive throughout the southeast, may be emigrating north as climate changes. These are popular pets, although they don’t do well with frequent handling.

Fireflies, the winged beetles I see most nights, are scientifically classified in the Lampyridae family of insects among the beetle order, Coleoptera. Over 2000 species of fireflies exist worldwide and the light they produce is a cold light, nearly 100% efficient in that it produces no heat. The light flashes are its social medium for courtship, warning, or predation. The predominant firefly in the eastern U.S. is the Photinus genus and its flashes bring males and females together for mating at night. The female lays eggs on or in the ground a few days after mating, and hatching occurs 3-4 weeks later. The larvae feed in the summer and hibernate over the winter, underground or in bark or other sites of refuge. Another use of the visual language of fireflies is to warn predators that they taste badly and may be poisonous, due to the lucibufagins, defensive steroids similar to the cardiotonic bufadienolides in some poisonous toads. Some fireflies, notably females of the Photuris genus, mimic mating flashes of other species in order to attract and then devour the unlucky males that fly to them in expectation of a different outcome.

Beetles and fireflies may be prominent contributors to Michigan nights, but they are only a tiny part of the rich web of life seen, heard, or unnoticed as we pass through these summer months. Tunes from open windows of cars and houses, patios, or block parties, drown out the tree frogs, just as outdoor lights or July fireworks obscure the fireflies. Seeing the cold light flashes from my porch and hearing music in the air from a neighbor begged the question whether that beloved musical group had a spelling problem. In 1957 John Lennon’s first group, the Blackjacks, became the Quarrymen, so named after their high school, Quarry Bank. Paul McCartney, age 15, joined Lennon in July and in the following March brought along George Harrison. By January of 1959 the other original Quarrymen had left the group and the three remaining guitarists, then attending Liverpool College of Art, briefly took up the name Johnny and the Moondogs for gigs. Art school friend Stuart Sutcliff joined as a fourth guitarist in January, 1960, bringing a new name for the band, the Beatals, after Buddy Holly and the Crickets. They became the Silver Beatles in May and by August, they were simply the Beatles. Sutcliff left the band in 1961 after its second Hamburg period and Ringo Starr joined in 1962.

While the name of the Liverpudlian musical group may have had a link to insect nomenclature, the spelling variations remain unexplained, perhaps the educational fault of Liverpool’s Quarry Bank High School (now Calderstones School), pharmaceutical influence, or simply poetic license in Liverpool’s hot summer nights.

David A. Bloom
University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

Appendix
Chang Lecturers
2008 James Steward, DPhil, UM.
2008 Mysoon Rizk, PhD, University of Toledo.
2009 Joel Howell, MD, PhD, UM.
2010 Shinming Shyu, MS, EMU.
2011 Thomas Cole, MD, MPH, UNC, Contributing Editor, JAMA.
2012 Charles Yeo, MD, Thomas Jefferson University.
2013 Richard Prager, MD, UM.
2014 James Ravin, MD, University of Toledo.
2015 Pierre Mouriquand, MD., Claude Bernard University, Lyon.
2016 Don Nakayama, MD, MBA, Florida International University.
2017 David Watts, MD. University of California, San Francisco.
2018 David Bloom, MD, UM.

Birthdays, graduations, and centennials

Posted by dabloom

July 6, 2018

Birthdays, graduations, and centennials
3678 words

One.

In July we welcome new residents and fellows to our urology program (more about them in the next few months) and it’s a nice time for them to be in Michigan. Si quaeris peninsulam, that is if you seek a pleasant peninsula (as the state motto goes), this is the time of year to explore this double peninsula with its 65,000 inland lakes and bordering four great lakes. Michigan is an appropriate name, coming from Ojibwe, meaning “large water.” Indigenous people inhabited this area for millennia, until 17th century Europeans moved in and called it home. [Below: Wikipedia.]

We celebrated America’s birthday on July 4 (fireworks above), but Michigan’s birthday is open to debate. Michigan Territory dates back to June 30, 1805 and statehood declaration was January 26, 1837, but an actual “birthday” doesn’t seem particularly important, federalism trumping state particularism. Michigan gained its upper peninsula in 1836 after the Toledo War. Like the ridiculous and bloodless Pig War, described on these pages last month, the Toledo Dispute grew out of conflicting geographic identities that quickly escalated, although some blood was spilled in Toledo when a young Ohio man with a penknife stabbed a deputy sheriff from Monroe, Michigan during a scuffle. Resolution of the dispute by the US Congress, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, awarded Ohio the Toledo Strip while Michigan gained its Upper Peninsula. Annual Buckeye vs. Wolverine or Spartan contests ritualize the Toledo dispute although, for all the existential threats facing our species today, it is ridiculous that a Michigander might hate an Ohioan or a Buckeye despise a Wolverine.

Like most biologic lifeforms, we are engaged in life-long tests for survival and relevance, the relevance reflecting the necessity of belonging to some thing. Hard-wired into our genes, honed by millennia of trial and error, is the need to belong to a pack, a clan, a team, a family, a school, a community, a nation, or some belief system. Kurt Vonnegut satirized that notion of identifying with an organization or a particular geography in his book Cat’s Cradle (1969), where pride of membership in the General Electric Company, for example, or being a Hoosier seemed ludicrous. While Vonnegut challenged the meaning of such belonging, our genes compel us to those memes of identity and our national, sectarian, and religious identities are the most compelling. Identity as “an American” certainly supersedes identity as a Michigander, but endurance as a species may require a much stronger identity meme, namely that of being a global member of Homo sapiens. How we get there is anyone’s guess.

Two.

Beginnings. The Fourth of July was an arbitrary choice. The Resolution of Independence, legally separating 13 colonies from Great Britain, was signed by the Second Continental Congress on July 2, 1776. Congress then attempted to agree upon a document to explain the separation. The drafting of The Declaration of Independence had begun on June 11 by a Committee of Five led by Thomas Jefferson. Congress saw an early draft on June 28, but controversy over wording continued to July 2 and spilled over until agreement was reached on July 4. Signatures by state delegates didn’t begin until August and were not completed for several months [Danielle Allen, Our Declaration. 2014.].

This ambiguity gives us some license to pick a starting year for Urology at the University of Michigan. Genitourinary surgery was most certainly practiced from the earliest days of surgery in Ann Arbor but modern urology, with its educational and investigational components, is something substantially more. The actual term, urology, was invented by Ramon Guiteras, a genitourinary surgeon in New York City who founded the AUA in 1902. His book, Urology, in 1912 was one of the first 20th century texts to define the field, followed in 1916 by that of Hugh Cabot (below) an internationally famed Boston surgeon, with Modern Urology.

Disillusioned by the mercenary nature of his practice environment, Cabot accepted a “fulltime salaried” position at the University of Michigan as Chair of the Surgery Department in 1920. He brought modern urology to Ann Arbor, became the Dean of the Medical School, built a great multispecialty group practice, and presided over construction of a 1000 bed hospital that opened in 1926. His first urology trainees, Charles Huggins from Boston and Reed Nesbit from California, did well in their careers, influencing urology, worldwide medicine, and international events. Considering the various options, it seems reasonable and convenient to declare 1920, the year Cabot came to Ann Arbor, as the starting point for the Centenary of Urology at the University of Michigan.

Three.

Public universities. When Cabot arrived in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan was already more than 100 years old and differed from any other institution the Bostonian had experienced. Medical education in Boston had been based on medical school relationships with separate private and public hospitals. When the University of Michigan established its own teaching hospital in 1869, however, it invented a new and different model of medical education. This has become a wholly owned and operated integrated health system containing a full range of medical practice and a research enterprise that comprises a rich milieu for professional health care education. The University of Michigan is further unusual in that it is a public university (birthdate in 1817) that pre-existed its own state (birthdate 1837).

The facet of American Exceptionalism that may matter most in the long run will likely be the magnificent patchwork of higher education consisting of public universities, private universities, liberal arts colleges, technical schools, research universities, professional schools, community colleges, and faith-based colleges functioning independently to build tomorrow’s citizenry. This patchwork is quite different from a single higher education system managed by a central state.

Public and not-for-profit colleges and universities in this country are shaped not only by their particular institutional legacies, but also by their public responsibilities. Because we are a free country, an entrepreneurial and commercial side of higher education also exists, with ultimate responsibility to owners, corporate officers, and shareholders. This sector is not the strongest point of the American patchwork.

The public status of a university and health system brings particular constraints and responsibilities. Constraint starts at the top for Michigan with ultimate authority at the board of 8 publically-elected regents, responsible to the people of the State of Michigan. Each regent also brings an individual sense of the missions of the university and its health system, aligned to the interests of their political party. Public responsibilities of public universities reflect public needs and aspirations in a larger sense, and convey to their learners, employees, and patients.

Private universities and health systems have their own boards and ultimate responsible parties, with values, needs, and aspirations are not necessarily the same as those of public institutions and therefore may align differently with learners, faculty, and employees. Even so, their not-for-profit status gives them public responsibilities.

A few months ago, these pages quoted a short campaign speech of presidential candidate John Fitzgerald Kennedy on the steps of the Michigan Union at 2 AM October 14, 1960, laying the seeds for the Peace Corps. While, JFK didn’t seem to quite understand how public universities were “maintained,” his point that they had a higher purpose was well taken: ” Let me say in conclusion, this University is not maintained by its alumni, or by the state, merely to help its graduates have an economic advantage in the life struggle. There is certainly a greater purpose, and I’m sure you recognize it.” [Full speech below.]

Four.

Centennial. It is fitting that new leadership of this department of urology will be in place as we celebrate the Michigan Urology Centennial. Ceremonial interludes of this sort allow reflection, alignment, and revitalization before stepping into a new period. For purposes of planning we can start our Urology Centennial at the Nesbit Reunion in the autumn of 2019 and close it at the Nesbit Meeting in the autumn of 2020, roughly corresponding to a year in the academic calendar, but giving Nesbit alumni and friends two chances to get back to Ann Arbor for scientific and social events. A committee is already at work on this, under the leadership of Dr. Meidee Goh.

Before entering our second century, I’d like to clear up a nagging misconception. State support of public universities is dwindling nationally and this is particularly true in Michigan. Furthermore, virtually no state appropriations come to the UM health system or its medical school, aside for payment of services. It is true that other public medical schools have state-funded salary lines for faculty, but this is not so at UM. Nonetheless, many well-meaning Michiganders think their tax dollars support Michigan Medicine and that misbelief has led to hard-feelings in the competitive world of health care. One excellent referring physician from mid-state sent a rough email message to one of our faculty after hearing the UM “would not accept” his patient. In this case it wasn’t that Michigan Medicine would not accept the patient, but rather the “narrow network” of a stingy private insurer would not include Michigan Medicine in its network because Michigan’s costs have indeed been higher than average. It didn’t matter that this patient needed a complex surgical operation that is not done in most hospitals. Kudos to the referring physician for getting angry on behalf of his patient, but the anger was misdirected and to add a bit of insult to injury, the physician believed his taxes supported Michigan Medicine (wrong) noting that we would have cared for the patient under Medicaid or without any insurance (correct).

Five.

Visiting another peninsula. I was guest at another great public medical school and urology department that recently celebrated its first centennial, the University of California San Francisco. Our two institutions share many features and a number of Michigan medical students, trainees, and former faculty populate UCSF Urology. Unlike Michigan Medicine, UCSF is physically separate from its parent campus, across the Bay at Berkeley. The UCSF teaching hospital was founded in 1907, the year after the San Francisco Earthquake, and was the first university hospital in the University of California System. Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy co-located with the medical school on Mount Sutro along Parnassus Avenue and, like Michigan, the Parnassus Campus outgrew its geographic limits. While we at Michigan expanded to North Campus, East Ann Arbor Medical Campus, and other sites, USCF is also expanding widely, most notably to its grand new Mission Bay Campus. [Above: UCSF teaching conference with residents and an attentive canine named Peanut. Below: UCSF Assistant Professor Lindsay Hampson, UMMS 2009, next to Professor Kirsten Greene.]

[Below: top, Anne Suskind, Nesbit 2014 UCSF Assistant Professor and faculty David Tzou; bottom, Thai cooking class lunch with residents Heiko Yang UMMS 2016, Chef Sunshine, Adam Gadzinski UMMS 2013.]

Similar to Michigan, UCSF Urology celebrates graduation of its chief residents and fellows with dinner for families, faculty, and the entire resident cohort. Junior residents gently “roast” selected chiefs, just as we do in Ann Arbor. David Bayne, one of the graduating chiefs, was quoted by roaster Ian Metzler (whom I had met a few years back on the interview trail) as having once said: “Academic medicine is like a pie-eating contest, where the prize is more pie.” [Below: David & Shani Bayne.]

[Above: Peter and Laura Carroll at the St. Francis Yacht Club.]

Six.

Michigan’s chief dinner took place at our Art Museum the following week in June. Our graduating chief residents and fellows join a fine tradition of urology education in Ann Arbor going back to 1926, after UM opened its University Hospital (the fourth since 1869) and Hugh Cabot brought the first two urology trainees to Michigan. Since then at least 329 urology residents and fellows have come from this program. The exact number remains elusive as we don’t have a full accounting of all the fellows or the residents trained at the historic Wayne County General Hospital branch. Khaled Hafez and Gary Faerber had superb runs as program director over the past decade and the reins now pass to Kate Kraft. Our new PGY1’s were on hand for the evening.

[Above: Kate Kraft introducing new PGY1’s Kyle Johnson, Katie Marchetti, Roberto Navarrete, & Javier Santiago. Below: Amy Luckenbaugh and parents.]

Graduating chief residents are transitioning to fellowships: Amy to Vanderbilt Uro-oncology, Amir Lebastchi to the NIH Uro-oncology, James Tracey to Guys’ Hospital Andrology & Reconstruction, and Yooni Yi to UT Southwestern Dallas Reconstructive Urology. [Below: top, Amir with family and friends; middle, James and family, bottom, Yooni and parents.]

Fellows: Duncan Morhardt to Boston Children’s Pediatric Urology, Elizabeth Dray Columbia SC practice, Tudor Borza to University of Wisconsin faculty, and Courtney Streur joins our pediatric urology faculty. [Below: Duncan and wife Tina; Elizabeth with father Greg and husband David; Courtney between Professors John Park and Daniela Wittmann; Tudor between Ted Skolarus and Jeff Montgomery.]

Seven.

Memes. A few months back we raised the idea of the meme in relation to the blind eye metaphor. A meme is a parcel of self-replicating information that, like the biological gene, is capable not only of replicating into perpetuity, but also can modify itself through time and cultures such that the fittest versions survive. Richard Dawkins invented the neologism in his book, The Selfish Gene in 1976, noting that the concept pre-existed his description. He postulated that if one fundamental principle existed for all life it would be “that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.”

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us right in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. … The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could be thought of as related to ‘memory’ or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.” [Dawkins. P. 248-249. The Selfish Gene. 40th Anniversary Edition.]

That idea of the soup of human culture corresponds to the concept of superorganisms created by eusocial species, as E.O. Wilson has elegantly described in his work. Just as the gene is the building block of information that constitutes each individual, language and memes comprise the information that constitute the superorganism. Germ theory, shoe lace tying, tweetstorms, and the meme itself, are successful memes.

Eight.
The soup of human culture meme recalls a sensational episode of plagiarism involving Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), Belgian author and Nobel Laureate (Literature, 1911). Well-known in his time, he had a stint in the United States produce film scenarios for Samuel Goldwyn in 1919, although none became a movie. One scenario was The Life of the Bee, although Goldwyn heartily rejected the idea of a movie about a bug. Back home in 1926, Maeterlinck published a book called La Vie des Termites (The Life of White Ants), although reportedly admitted he never actually seen a living termite. His source, boldly copied, was obscure work published in 1923 in Afrikaans by Eugene Marais, called The Soul of the (White) Ant. [Wikipedia.]

Extensive field work observing termites “on the veld,” led Marais to the idea of “the organic unity of the termitary” analogous to the organ-based composite human body. Maeterlinck appropriated the Marais theory 3 years later, boldly plagiarizing the text. Marais threatened a lawsuit although didn’t pursue it due to financial barriers. A subsequent English edition of Marais’s original book contains an introduction by its translator, Winifred de Kok assigned priority and credit to Marais, while pointing out the plagiarism. [Eugene N. Marais. The Soul of the White Ant. Methuen & Co. London. 1939.]

Tracking down the meme story, I found the Dawkins neologism and then noted the Maeterlinck transgression in Wikipedia, where University of London professor of biology David Bignell described the episode “a classic example of academic plagiarism.” Not wanting to fall into the realm of plagiarism myself, I tried to track down the evidence for this claim (after all, Maeterlinck was a Nobelist!) and went to the reference cited in Wikipedia but couldn’t find the actual claim. I did find an email address for Professor Bignell, composed my question, and pressed “send.” A reply from the next morning was a wonderful surprise. Professor Bignell wrote:

“Thank you for your message. This has rather made my day. I am long since retired, but it’s always stimulating to be dragged out of retirement with a question about termites, however obtuse. … The only public reference I have ever made to the Marais/Maeterlinck issue was in my Inaugural Lecture in October 2003. In the UK, newly promoted Full Professors are obligated to give a public lecture (widely advertised and open to anyone to attend), and I might add a terrifying experience as it’s your one opportunity to make a complete fool of yourself without any subsequent means of redress. I stuck to my subject (termites) but included a reference to the plagiarism, as it had become celebrated in the world of science, and bizarrely was one of the reasons why termites sometimes command public attention.”

Nine.

Mimes & plagiarists. Mimicry is the biological phenomenon in which one organism evolves characteristics that resemble those of another group. This is akin to a theatrical phenomenon, the performance art of acting out a story or a persona, the term coming from the masked dancer in ancient Greek comedy called Pantomimus. Marcel Marceau, French actor and survivor of the French Resistance in WWII, became the most famous meme of modern times and brought silent mimed exercises to a high art, inspiring Michael Jackson among others.

[Publicity photo of Marcel Marceau for appearance in Seattle, Washington, 1974. Wikipedia.]

[Mime artists Jean & Brigitte Soubeyran in the play “In the Circus” 1950. Wikipedia.]

As a young surgeon I tried to mimic attributes of my key role models. At UCLA they were William Longmire, Rick Fonkalsrud, Don Skinner, Rick Ehrlich, RB Smith, and Jean deKernion. In London it was David Innes Williams and in Boston, Judah Folkman and W. Hardy Hendren. Each set high bars for thinking, clinical acumen, surgical skill, patient rapport, teaching, and wisdom. Role modeling is essential to professional education, where the so-called hidden curriculum of behaviors is as important as the conceptual knowledge and skills that are imparted.

The truism that imitation is a high form of flattery, however, stops short of plagiarism. Plagiarism is theft of an original idea or work and representation of it as one’s own. Most work of civilization is collaborative with some decree of mimicry, but deliberate plagiarism betrays civilized behavior and represents fraud, theft, and deceit. Erosion of trust in science and medicine is particularly dangerous. Even though plagiarism seems to be a rare event in academic circles of urology, it happens. Most people can easily distinguish the difference between passing along memes and outright plagiarism. Science, literature, and the other arts build upon the imagination of our predecessors, and the memes they created or passed along replicate only through re-use, evolving in that reuse through the trial and error of application (or errors in transcription). The fairness of civilization demands that credit be given when credit is due, recognized through patents, copyrights, and academic integrity.

Plagiarism happens in a number of ways. Some people, unfamiliar with traditions of intellectual honesty and personal integrity, may resort to lazy plagiarism of an idea, paragraph, illustration, or even more. Other plagiarists rationalize that their “scholarly methods” allow cutting and pasting without attribution as “honest mistakes.” I’ve heard a number of these excuses even from a few otherwise respected colleagues when caught in the peer review process. On the other hand, when journalist James Stewart wrote his factual account, Blind Eye, he used a very widespread metaphor (a meme) for the dark and true story of educational supervisors who turned a blind eye to terrible misdeeds of an aberrant human being. [Blind Eye. 1999. Simon & Shuster.] Stewart, however, didn’t need to acknowledge Admiral Nelson for the meme, we would call that fair use, and such acknowledgement would border on pedantic explanation, when no explanation is necessary. Blind eye is now part of our language.

We all replicate memes, but gross plagiarism discovered occasionally during journal review makes me angry. It wastes the time of the reviewer and discredits our “brand” as scholars in the eyes of the public. We expect our resident graduates to mimic the best of what they observe and then to build on that to become their own originals in thought and action. Furthermore, we hope they will never turn a blind eye to plagiarism or other breaches of civility.

Ten.

Graduating urology trainees carry with them rich identification with their training programs and join unique cadres of fellow alumni that may reach back more than a century, as for Johns Hopkins, the first formal urology program. Most physicians identify reverently with their residency training sites. Human complexity allows us to find relevance in numerous contexts and, to that end, medicine as a generality for health care, is a greater belief system than mere occupation or specialty. More than most professions, medicine is central and essential to life and its fulfillment. We each begin life as patients, are among the rare species that routinely need assistance for childbirth, and we are the only species capable of complex therapies based on shared, verifiable, and accruing knowledge and technology. Medical practice is, above all, a performance art.

The art of medicine exists in the choices of excellence, kindness, attentiveness, education, innovation, skills, investigation, and fiduciary duty brought to the daily work of clinical care, and updated in daily practice through immersion in the soup of human culture. We extend that immersion through other forms of art, as the title of a book by Robert Adams provocatively claims. [Art Can Help. Yale University Press, 2017.] Visual, musical, and other performance arts inspire thought, admiration, criticism, inquiry, and further creativity. The arts help us answer our continuous tests for relevance as trainees, new graduates, and old hands in urology.

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts this July, 2018.

David A. Bloom
University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

Kennedy’s speech. When you listen to a recording it differs somewhat from this official printed version.

“I want to express my thanks to you, as a graduate of the Michigan of the East, Harvard University.
I come here tonight delighted to have the opportunity to say one or two words about this campaign that is coming into the last three weeks.
I think in many ways it is the most important campaign since 1933, mostly because of the problems which press upon the United States, and the opportunities which will be presented to us in the 1960s. The opportunity must be seized, through the judgment of the President, and the vigor of the executive, and the cooperation of the Congress. Through these I think we can make the greatest possible difference.
How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can! And I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the effort must be far greater than we have ever made in the past.
Therefore, I am delighted to come to Michigan, to this university, because unless we have those resources in this school, unless you comprehend the nature of what is being asked of you, this country can’t possibly move through the next 10 years in a period of relative strength.
So I come here tonight to go to bed! But I also come here tonight to ask you to join in the effort…
This university…this is the longest short speech I’ve ever made…therefore, I’ll finish it! Let me say in conclusion, this University is not maintained by its alumni, or by the state, merely to help its graduates have an economic advantage in the life struggle. There is certainly a greater purpose, and I’m sure you recognize it. Therefore, I do not apologize for asking for your support in this campaign. I come here tonight asking your support for this country over the next decade.
Thank you.”
Senator John F. Kennedy
October 14, 1960

Rules, boundaries, and stories

Posted by dabloom

DAB What’s New June 1, 2018

Rules, boundaries, & stories

3722 words

One.

Colors explode as summer opens up in June around Ann Arbor. The visuals are unsurpassed in the UM Nichols Arboretum Peony Garden, adjacent to Mott Children’s Hospital. The garden is a few years short of a century old and derives from Dr. WE Upjohn’s flower collection (pictures above and below, May 29, 2018).

Schools let out in June and summer vacation begins for most students north of the equator, echoing our agrarian history when children needed to be free to work on family farms. Today, farms don’t depend on child labor and most schoolchildren come from urban/suburban homes, the rural: urban ratio having flipped in the last 150 years. In 1870, 25.7% of the US population (38.5 million) was urban and 74.3% was rural, while by 1990 the ratio was 75.2% urban and 24.8% rural (population 248.7 million) and the trend continues, although summer vacation still rules in most schools and workplaces. [Table 4 US Census Data 1993.]

Doctors in training don’t get summers off, they have full 12 month cycles of education, with one random month for vacation, and our new cohort begins its turn next month here in Ann Arbor. [Above: Grand Rounds.] Time has framed graduate medical education in urology since the formalization of the American Board of Urology in 1935. Urology trainees at Michigan spend five years of postgraduate training after medical school, shorter than my time of residency at UCLA, although residents today are increasingly likely to put in additional years for fellowship training. The idea of “duty hour” limitation was a reaction to a few bad training programs that exploited residents, and the 80-hour work week is the national standard for residents in training. Another quantitative constraint is the concept of minimum numbers of specific operative procedures.

A qualitative dimension of regulation, educational milestones, was implemented within the last decade. Milestones reflected the enticing idea that GME should not routinely progress only according to clock, calendar, and case numbers, but according to acquisition of skills. The increased burden of administrative time and paperwork to document milestones, however, has been unmatched by any demonstrable value for trainees or programs and, if common sense prevails, milestones will likely get swapped out for another idea or experiment. Nonetheless, it is clear that time and numbers alone should not be the only measures of residency education.

Our new GME cohort. Residents Kathryn Marchetti from UM, Kyle Johnson from University of South Carolina, Javier Santiago from Baylor Medical School, and Roberto Navarrete from Wake Forest School of Medicine. Fellows Giulia Lane from University of Minnesota (FPMRS) and Jeffrey Tosoian from Johns Hopkins Hospital (SUO). New Faculty: Bryan Sack from Boston Children’s Hospital and Courtney Streur who completes her pediatric urology fellowship both join our Pediatric Urology Division. Kristin Chrouser has joined our faculty this year from the University of Minnesota in NPR and will be mainly at the VA.

Two.

Time, curiously, has no role in baseball, the game of summertime. The sport has no relation to a clock – rather milestones of innings, runs, and outs mark the game’s progress. In this, baseball lends itself to being the ideal summer sport, unfettered by time and limited only by accumulation of three failures or “outs” and innings unless bad weather intervenes or until it gets too dark to play.

Baseball at Night, a painting by Morris Kantor on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, shows a minor-league game in West Nyack, NY, around 1934. Stadium lighting was a rarity then, given the long days of summer when play could continue until dark, although twilight made the game tenuous. Stadium lights shifted quickly from novelty to necessity and major league teams have played deliberate night games since 1935.

It’s hard to imagine baseball or any other sport without limits and rules, even if arbitrary or parochial, such as the designated hitter rule that now applies to one major league but not another. Rules matter and when different leagues play each other, they find it necessary to have rules that supervene their particular league rules. Rules create fair playing fields, allowing games to go forward and conclude peacefully.

Rules are equally essential for other social activities, organizations, and governments. The USA has the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The State of Michigan has its own constitution and laws, including term limits that guarantee frequent refreshment of the state legislature, but at the expense of deep institutional knowledge of the state and its components. The University of Michigan has its Regent’s Bylaws and Standard Practice Guide, as well as Michigan Medicine’s own sets of Bylaws. In all of these we rely on consensus for decisions, achieved casually in daily operations, more formally in committees (using Robert’s Rules of Order), and more broadly by public voting.

Three.

Communication skills are a pre-requisite for medical practice in both the essential transactions of direct patient care and in the complex team play of modern specialty medicine. [Above in foreground, Brent Williams, Professor of Internal Medicine, communicating with Michael Giacalone, Jr., Chief Medical Officer of the Hamilton Community Health Network in Flint.] Listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills are taught with variable degrees of success in elementary schools up through college, but medical practice demands more vocabulary and capabilities. Medical students, it is said, double the size of their vocabularies.

The traditional algorithm of healthcare starts with listening to the concerns of patients and then probing for additional information to construct a medical history, including relevant comorbidities and circumstances. Patients are physically examined and data is assembled into coherent narratives. Diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy derive from those stories in which authenticity and accuracy are assumed.

Modern electronic systems impose new communication challenges. Email and texting are immediate and convenient, but lack the human factors of facial cues, thoughtfulness, and social grace. Electronic medical records (EMRs) constrain work flows to templates and replace human narratives with check lists, pop-up choices, keyboard entries, and cut-and-paste phrases. The actions of data entry detract from listening, looking, and communicating with patients. Healthcare processes today do not prioritize stories, and it seems to me that appreciation of the art of the story lies at the heart of excellent clinical care. It’s no great leap of faith to claim that the art of authentic storytelling and story construction is the basis of most human relations, from compelling stories around campfires to A3 storytelling in lean process engineering. Truth and authenticity matter. Listening to them and weaving them are art forms.

Four.

Physician-author William Carlos Williams appeared on these pages earlier this spring and since then I’ve been thinking of the different contexts in which physicians write, and first and foremost, physicians write the stories of their patients.

Williams, you may recall, was the author of Spring and All of which a recent edition included an introduction by C. D. Wright comparing Williams to an earlier poet from New Jersey, Walt Whitman: “Like Whitman, he [Williams] would gradually come to a great human understanding, an apprehension that eluded most of his peers.” [Spring and All. WC Williams. New Directions Book, 2011.]

We pursue that greater human understanding on a daily basis, working in medicine, through stories learned and experiences gained, patient-by-patient. The dilemmas of patients are understood in terms of their stories, that must be heard, elucidated, and constructed from evidence and reasoning on the part of those who undertake the responsibility for helping. Stories are important to people, and we dignify them with our attention.

Electronic medical records are poor platforms for authentic narratives. The construction of narratives in the minds of physicians and the translation to visible words in some medium is a core element of the profession of medicine, framing the response of the care-giver in terms of advice, reassurance, therapy, and prognosis. This is the central organizing feature of the doctor-patient relationship, comprising the daily shop-talk of medical practice. A story must be accurate, with true facts, but also authentic, in reflecting circumstances and co-morbidities (an economist might call these externalities) framing the “present illness” and creating a context for further conversation and therapy. In my experience, an authentic and empathetic story only fully emerges after the history, physical exam, and further discussion with patient and family.

My own clinic notes were once written or dictated well-after the clinical visit when the story was relatively complete and coherent. The reduction of clinical notes to formulaic elements such as the SOAP format (subjective, objective, assessment, and plan) or the E&M format (Evaluation & Management: chief complaint, history of present illness, review of systems, etc.) fits computer entry systems nicely, but has disrupted the traditional medical work-flow that create stories.

It is challenging to find the words to describe this fundamental type of medical writing whether in narratives or EHR. Quotidian medical communication seems to fit, even though not everyone is familiar with the use of quotidian for daily or routine. Quotidian communication must be accurate, truthful, and authentic to each patient. Most healthcare workers are writers and their products are stories of patients. A brief piece in The Lancet by Roger Kneebone called “The art of conversation” expresses the idea of the clinical conversation that we have clumsily called “taking a history.” Kneebone expressed his thoughts more elegantly than I have, so I’ll just quote two sentences and refer you to the rest. [The Lancet. 391:731, 2018.]
“A conversation is a one-off live performance that can never be repeated. Its essence is its evanescence, and attempts to capture in writing are as thin as reading the script of a play or film.”

Five.

Stories suffuse all types of medical writing. Scientific writing for journals, grants, or textbooks is the bedrock of healthcare research and progress. Just as with stories of patients, this writing is predicated on accuracy, and clarity is enhanced when a meaningful story is constructed from the science. Medical journalism, another form of medical writing, communicates to the public about medical science and practice. Medical memoir is another important genre, also written for the public but usually as personal storytelling or essays.

William Carlos Williams and others divert into creative reflections through prose and poetry. These writers mainly tell stories they create, often based on authentic experiences, but with “literary license.” Many of these physician-writers venture into fiction at the other end of the spectrum of medical writing, although this too requires authenticity in that stories revolve around individual experiences, conflicts, tensions, issues, and environments that are genuine to the reader’s senses. The fictions may involve other species or galaxies, as with the work of Michael Crichton, but if the stories are well-crafted they contribute to that greater authentic human understanding. To summarize medical writing variants: a.) the daily writing of clinical practice, b.) scientific writing, c.) medical journalism, d.) medical memoir, e.) creative reflections, and f.) fiction.

We are a species of stories and understand ourselves through stories far better than through data. That greater human understanding is accessed through narrative better than through numbers. The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, in his 2017 Nobel Prize Lecture, praised the “… quiet private sparks of revelation …” to be found in stories. “Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings. That they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides.” [Ishiguro. My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs. AE Knopf. NY 2017.]

Six.

A pig story. It doesn’t take much to disturb a comfortable status quo or otherwise disrupt peaceful human relations. An obscure story exemplifying this began on June 15, 1859 on San Juan Island, a place east of Vancouver Island where both the United States and Great Britain claimed sovereignty, after the Oregon Treaty of June 15, 1846, exactly 13 years earlier. [Below: blue Haro Strait boundary favored by US, red Rosario Strait favored by Britain, green compromise proposal. Copyright Derek Hayes, Historical Atlas of the Pacific Northwest. Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 1999.]

Peaceful co-existence remained in play until a British pig, owned by Hudson’s Bay Company employee Charles Griffin, wandered onto an American farm to eat some potatoes. This wasn’t the first transgression and Lyman Cutlar, the American farmer, shot and killed the trespassing pig. Cutler’s offer of $10 compensation was refused and the British threatened to arrest him. Sixty-six American soldiers under the command of Captain George Pickett were dispatched to the island to prevent British forces from landing. The British countered, bringing three warships offshore, soon escalating to five ships, 70 guns, and 2140 men. American forces then swelled to 461 men with 14 cannons, as diplomacy failed and the dispute escalated into The Pig War. The British governor of Vancouver Island ordered Rear Admiral Robert Baynes to land his marines on San Juan Island, but Baynes wisely refused to further escalate the “squabble over a pig” and the war remained bloodless, aside from the porcine tragedy.

In October, President Buchanan sent General Winfield Scott to resolve the crisis and negotiations resulted in an agreement that the British could occupy the north half and the Americans the south with each side allowed up to 100 troops pending further formal agreement. No wall was built, and in 1872, a full 13 years after the ill-fated pig, an international commission led by Kaiser Wilhelm I, decided that the entire island should fall under American control and so it remains.

Seven.

Henry Martyn Robert was one of the 66 American soldiers stationed on San Juan Island under Pickett’s leadership. It’s hard to know how he felt about his mortal jeopardy over the cause of a pig, but it’s a good thing the conflict remained bloodless and Robert went on to bigger things. Born in Robertville, South Carolina, he grew up in Ohio where his family moved due to their opposition to slavery. Robert’s father, Reverend Joseph Thomas Robert, would later become the first president of Morehouse College (1871-1884). Henry went to West Point and graduated fourth in his class in 1857, becoming a military engineer and building the fortifications on San Juan Island in 1859. He remained with the North during the Civil War, attending to defenses around Washington, Philadelphia, and New England Harbors. After the war, he served the Army Division of the Pacific from 1867-1871, then developed ports in Wisconsin and Michigan, later improved harbors in New York and Philadelphia, constructed locks and dams in Tennessee, and performed more civil engineering pertaining to the Mississippi River and Hurricane Isaac in Galveston. He died in 1923 and is buried at Arlington. [Below: Brigadier General Henry Martyn Robert, Wikipedia.]

Although Robert’s military service was significant, we remember him today for his civil engineering of practical rules for human interaction. These came about in 1876 after losing control of a church meeting he was leading in New Bedford, Massachusetts when it erupted over abolitionist views. Robert blamed his ineptitude for the fiasco and decided to teach himself how to run a meeting. His study of the procedures of the House of Representatives led to his Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies. He wrote:
“One can scarcely have had much experience in deliberative meetings of Christians without realizing that the best of men, having wills of their own, are liable to attempt to carry out their own views without paying sufficient respect to the rights of their opponents.”

Robert’s world was framed by his gender and faith, but his rules have endured because they are independent of his particularities. Robert’s Rules of Order apply to almost any human gathering and, like the rules of baseball, Robert’s Rules level the playing field and allow the game to go forward. [“Historical Vignette 038 – An Army Engineer Brought Order to Church Meetings.” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – Office of History. November 2001. Retrieved 2015-12-02.] His rules offer protocols for civilized and democratic behavior.

Eight.

Michigan hosted its first Teeter Symposium last month, focusing on bladder cancer in honor of our Ann Arbor friend Bob Teeter, who died a decade ago from bladder cancer in spite of radical cystectomy. [Above, Bob and Betsy Teeter; below, Teeter Laboratory Plaque.]

Since then, knowledge and therapy of bladder cancer have increased by a quantum leap, although more leaps are necessary to obliterate the pain, suffering, and mortality of that disease. The day-long event, organized by Alon Weizer, featured 2 guest speakers and held an attentive audience that topped 50, with excellent talks and superb discussions. The event fulfills one of the items on my bucket list as department chair and honored not just Bob and his surgeon Jim Montie, but also some generous gifts for laboratory investigation that we gained after Bob passed away.

The first guest lecturer, Thomas Bender, MD, PhD (above) from Dow Chemical, spoke about the Health Hazard Evaluation Program for former employees of a chemical plant that had been closed in 2002, but Dow later acquired its parent company, Morton, in 2009. As I sat in the audience, wondering how to link this month’s Matula Thoughts to the Teeter Symposium, Dr. Bender said a magic word: Paterson. That’s where the chemical plant had been since 1929. Paterson, New Jersey, was the home of William Carlos Williams.

The next invited speaker, Elizabeth Plimack MD, MS, Chief of Genitourinary Medical Oncology at Fox Chase Cancer Center, grew up in Ann Arbor. Her parents and mentor Richard Swartz were on hand to hear her excellent talk Immunotherapy and Beyond. In attendance was Monica Liebert (Nesbit 1984 below), now retired, but still working in our laboratories. Monica developed many bladder cancer cell lines in her heyday and these are still utilized in our research efforts.

Our own Khaled Hafez (below, Nesbit 2004) closed the event with a superb talk on Clinical Management of Patients with Locally Advanced Bladder Cancer, a topic close to his heart and emblematic of his skill set, as he is surely one of the best in the world at this craft.

Nine.

The AUA annual meeting last month in San Francisco featured the usual strong Michigan presence. San Francisco was also the site in 2010 where the picture of our inaugural chair, Jim Montie (Faculty Nesbit 1995), was taken. In addition to turning over a very strong group of faculty and department, in 2007 when the current departmental administration began, Jim turned over a positive team culture, rather than a “me-me-me” culture. Jim not only remained relevant to the department, but remains a keen participant and a role model of leadership.

Looking through those 2010 Nesbit reception pictures, I found a picture of the late and truly great Cornell Urology Chair, Darracott Vaughan, flanked by Jennifer Anger of UCLA and Hunter Wessells, chair at the University of Washington in Seattle (below).

But now back to 2018.

Above: Emilie Johnson, Nesbit 2011, with her iconic mentor from Boston, Alan Retik. Below: Julian Wan, Nesbit 1990, at one of his podium appearances, knocking it out of the park.

[Below: Music reception with Khurshid Ghani, Faculty Nesbit 2013, & David Miller, Nesbit 2005.]

The Nesbit reception this year at the Hotel Vitale on Mission Street hosted around 100 alumni, friends, and current team of the Urology Department. Below, a partial view of the crowd.

[Above: Damon Davis, Nesbit 2007. Brian Sack will start with us in pediatric urology this summer. Kristin Chrouser joined us this winter from Minneapolis and is centered at the VA. Below: Irene Crescenze current fellow FPMRS, Cheryl Lee, Nesbit 1997, now chair at Ohio State, Bert Chen, Nesbit 2006.]

[Above: Stu Wolf, Faculty Nesbit 1996, now in Austin, Udit Singhal PGY 2, Alon Weizer Faculty Nesbit 2005, Bunmi Olapade-Olaopa Nesbit, 2000. Below; Betty Newsom, Nesbit 1990, Bart and Amy Grossman, Nesbit 1977.

[Above: Lynda Ng, Nesbit 2005 and Jerilyn Latini, Faculty Nesbit 2003. Below: Steve & Faith Brown, friends of Michigan.]

[Above: Tom Stringer, Dept Urology Florida, Barry Kogan, Nesbit 1981 and Chair Albany. Below: Hugh Flood, Nesbit 1991, of Clonlara, County Clare, Ireland. Below: Simpa Salami, Nesbit 2017 & guest Mohamed Jalloh of Dakar, Senegal.]

Ten.

Boundary matters. A few months past the JAMA column, A Piece of My Mind, came from Jeffrey Milstein at Penn Medicine [Milstein. The envelope. JAMA. 319:23, 2018] and detailed his office visit with a 70-year-old patient who carried a large white envelope, assumed to be “outside records.” Most of us get these, not infrequently, indicating that a second or third opinion is expected. On the occasion of this particular visit, the details were those of a 32-year old son who had recently passed away due to cancer. The envelope contained a stack of records with an obituary on top. The patient first wanted to talk about his son and then the course of his disease, tests, hospitalizations, treatments, and emotional toll. Then, after “a long moment of silence” the patient explained that he himself had not been to a physician in years, but needed to tell his son’s story before committing to his own care. The clock had run down by then and “the time for the visit” was over leaving nothing that could be documented in the EHR about the patient himself. The author noted “so another visit must be scheduled.”

So, it seems medical care today has tight boundaries of time and information. Boundaries for nations, sports, politics, education, business, are important, but some are more important than others. The Pig War, a foolish dispute, easily could have escalated to bloodshed, leaving us no Robert’s Rules. Rules and boundaries in sports allow games to proceed fairly and end peacefully. Some boundaries in health care are tight and timeless, as evidenced in the Hippocratic Oath or as shamefully dishonored by occasional bad actors. The constraints of the EHR are self-inflicted wounds of the business of medicine, and should be viewed with minor contempt and never honored at the expense of a patient.

Baseball, timeless as it is, nonetheless must be somewhat mindful of the clock. Some fans may have babysitters, while transportation drivers and other workers are paid by the hour. The number of pitches thrown is a clock of a sort. Still, the essence of the game is indifferent to time. The same is true for conversations with patients. Life and schedules are much easier when each patient’s visit goes according to clockwork precision, but the essential transaction of the crucial conversations not infrequently runs afoul of anticipated timed encounters. These conversations are unique in the human repertoire and can have the most profound implications. Skilled clinicians know when and how to diplomatically crowd the later patients, run through lunch, or regroup with an expansive patient later in the day or soon thereafter. Such is the art of medicine.

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts this June, 2018.
David A. Bloom
University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

Matula Thoughts July 7, 2017

Posted by dabloom

DAB What’s New July 7, 2017

The Fourth, stories, & art

3789 words

This commentary from the University of Michigan Department of Urology is sent out on the first Friday of each month in two versions, the email What’s New publication and the web posting matulathoughts.org. Matula is an ancient term for diagnostic flasks once used to inspect urine.

One.

July delivers a new cadre of interns/residents to hospitals around the country in the midst of divisive national controversy over healthcare. Momentary acronyms – ACA, MACRA, MIPS, AHCA, BCRA, etc. – rivet public attention, just as the next acronyms de jour will do a few years hence. Whatever paradigms and regulations spill out of Washington, the daily clinical work of healthcare, education of our next generation, and expansion of knowledge and technology will continue. New house officers leaping out of their starting gates this month may scarcely notice the regulatory nuances and social policy debates. I hardly noticed such matters at a similar time in my life in 1971, but today the impact of healthcare legislation and regulation seems increasingly important. These matters, furthermore, are deeply linked to the principles celebrated this past week, because foremost in America’s ongoing republican experiment is belief in human rights and self-determination and these are inextricable from health.

July 4^th represents a pause of personal freedom and relaxation for most Americans. In addition to the general right of freedom, personal freedom requires a shared sense of social justice built on laws specific to given nations, societies and localities, such as speed limits in school zones, zoning rules, or sales taxes, yet aligned with universal human rights. Not all local laws meet the bar of social justice, examples are voting restrictions, sedition or blasphemy laws, childhood marriage, and eugenic sterilization. A book on the document that made the Fourth of July possible, Our Declaration written in 2014 by Danielle Allen, dissected The Declaration of Independence word-by-word, examined the milieu in which it was constructed, and distilled the underlying principles in its second paragraph (“We hold these truths to be self-evident …”) down to three “truths” after accounting for punctuation and syntax:

all people are equal in being endowed with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, among others;
humans build governments to secure these rights and political legitimacy rests upon the consent of the governed;
when governments fail to protect these rights, people have a right to revolt. [Our Declaration. Liveright Publishing Corp. NY. 2014. 153.]

Fireworks2

[Fireworks, Barton Hills 2017]

Two.

The Declaration, read from a strict originalist or textualist perspective, or even interpreted from a common-sense viewpoint, places healthcare soundly within all three of those “inalienable rights.” Life speaks for itself, from birth through childhood and adulthood navigating the hazards of trauma, disease, and disability. Liberty is the matter of self-determination, a basic tenant of our nation and democracy. This is the freedom to make judgments, speak freely, pursue education, choose careers, or adopt life styles. Liberty requires personal independence and mobility, assets that logically depend upon health. The writers of The Declaration were specific in selecting pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right. The word, happiness, appears twice in the second paragraph of The Declaration. Happiness may have had a subtly different meaning 241 years ago, but it is likely that the Committee of Five charged by Congress to write The Declaration (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston) did not intend a trivial or hedonistic sense. They recognized that people, individually and equally, shared the right to pursue happiness as they themselves determined that happiness and government was intended to be in service to its people: “…Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

The Lancet last month included a relevant statement from a World Health Organization Working Group, speaking for health and human rights of women, children, and adolescents, but applying equally to all human beings and expressing the principles of The Declaration. The particular vulnerability of women, children, and adolescents throughout most of the world is a tragic reality built on countless stories, known and unknown. The Working Group comment extends beyond its particular portfolio because all human beings are vulnerable to catastrophes of climate, geology, famine, war, oppression, violence, economics, and biology.

“The powerful interplay between health and the human rights of women, children, and adolescents forms the cornerstone of the global development agenda. When their right to health is upheld, their access to all other human rights is enhanced. The corollary holds true. When their right to health is denied, the impacts inhibit their exercise of other human rights, undermining their potential …” [Halonen T, Jilani H, Gilmore K, Bustreo F. The Lancet. 389:2087-2089, 2017]

Three.

House officers and fellows explain their attraction to medical careers, at least in part, by belief in social justice and the opportunity to help people. Medical school debt, duty hours, documentation-compliance, RVUs, and personal well-being dampen those original attractors. Acrimonious debates on healthcare legislation center around views of healthcare as a right as opposed to healthcare as a commodity and personal responsibility. The words right and responsibility require deeper consideration, for example in a recent radio interview Tom DeLay, former U.S. Representative from Texas (1979-1983, 1985-2006) and House Majority Leader (2003-2005) stated he doesn’t believe that health is a right, but rather a responsibility. [Interview on NPR with Jeanine Herbst March 22, 2017.] His point that government has no “constitutional role in health insurance” is accurate from a textual Constitutional perspective, however to reduce the generality of healthcare to the particularity of health care insurance is neither logical nor helpful in the national debate. I use the DeLay quote only to introduce the consideration of healthcare as a right, not because of any claim to healthcare expertise or salutary wisdom regarding social justice he might offer.

Ian & Ted

[House officers Matt Lee & Ian McLaren choosing freedom over local rules.]

The truth in healthcare is close to home for most people. Health care involves each of us from antenatal days to final days of life. It is not productive to frame the national healthcare debate in the context of healthcare insurance, as insurance is only one method to fund a nation’s healthcare needs. Viewing the enormous panorama of national healthcare from only the insurance perspective makes no more sense than expecting the motor vehicle insurance sector to cover all motor vehicle costs including purchase, gasoline, cleaning, maintenance, safety inspections, collision repair, and damage from acts of nature, as well as highway safety, research and development, petrochemical sourcing, and traffic control.

The insurance industry, arguably, began at Lloyds Coffee House in 1686 of London as a source of shipping news and later marine insurance to mitigate catastrophic risks of sea commerce (above c. 1800 unknown cartoonist. Wikipedia). Insurance did not cover all expenses of sea trade, it covered true catastrophe, not operating costs, torn sails, or men overboard. The origin and evolution of American health insurance and the co-mingling of it with employment status is a story with many twists and turns, and federal involvement added further complexity. The result is an intertwined morass of funding streams and regulations, kinda looking like the Lloyd’s cartoon above. Rather than partisan ping pong, the solution to the national healthcare dilemma requires thoughtful bipartisan consideration of a framework to define rational public and private domains, responsibilities, and funding.

Four.

Debate, essential to democracy, requires free speech and an open society that embraces education and cosmopolitanism. Conversations that challenge opinions, introduce ideas, and work toward consensus are fundamental to civic life as well as just and constructive public policies. This is how democracy works best, whether on national stages or in local workplaces.

Point counterpoint

We bring debate to Michigan Urology with point-counterpoint sessions at Grand Rounds when two residents square off with contrasting points of view to sway the rest of us. Our discussions are more prosaic than debates of health care as a right or commodity, because we are focused on learning urology. For example, Parth Shah recently offered the opinion that radical cystectomy should be performed by traditional open technique while Zach Koloff argued for the robotic platform (pictured above). They reinforced their positions with historical perspective and current data, deploying classic elements of argument. The impeccable characters of Zach and Parth represented ethos, their data supported logos of their claims, and considerations of pain, costs, complications, learning curves, and fiduciary responsibility bore pathos in the traditional rhetoric triad. The hospital conference room, newly refinished, was pretty much at capacity with about 45 in attendance including the usual 4-6 lurking at the back of the room with coffee and opportunity for stealthy egress.

Five.

The recurring biologic experiment of civilization evolved occasionally from the social networks animals depend upon to maintain each generation. A few eusocial species, if I may flip back to the writings of E.O. Wilson, create societies that successfully and become durable “megaspecies” in and of themselves. Wasp, bees, and ants are most notable, using chemicals or motions for communication. Specific signals trigger unified mass social actions such as directional movement, panic, or war. Ants, for example, manage their colonies with pheromones.

Fire_ants_01

[Above: marching fire ants, Stephen Ausmus http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/graphics/photos/dec04/k11622-1.htm]

The human advantage with civilizations is an ability to build and change them over centuries through communications transcending many generations and even millennia, allowing learning, creativity, and innovation. Individuals apply critical thinking, reexamine assumptions, experiment, analyze methodologically, and cooperate for durable change, passing information along to successive generations. Individuals naturally have individual points of view and debate allows cooperation and learning, leading to resolution, reconciliation, and centrism. A strong center is essential for robust civilization, but just as ants and bees, humans are subject to mass manipulation by signals that, usually for us are money, ideology, propaganda, quackery, or charisma.

Six.

Conspiracy theories attract and entertain. We are drawn to them, being hardwired to favor stories that fit our predispositions or play to our anxieties. Conspiracy ideas provide lazy mental short-circuits that displace critical thinking and rational re-examination of assumptions. Some conspiracies, of course, prove authentic, although my limited experience in the military and as an amateur student of history, is that major conspiracies are unlikely to remain long-concealed. Democracy is leaky due to First Amendment protections of free speech. Rare exceptions, such as campaigns that “loose lips sink ships” or the Manhattan Project, demonstrate that free society can maintain secrecy for critical intervals on rare occasions when the need is essential and widely understood. The rarity of these exceptions preserves their exceptionalism. When a regime tilts toward authoritarian rule and censorship becomes common, democracy slides away.

It is not wrong that news sources are polarized. The left side of the political spectrum reads left-sided sources while the right reads right-sided sources, and everyone blends opinions, facts, and stories to support their myths and to ascertain facts. The middle of the political spectrum is where democracy finds its balance, but sources of news and opinion that the center trusts are uncertain and conspiracy fears can spread like viruses.

400px-RoswellDailyRecordJuly8,1947

On this day in 1947 Major Jesse Marcel, intelligence officer of the 509^th Bomber Group at Roswell Army Air Field inspected a debris field where an incident was claimed to have happened. [Above: Roswell Daily Record, July 8, 1947] Stories still emanate from that incident, blending facts and myths with no commonly-held authoritative version, but only colorful conspiracy theories. Those of us who grew up with the original X-Files series (1993-2002), centered around Roswell-type mysteries, are familiar with the haunting tune and the invitation to further inquiry: “the truth is out there.” The quest for truth is humanity’s big challenge.

All living creatures discern information from ambient noise. We humans create stories out of information and from the stories invent myths, models, and theories to derive meaning and utility. Careful analysis, by verification or scientific testing, pulls truth from facts, myths, models, and theories, nonetheless, truth remains elusive. The intersection of news and entertainment risks confusion and credibility as when the radio broadcast War of the Worlds in 1938 by Orson Wells created a minor panic for listeners who tuned in after its introduction as a radio play and thought that Martians were actually invading Earth. When trusted news anchors portray their roles in TV and film fiction they diminish their credibility. Worse, deliberate fake news tilts political opinion and instigates conspiracy fears that cannibalize civilized society by devouring trust that is the currency of civilized people.

Seven.

Lapides copy 3

True facts. The story of Jack Lapides, former chief of urology here at Michigan, educator, and innovator (above) was briefly told in an obituary column his sister requested after he passed away. [New York Times. Nov 19, 1995] (The published version has a single typo, introduced by the newspaper that must have thought the reference to Charles Huggins was “Charles Higgins.”) Jack’s surgical accomplishments continue to show up in urology clinics around the world, illustrating the long reach of an innovative surgeon. Surgeons fix problems, and one of Jack’s surgical innovations was the vesicostomy, a solution for bladder and sphincteric dysfunction by making an opening on the abdominal wall.

The concept and practice of urinary diversion preceded Lapides by many decades with the standard of care for neuropathic bladder in the mid-20^th century consisting of suprapubic cystotomy, ureterosigmoidostomy, ureteroileostomy, cutaneous ureterostomy or nephrostomy. Lapides favored vesicostomy to eliminate urinary stasis, high pressures, and urethral incontinence, but standard ostomy devices were unreliable: “Initially, we employed the usual types of fecal colostomy devices for collecting the urine, but soon became disenchanted with the various appliances because of bulkiness, leaking of urine, skin reaction, malodor, and difficulty in changing the apparatus.” [Lapides J, Boyd R, Fellman SL. A urinary ileostomy device. J Urol. 1958. 79:353-355.] Lapides created a device utilizing a rubber ring with changeable collecting condoms, being rapidly replaceable, streamlined and more acceptable to patients. As it gained popularity it came to be known as the Lapides urinary ileostomy. [Lapides J, Ajemian EP, Lichtwardt JR. Cutaneous vesicostomy. J.Urol. 1960. 84:609-14.]

Pediatric urologists utilize vesicostomy occasionally. Keith Schneider, pediatric surgeon in New York, and John Duckett, pediatric urologist in Philadelphia, subsequently described vesicostomy techniques of their own, but these were mostly replaced by Lapides’s clean intermittent catheterization methods after 1971 and the reconstruction approaches of W. Hardy Hendren. We honor the Duckett and Lapides names with lectureships here in Ann Arbor in July, as the first academic events of the residency training season. I carry the Lapides name with my endowed professorship and Hardy (mentor to John Park) continues to be an inspiration and friend to many of us in Ann Arbor.

Eight.

Intersecting story. Last year our departmental office got a call from Peggy Hawkins of Chevy Chase, Maryland, who identified herself as the sister of a former Lapides patient in need of help. Her brother, we can call Larry, was living in Florida and dependent on a vesicostomy Lapides created in June, 1968, but Larry was having trouble obtaining stomal supplies. Peggy, recalling the name Lapides, contacted our office for help. I called Larry and we got him in touch with our UM stomal experts who found some solutions.

Peggy called back recently to tell me that Larry recently passed away and filled me in on Larry’s amazing story. She assures me that Larry would have been pleased to share the following details of his life, particularly the importance of his vesicostomy to him.

Born in 1943, Larry was the only son in a family with two sisters. Popular and athletic, he played football and ran track in high school. After graduation from college with a major in political science he joined the United States Army as a Second Lieutenant and married his girl-friend. Larry was sent to Vietnam with the 173^rd Airborne Brigade in 1967. The Tét Offensive changed his life. Launched on January 30, 1968 by 80,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces during the Tét lunar new year holiday, the offensive was a coordinated series of attacks on over 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. A mortar round that first day exploded just behind Larry causing tremendous concussive injury to his back and spinal cord with extensive shrapnel injuries, particularly to lung, liver, and upper extremities. The triage officer didn’t expect him to live, but Larry defied expectations and survived first to the field hospital, then to a general hospital in Japan, and next to Valley Forge Army Hospital in Pennsylvania, but with paraplegia and consequent lower urinary tract dysfunction that translated to sepsis and upper tract deterioration.

His medical condition continued to decline at Valley Forge and around this time a son was born. Larry separated from the Army in June, 1968 and was sent to the Ann Arbor VA that month where he came under the care of Jack Lapides who understood the deleterious nature of high pressures in the neurogenic bladder who explained that vesicostomy might extend Larry’s life another ten years, Peggy recalled. The procedure that June turned around Larry’s deteriorating clinical course and provided him another 48 years of independent life without urinary tract problems as long as he had access to stomal supplies.

After recovering from the operation and stabilization of his health Larry enrolled in law school in the fall of 1969, living in a nearby apartment with reasonable wheelchair access. With his Juris Doctorate he moved to Florida in 1972 mainly because of the flat terrain and more favorable climate, finding work in politics early on as an advocate for Veterans in Tallahassee. Larry received a Purple Heart and Bronze Star (above) with a “V” Device (for valor) in 1974. In 1978 he ran for public office and served 4 terms (1978-1986) in the Florida House of Representatives where he chaired the Veterans Affairs Committee and impacted a groundbreaking generic drug law. He was elected Dade County Commissioner 1988-1994 and sponsored nation’s first family leave ordinance (Miami-Dade employees 1992), helped the Miami community recover after Hurricane Andrew and found creative solutions to the influx of Haitian immigrants in Jackson Memorial Hospital and Dade County Public Schools. Larry served on the Board of Vietnam Veterans of America. His network of political friends included Bill Clinton and Senator Tom Harkin, who introduced the Americans with Disabilities Act in the Senate. Larry’s son died at age 34 in 2002, leaving Larry 2 grandchildren – a granddaughter who teaches kindergarten and a grandson currently serving in the Army. His step-son works for the U.S. Secret Service.

During his 48 years with a stoma Larry was able to engage socially and professionally. Never in those 48 years did he have a UTI, upper tract problems, or stomal problems, although access to stomal appliances, necessary for daily peace of mind, became increasingly difficult as the market for them disappeared. Larry died recently from multisystem problems, but without urinary tract issues. He will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Nine.

The Tét Offensive of 1968 continued through February. Although a military defeat for the North it intensified the American public opposition to the war and created a crisis in the Johnson administration. The “credibility gap” that had become apparent in 1967 widened in 1968, the year US casualties peaked with 16,592 soldiers killed. In February that year the US Selective service called for a draft of 48,000 men and on February 28 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stepped down from office. McNamara had been a long-time college friend of my UCLA urology professor Willard Goodwin and coincidentally lived in Ann Arbor for a short period as president of Ford Motor Company. As early as mid-1966 McNamara, as defense secretary believed that “there was no reasonable way to bring the war to an end soon” and that we should quickly find a political solution with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. These were marginal opinions in the Johnson administration. [McNamara. In Retrospect. 1995. P 262] Many conspiracy theories abounded about the Vietnam War and some still resonate, but McNamara’s book lays out the story clearly, explaining the mistakes of management, failures of duty, and sins of pride led to escalation of conflict and flew out of control. The Fog of War. Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, a film by Errol Morris and a book by James Blight and Janet Lang, explains the cautionary tale.

Ten.

Chang Lecture. Medicine without art is a commodity. Not to disparage commodities, we expect them to be dependable, available, and standard in quality. With health care however we prize human values of excellence, kindness, discernment, attention, discovery, innovation, and even virtuosity. For all of us as patients and families, our healthcare needs and expectations go beyond mere provision of commodities. Many services in medicine can be managed as commodities: blood pressure screenings, flu shots, blood draws, and dental hygiene are typical examples, although even these can be done artfully or not. The routine blood pressure check requires thoughtful matching of cuff to body size and a few minutes of relaxation that puts the recipient at ease. Any human performance can be given with care, enthusiasm, and art – or not.

My aunt Evelyn Brodzinski, an artist, once said “Art is anything that is choice” after I asked her “What is art?” I quote her definition often. Art consists of the choices we make in the performances we give, whether delivery of a job, doodling on paper, whistling a tune, writing an essay, taking a picture, drawing a blood sample, or doing a surgical procedure. Any vocation can and should be performed artfully. Universities have a duty to propel this aspiration in all their fields of study, and the artful provision of healthcare should be at the top of any list of fields. The study of art is the study of choices in the world.

Gibbes

[Above: Lawrence exhibit Gibbs Museum, Charleston, SC]

We began the Chang Lecture on Art and Medicine in recognition of this obligation of our university. Such a lecture could just as easily come out of any of the 30 departments in our Medical School. It could also have come from Michigan’s Department of Art History or School of Social Work. We brought it forward from the Department of Urology inspired by the linkage of art and medicine in the family of Dr. Cheng-Yang Chang, a urologist who trained and practiced at the University of Michigan, as well as founded a medical school in Taiwan and later practiced in Flint. His father, Ku-Nien Chang was a famous painter in China and Dr. Chang’s oldest son is a urologist in Albany NY, trained here in Ann Arbor under Ed McGuire. Dr. Chang’s youngest son is a financial analyst in Chicago and one of UM’s best alumni supporters. This year Dr. David Watts, a prominent gastroenterologist in San Francisco and nationally-known humanist, will give the Chang Lecture July 20, 5 PM, Ford Auditorium.

AAAF 2016

[Life and the pursuit of happiness on Liberty. Art Fair. 2016]

Thanks for reading What’s New and Matula Thoughts.

David A. Bloom

University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

Matula Thoughts. September 2, 2016.

Posted by dabloom

DAB What’s New Sept 2, 2016

Matula Thoughts. September 2, 2016. News & views.

3821 words

One. Summertime news. Yesterday was the beginning of meteorological autumn and tomorrow is Michigan’s first football game of the season, here at home with Hawaii. Ann Arbor days were hot this summer, but are getting shorter, although not so short yet since we can travel between home and work in daylight at least in one of the directions. [Above: the drive on Huron Drive] September was the seventh month in the old Roman calendar when March served as the first month of ten in the year (see April 1st Matula Thoughts). Calendar reform added January and February to create a 12-month year and September got demoted to the ninth month, but retained its historic name.

We had a good summer, overall, in spite of local, national, and worldwide tragedies admixt with the ongoing environmental degradation of which we are no longer innocent. Our particular geographic microcosm, however, has been mostly pleasant and constructive with the entry of new house officers, promotion of their seniors, incorporation of new fellows, and initiation of first year medical students. We enjoyed the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, Art Fairs, Chang-Duckett-Lapides lectureships, White Coat Ceremony, and lovely three-day weekends that come to an end with Labor Day on Monday. A few weeks back Mani Menon from Henry Ford Hospital gave a brilliant Grand Rounds talk on his remarkable achievement of translating radical prostatectomy to the robotic platform, and thus introducing a new paradigm of therapy worldwide (below: Mani Menon, Khurshid Ghani, Andy Brachulis). Stu Wolf had his last day a week ago and will now be doing his part to build a new medical school in Austin, Texas.

In mid-August we lost a wonderful colleague and pediatric surgeon, Dan Teitelbaum (pictured below), after a difficult struggle with brain cancer. Dan partnered with us in the Disorders of Sex Development program and was a world authority on pediatric gastrointestinal problems both clinically and in the research world. Dan was more than just a colleague, he was a kind, skilled, and reliable partner-in-care and his excellence made us better. We could always count on Dan. Brain cancer, all cancer, is an evil destroyer of the good things in life. We are making progress against cancers on many fronts, but not in time for Dan.

A road trip this summer to Toronto featured Sick Kids Hospital’s Gordon McLorie symposium for the latest news in pediatric urology. [Below: McLorie Symposium] The Olympics captured much attention during my visit north of the border and, flipping back and forth on television, it seemed that Canadian coverage favored more actual sports and news than broadcaster celebrities and opinions on American networks.

Bruce Hornsby & The Noisemakers appeared back in Ann Arbor at the Summer Festival one evening. Many of us (of a certain age) recall the classic song, The End of the Innocence, Hornsby wrote with Don Henley in 1989. At the Power Center Hornsby and the Noisemakers expanded the piece into an amazing long version with riffs, explorations, and pleasing dissonances. I wondered if the composers intended some reference to Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake in 1789 and 1794, but in any case the piece struck me more meaningfully this summer than when I first heard it years ago. Jeff Daniels joined the Hornsby ensemble for an encore and performed his new composition on the iconic environmentalist Henry David Thoreau.

Back in 2009 Daniels and E.O. Wilson received honorary degrees from The University of Michigan (pictured above). Wilson, above on left, is our planet’s most credible spokesman for biodiversity. Recognizing this at a dinner in their honor, Daniels commented self-effacingly something like: “I really don’t know why I am here, for after all, my claim to fame is a film called Dumb and Dumber.” In fact, both honorees are substantial contributors to society and they have comfortably crossed intellectual boundaries. Daniels’ work, for example in The Newsroom, not only entertains, but also speaks to the better nature of mankind, offering an example of a trustworthy television journalist navigating the challenges of corporate broadcasting. Wilson, on the other hand, successfully ventured out from his academic world with the novel, Anthill.

[Title page: Songs of Innocence and Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. 1826 edition. At Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK]

Two. Experience. A new season of academic medicine begins each September and renews the process of turning innocent medical school graduates into experienced urologists. Medical students cram our urology services to test out the idea of careers in urology and audition for 4 available PGY1 (intern) slots, while our residents quickly ascend their ladders of experience and our faculty hone their practices.

Above you see Julian Wan at Grand Rounds presenting awards to residents Duncan Morhardt, Amir Lebastchi, and Parth Shah for their achievements with consults in Julian’s innovative Tour de Consult. The next picture shows faculty and residents that same Thursday morning at 7 AM listening to talks from medical students. The newly redecorated conference room is a big improvement over its previous 1986 version, although we still run out of space.

Our residents, however, are enjoying ample private space in their new residents’ room we gained recently and which was significantly upgraded thanks to contributions by Jens Sönksen (Nesbit 1996) and a number of other alumni. [See picture on our matching departmental Instagram https://www.instagram.com/umichurology/, courtesy Pat Soter]

This autumn we expect 21 clinical clerks (six 4^th year medical students from UM and 15 from other medical schools) to rotate with us. The individual Grand Rounds presentations they make during their stints over the course of my career at Michigan get better and better in sophistication of presentation skills and subject mastery, indicating that the next generation of urologists should surpass us. Later this autumn a subset of our faculty will personally interview about 40 other students from a pool of 350 applicants. In December we will rank all applicants just as they will rank us, a computer will do the matching and by February we will know the names of our next 4 entering residents.

Autumn will also be busy with sectional and subspecialty conferences, national meetings of the American College of Surgeons and other organizations. Abstracts will be due for next year’s big clinical congress of The American Urological Association in Boston. Family life restructures for many of our faculty when children head back to school. Also this fall a presidential election will take place, so make arrangements now so you can vote on Tuesday, November 8. I’ve learned from sad experience that busy clinicians and staff cannot count on finding a voting window during election day unless they have made deliberate plans, like absentee ballots, far in advance. Unprepared, you may get lucky – or not.

Three.

Far from the town crier and printed circular, radio was a big step in the dissemination of news. Radio itself began in 19th century, arguably with the wireless telegraphy patent of Guglielmo Marconi in 1896, but the first tuning system, patented a century ago, brought choice and accessibility to the public. Ernst Alexanderson, an engineer for General Electric in Schenectady, New York, developed the selective tuning system. Station choices grew on AM radio [Above: vintage radio tuner c. 1920s, Wikipedia] and later with FM, thanks to generous regulation and commercial competition. When I spent a year training in Great Britain as a resident in 1976-77 only 4 radio choices were available on my radio, in addition to an off-shore “pirate” station, because government tightly controlled airwaves.

[Radio & Television Magazine X (2): June, 1939. NY: Popular Book Corporation]

Television portended the end of radio after the first public television broadcast in 1927 and color TV in the 1960s made the medium even more irresistible. The prophecy was wrong, however, as radio rebounded with multiple new consumer channels and TV became just the newer communication layer. Radio stations provided “narrow networks” of sports talk shows, partisan political commentary channels, business news stations, religious channels, local news, weather, and some splices to television channels. Reemergence of radio’s early variety shows appeared with Garrison Keillor and the ubiquity of NPR gave radio large new audiences; the final broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion this past July 2 completed its extraordinary 42-season run. Commercial satellite radio produced an explosion of new radio species for an astonishing range of human interests from Elvis to POTUS Politics. Cable TV ended the domination of broadcasting networks, although the proliferation of new television channels added only precious few of quality.

Radio and television “news”, however maintained a sense of integrity with trusted journalist/broadcasters such as Edward R. Murrow who told it clean and straight, in contrast to advertising or propaganda. At some point, however, the term “content” subsumed “news” and clarity began to vanish. Entertainment mingled with news broadcasts and trusted news broadcasters appeared in fictional stories further blurring the border between truth and fiction.

Podcasts, cable and satellite media, and other innovations offered content to seriously compete with network television and the movie industry. Home Box Office (HBO) produced its first original movie for cable TV in 1983 (The Terry Fox Story) and other memorable films and series followed including Breaking Bad (2008-2013) and The Newsroom (2012-2014) with Jeff Daniels who should inspire a future generation of good journalists. (What Game of Thrones inspires is not so clear). Personal phones, computers, and video streaming bring yet newer layers and innovations to communication, information, and entertainment. Mini-series binge-watching eroded prime time network television while Netflix’s video streaming expanded into a new model of content production. Abandoning the pilot and sequential release of episodes, House of Cards (2013) offered an entire series for immediate consumption. The bottom line: new communication technologies add new layers rather than replacing the older media.

Four.

Quorum sensing. A few months ago at Grand Rounds Alex Zaslovsky, representing the lab of Ganesh Palapattu, gave an excellent presentation showing how platelets communicate with tumor cells to help them metastasize.

A process much like bacterial quorum sensing seems to be occurring, and perhaps this type of communication is prevalent throughout all life forms, whether gaining a consensus in a microbial biome to release endotoxin or a majority in a society for an election or an action on an issue. Strictly speaking, quorum sensing is a matter of individual gene regulation in response to news of cell population density. In other words, gene expression is coordinated according to the size and needs of the population. In the larger sense, quorum sensing allows individuals, that by themselves may be insignificant, to become superorganisms. Bacteria thus act in congress like multicellular organisms and this process works in bigger species such as social insects, fish, mammals, and likely all biologic creatures in ways we have yet to understand. This phenomenon brings us back to the seminal work of E.O. Wilson who linked ant pheromones to sociobiology and then to human consilience.

Quorum sensing is basically a matter of getting news, that is acquiring information about the environment so as to change or maintain behaviors. Weather (temperature, humidity, and pressure) is a form of news, but news about other creatures (one’s own species and different ones) also has great relevance for the immediate and intermediate future. Just as people learn individualistically, they collect news idiosyncratically. A hurricane or a full solar eclipse in mid-day gets everyone’s attention, but most news we need or crave is more discrete, while the media we employ to collect it are many and increasing in variety. Newspapers, radio, television, personal computers, and smart phones expand human quorum sensing and newsgathering far beyond the wildest expectations of Gutenberg with his printing press. New forms of social media layer upon each other and get tested in the market. Michigan Urology has its regular What’s New email, web site, Facebook page, Twitter Account, Matula Thoughts blog, and will now test out a weekly Instagram photograph that we hope will attract not only viewing interest, but also contributions from the readership.

We started putting Matula Thoughts on a web site three years ago mainly as an archive and an alternate access because our What’s New email list was getting cumbersome. While we don’t know much of our ultimate email audience, due to multiple forwarding, the matulathoughts.org web site provides visibility of readership as seen in the snapshot below of the first 6 months of 2016.

Five. Thoreau away thoughts. Coming into work one day this summer I was listening to an audio book by Chris Anderson, the head of TED Talks, and had just come to his optimistic conclusion about mankind when I stepped out of my car on the Taubman lot and was offended by a bunch of pistachio nutshells someone had dumped on the deck. My first thought was “What jerk did this?” but after reconsidering I thought Why should I care?

After all I was wearing shoes and those shells weren’t going to hurt my feet. They don’t harm the environment, aside from minor aesthetic degradation, and even so some modern artist might consider the pattern a compelling expression of random human graffiti. Possibly I myself had been such a jerk making similar transgressions in the past, before my sensibilities (presumably) matured. No sharp demarcation exists between the clueless citizen and the clinically certified narcissist, although most of us can tell the difference at any moment. Another label for the parking lot perpetrator springing to mind was the less complimentary anatomical term for the gastrointestinal tract terminus, a word that has an important place in organizational theory (RI Sutton, The No Asshole Rule, The Hachette Book Group, 2007). Thanks to the ubiquitous cell phone camera I was able to record this minor breech of civility for a teaching opportunity. The lesson being that the environment is our nest, but general appreciation of its limits is poor, in spite of great thinkers from Lucretius to Henry David Thoreau to E.O. Wilson who have tried to raise our sensibility.

Thoreau was a curious fellow, best known for his Walden Pond seclusion, possibly because he didn’t consider himself very sociable. The above daguerreotype was taken in response to a request by Calvin R. Greene, a Thoreau disciple living in Rochester, Michigan. Greene began corresponding with Thoreau in January, 1856 and asked for a photographic image, that Thoreau initially denied, saying: “You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally – the stuttering, blundering, clodhopper that I am.” Greene’s persistence paid off and in June of that year Thoreau sat for three daguerreotypes at 50 cents each in Worchester, MA at the Daguerrean Palace of Benjamin Maxham. Henry David must have at least liked the third image, sending it to Greene, noting: “… which my friends think is pretty good – though better looking than I.” [Image and description, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC]

Six. News. It’s a nice coincidence that NEWS could be an acronym for north, east, west, and south. The reality, though, is that the English term arrived in the 14^th century as a plural form of “new” information. For 14^th century English village folk, relevant news included weather, gossip, crop issues, births & deaths, accidents, plague, and war. In turn over time town criers, newspapers, radio, and television carried news among villages, through cities, and across continents. A new profession arose as journalists pieced events together and investigated them to derive factual stories. Photographs and today’s video clips offer powerful encapsulations of news in images and voices. Aggregation of news and targeting it to audiences with narrow interests is not new, we saw it in People magazine, the Racing Form, and Popular Mechanics, but daily news aggregation on the internet compiles information on a global scale and devastated the business model of investigative journalism. The Newsroom attended to the tensions between regurgitated information, narrative truth, and corporate self-interest. Human quorum sensing is immeasurably more complex than that of E.coli, although the basic principles must be quite similar. The variety of ways to collect and disseminate news from quorum sensing to Instagram will continue to expand, and each of our growing number will adapt our own methods and devices to capture what we will.

[Ann Arbor newsboys c. 1890]

Seven. Urology news & Ig Nobel Thoughts. Later this month the 2016 Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony takes place at Harvard’s Sanders Theater (September 22) to introduce 10 prizewinners for accomplishments “that make people laugh then think.” We expect no winners from the ranks of UM Urology, although it is worth mentioning that one winner last year was a study of mammalian urination times that found “golden rule” wherein urination times ranged around 21 seconds regardless of the species or bladder volume. This work, published in PNAS (a curious acronymic homonym), begs further investigation to explore gender differences, age effects, and the relations to various pathologies such as BPH [Yang et al Proc Nat Acad Sci 111:11932, 2014]. Notably, the first reference in the paper was Frank Hinman, Jr.’s book On Micturition (1971). The Ig Nobelists, however, missed Hinman’s smaller limited edition book called The Art and Science of Piddling [Vespasian Press, San Francisco, 1999] Hinman (shown below) playfully censored the retromingent stream of the rhinoceros on the book cover. To what end this unusual direction of micturition has evolved remain unclear, but extinction may void the species before an explanation is discovered.

Eight. Photography. If you happen by the National Archives, as we did on a brief visit to Washington this summer, you might spot the Daguerre Memorial on Ninth Street by the Department of Justice. American sculptor Jonathan Scott Hartley (born in Albany, NY 1844, deceased 1912) produced the relief bust of Louis Daguerre honored by a female figure representing fame while a garland encircles the globe in homage to the universality of photography. Harley also made busts of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s friend and colleague.

Daguerreotypes transitioned to portable film cameras and now digital images on universal camera phones that allow great visibility of the particulars of the world. Visual images are fundamental to modern communication and newsgathering. Walking near the Daguerreotype monument we noticed a discarded snuff can in a planter box similar the pistachio shell arrangement shown earlier, further evidence that the great pageant of humanity marches forward and continues to leave its mark, although now subject to universal documentation.

A yearly photographic competition of The Lancet, called Highlights, further opens the door to the world’s cellphones and cameras. Last year’s contest yielded 12 winners detailing: a ruined hospital in western Syria, moments of patient care, community action, a poster showing health advantages of raised beds with mosquito nets, smoking prevention, Ebola hot zone management, road traffic accidents, cleft lip repair, and the politics of social justice. [Lancet. Palmer & Mullan. Highlights 2015: pictures of health. 386:2463, 2015]

Nine. A somber note. Last month this column concluded with reference to the Hiroshima bomb, an existential threat that has increased since 1945 by many orders of magnitude. There is little question what Henry David Thoreau, among many wise thinkers of the past and present would say on this matter of nuclear weapons: they must be contained and their spread prevented. Failing that, a doomsday scenario is not unlikely and only luck has prevented this from happening so far. A new book, My Journey to the Nuclear Brink by William Perry (US Secretary of Defense 1994 – 1997), explains our precarious situation better than anything else I’ve read. You can understand his point in a “Cliff’s Notes” fashion by going directly to Perry’s website, but his book is quite compelling and readable. Perry, currently emeritus professor at Stanford University and senior fellow at its Hoover Institution, founded the William J Perry Project in 2013(http://www.wjperryproject.org/), a non-profit organization intended to educate the public on the current dangers of nuclear weapons. Addressing close calls of the past, Perry reveals that the Cuban Missile Crisis came far closer to the brink that most people suspected, but for two unreported “mistakes” on both sides of the conflict (USA and Soviet Union) that prevented nuclear deployment. Today the risk is greater and more complex as the weapons are far more massive and numerous than 71 years ago over Hiroshima. Opportunities for accidents, terrorism, rogue nations, territorial disputes, or mistaken perceptions of “responsible” nations are too many to count.

[Above, Hiroshima before blast, above ground zero, with 1000 foot circles marked; below, after the explosion with not much left standing.]

Ten.

Cassandra. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a curious prophet, who turned out to be an ineffective communicator. Attempting to seduce her, Apollo gave her the power of prophecy, but when she refused his advances he spat into her mouth with the curse that no one would believe her prophecies. Prophecy skepticism has endured since her time. Right or wrong, but forecasts require consideration, especially when backed by information, whether in the form of news or other information. [Cassandra, in front of burning Troy, by Evelyn De Morgan, 1898]

The current likelihood of a nuclear incident is great and in recognition of this an exercise called Mighty Saber was held last year by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at Fort Belvoir, Virginia to simulate a detonation in a US city and trace the origin of the device. An article by Richard Stone in Science concluded: “… to have any chance of unraveling the details of a nuclear attack, investigators have to lay the scientific groundwork – while hoping it will never be needed.” [Stone. Science. 351:1138, 2016]

The world is full of danger and nuclear devices are but one of a number of catastrophic threats. This fact needs to be acknowledged as people go to the polls to vote for their legitimate self-interests that may involve party loyalties, economic matters, civil rights, first and second amendments, immigration, border security, health care equity, public education, government size, gender issues, free speech, law enforcement, etc. Our ultimate self-interest, however, is immediate survival of our species and the security of our children’s future. With this in mind we individually must make the best choices we can for the elections at hand. Just as importantly we, as a society, must do a far better job of leadership succession to prepare educated and wise future civil leaders rather than leaving succession up to random populists, celebrities, or narcissists who crave power and the ultimate corner offices. Geopolitical and world market stability are severely challenged and we are terribly short of good leaders and great ideas. The grim political landscape at hand, however, doesn’t give anyone of us the right to be aloof from the politics and processes of representational government.

You may ask what does all this have to do with our profession, our patients, our trainees, and our science? The answer is – everything. Our successors won’t consider us innocent if we hand over to them a diminished future in a dysfunctional society on a damaged planet. Join the important political conversations, the next generation is counting on it.

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts for this first Friday of September, and on future first Fridays if you are so disposed.

David A. Bloom

University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

Matula Thoughts August 5, 2016

Posted by dabloom

Matula Thoughts – August 5, 2016

Summertime field notes, superheroes, and retrograde thoughts.
3975 words

Patient experience. Walking through the Art Fairs last month after great lectures from visiting professors, my thoughts wandered to Matula Thoughts/What’s New, this electronic communication that has become my habit for the past 16 years. It may be presumptuous to think that anyone would spend 20 minutes or more reading this monthly packet approaching 4000 words. Certainly, UM urology residents and faculty are too busy to give this more than a glance, and that’s OK by me. Of the 10 items usually offered I’d be happy if most folks just skimmed them and perhaps discovered one of enough interest to read in detail. Conversely, some alumni and friends hold me to account for each word and fact, and they are enough for me to know that this communication (What’s New email and Matula Thoughts website) is more than my whistling in the wind.

One.

Art & medicine. Luke Fildes’s painting, The Doctor, shown here last month, deserves further consideration in the afterglow of Don Nakayama’s Chang Lecture on Art & Medicine. [1892, Tate Gallery]. The duality of the doctor-patient relationship, ever so central to our profession, has gotten complicated by changes in technology, growth of subspecialties, necessity of teams and systems, and the sheer expense of modern healthcare. As Fildes shows, medical relationships in the pediatric world extend beyond twosomes and this actually pertains for all ages, since no one is an island. That nuance notwithstanding, the patient experience through the ages and into the complexity of today remains the central organizing principle of medicine.

[Dr. Chang & Don Nakayama]

An article in JAMA recently explored the patient experience via the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers & Systems (HCAHPS) Survey. Delivered to random samples of newly discharged adult inpatients, the 32 items queried are measurements of patient experience that parlay into hospital quality comparisons and impact payments. [Tefera, Lehrman, Conway. Measurement of the patient experience. JAMA 315:2167, 2016]

It is unfortunate that health care systems and professional organizations hadn’t previously focused similar attention on patient experience and only now are compelled to investigate and improve it by the survey. We may chafe and groan at HCAHPS, but it reflects well on representational government working on behalf of its smallest and most important common denominator – individual people.

Everyone deserves a good experience when they need health care whether for childbirth, vaccination, otitis, UTI, injury, other ailments and disabilities, or the end of life. If for nothing more than “the golden rule” all of us in health care should constantly fine-tune our work to make patient care experiences uniformly excellent because, after all, we all become patients at points in life. The individual patient care experience is the essential deliverable of medicine and the epicenter of academic health care centers from the first day of medical school to the last day of practice, after which we all surely will become patients again.

Two.

Educating doctors. Last week’s White Coat Ceremony was the first day of medical school class for Michigan’s of 2020. Deans Rajesh Mangulkar and Steven Gay with their admissions team assembled this splendid 170th UMMS class. Unifying ceremonies are important cultural practices and this one is an exciting milestone for students and a pleasant occasion for the faculty who will be teaching the concepts, skills, and professionalism of medicine. Families in attendance held restless infants, took pictures, and applauded daughters and sons. A “doctor in the family,” for most of the audience, happens once in a blue moon, a rare circumstance of joy, and certainly evidence of success and luck in parenting. The attentive audience for the 172 new students entertained only rare social media diversions. Julian Wan represented our department on stage.

Dee Fenner’s keynote talk resonated deeply. She described her career as a female pelvic surgeon and its impact on patients and on herself. Dee talked about the symbolism of the white coat and skewered today’s hype about “personalized medicine”, saying that medicine is always rightly personalized; our ability to tailor health care to the individual genome is just a matter of using better tools. Alumni president (MCAS) Louito Edje said: “This medical school is the birthplace of experts. You have just taken the first step toward becoming one of those experts.” She recommended cultivation of three fundamental attitudes to knowledge: humility, adaptability, and generosity. Students then came to the stage and announced their names and origins before getting “cloaked.”

The ceremony passes quickly, but is long remembered. Students shortly immerse in intense learning, although medical school is kinder today with less grading, rare attrition, and greater attention to personal success and matters of team work.

My favorite “new medical student story” concerns the late Horace Davenport. He had retired before I arrived in Ann Arbor, but remained active in the medical students’ Victor Vaughn Society that met monthly at a faculty home for a talk over dinner. Davenport, an international expert in physiology, was a superb and fearsome teacher as one student, Joseph J. Weiss (UMMS 1961), recalled from the fall of 1957.

“In our first physiology lecture Dr. Horace Davenport grabbed our attention by announcing that the first person to answer his question correctly would receive an ‘A’ in physiology and be exempt from any examinations or attendance. The question was: ‘What happened in 1623? The context implied an event of significant impact to human knowledge. After a long pause the amphitheater echoed with answers: the discovery of America, the landing of the pilgrim fathers, the death of Leonardo da Vinci. Then Nancy Zuzow called out: ‘The publication of William Harvey’s The Heart and its Circulation’. There was sudden silence. She must be right. How clever of her. Of course a physiologist would see this landmark publication as an event to which we should give homage. Who would have thought that Nancy was so smart? Even Dr. Davenport was impressed. He asked her to stand, and acknowledged that she had provided the first intelligent response. ‘However,’ he noted, ‘that publication occurred in 1628.’ No one could follow up up on Nancy’s response. Dr. Davenport looked around the room, sensed our ignorance, realized we had nothing more to offer, and then said: ‘1623 was the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio.’ He announced that we would now move on and ‘return to our roles as attendants at the gas station of life”,’ and began his first in a series of three lectures on the ABC of Acid-Base Chemistry.” [Medicine at Michigan, Fall, 2000. Weiss, a rheumatologist who practiced in Livonia, passed away in October 2015. Zuzow died in 1964, while chief resident in OB GYN at St. Joseph Mercy, of a cerebral hemorrhage.]

Three.

New Perspectives. Visiting professors bring different perspectives and last month the Department of Urology initiated its new academic season with several superb visitors. Distinguished pediatric surgeon Don Nakayama gave our 10th annual Chang Lecture on Art and Medicine on the Diego Rivera Detroit Industry Murals. [Below: full house for Nakayama at Ford Auditorium]

I’ve been asked what relevance an art and medicine lecture has for a urology department’s faculty, residents, staff, alumni, and friends. Davenport would not have questioned the matter. This year, in particular, the lecture made perfect sense with Don’s discussion of what can now be called the orchiectomy panel in the Detroit Institute of Arts murals. Hundreds of thousands of people have viewed this work since 1933, including the surgical panel that art historians labeled “brain surgery” – a description unchallenged until Don revealed the scene represented an orchiectomy. His Chang Lecture explained the logic of Rivera’s choice.

[Top: Caleb & Sandy Nelson; Middle: Bart & Amy Grossman, Bottom: George Drach]

The day after the Chang Lecture, Caleb Nelson (Nesbit 2003) from Boston Children’s Hospital and Bart Grossman (Nesbit 1977) of MD Anderson Hospital in Houston delivered superb Duckett and Lapides Lectures. Caleb discussed the important NIH vesicoureteral reflux study while Bart brought us up to date on bladder cancer, greatly expanding my knowledge regarding the rapid advances in its pathogenesis and therapy. George Drach from the University of Pennsylvania provided a clear and instructive update on Medicaid coverage for children. Concurrent staff training went well thanks to those who stayed behind from this yearly academic morning to manage phones, clinics, and inevitable emergencies.

[Above: Lapides Lecture, Danto Auditorium]

Four.

Observation & reasoning. Don Coffey, legendary scientist and Johns Hopkins urology scholar, retired recently. Among his numerous memorable sayings he sometimes mentioned an old southern phrase: “if you see a turtle on a fencepost, it ain’t no coincidence.” A tortoise on a post isn’t some random situation that happens once in a blue moon, it is more likely the result of a purposeful and explainable action. (Of course, it is also not a nice thing.) Coffey was arguing for the importance of reflective and critical thinking as we stumble through the world and try to make sense of it, whether on a summertime pasture, in an art gallery, or in a laboratory examining Western blots.

[Above: tortoise sculpture on post. Mike Hommel’s yard AA, summer, 2016. Below: Coffey]

Richard Feynman (above), Nobel Laureate Physicist, offered a related metaphor.

“What do we mean by ‘understanding’ something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes ‘the world’ is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course if we watch long enough we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules… (Every once in a while something like castling is going on that we still do not understand).” [RP Feynman. Six Easy Pieces. 1995 Addison-Wesley. P.24]

Observation, reasoning, and experimentation are the fundamental parts of the scientific method that allows us to figure things out. Feynman’s castling allusion is brilliant.

[EO Wilson at UM LSI Convocation 2004]

E.O. Wilson went further with his thoughts on consilience, the unity of knowledge.

“You will see at once why I believe that the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries got it mostly right the first time. The assumptions they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding through intellectual advance. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world, but artifacts of scholarship. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasing favored by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences.” [Wilson. Consilience. P. 8. 1998]

Five.

Superheros. Somewhat to our cultural disadvantage our brains are hardwired to favor physical performance, entertainment, and appearances over intellectual leaps of greatness. We celebrate actors, athletes, politicians, musicians, and cartoons far more than great intellects. Worse, intellectuals in many periods of history were deliberately purged.

Coffey, Feynman, and Wilson are real superheroes of our time. Their ideas have been hugely consequential and they individually are role models of character and intellect. Another name to add to the superhero list is Tu Youyou (屠呦呦). My friend Marston Linehan first alerted me to her incredible story and discovery of artemisinin. It is also a story of how the better nature of humanity is subject to the dark side of our species and the nations we let govern us.

Born in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China in 1930 Tu Youyou attended Peking University Medical School, developed an interest in pharmacology, and after graduation in 1955 began research at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing. This was a tricky time to be a scientist in Maoist China. Ruling authorities favored peasants as the essential revolutionary class and in May 1966, the Cultural Revolution launched violent class struggle with persecution of the “bourgeois and revisionist” elements. The Nine Black Categories (landlords, rich farmers, anti-revolutionaries, malcontents, right-wingers, traitors, spies, presumed capitalists, and intellectuals) were cruelly relocated to work or forage in the countryside while neo-revolutionaries disestablished the national status quo.

In 1967 as North Vietnamese troops contended in jungle combat with US forces, chloroquine-resistant malaria was taking a heavy toll on both sides. Mao Zedong launched a secret drug discovery project, Project 523, that Tu Youyou joined while her husband, a metallurgical engineer, was banished to the countryside and their daughter was placed in a Beijing nursery. Screening traditional Chinese herbs for anti-plasmodial effects Tu found Artemisia (sweet wormwood or quinghao) mentioned in a text 1,600 years old, called Emergency Prescriptions Kept Up One’s Sleeve (in translation). She led a team that developed an artemisinin-based drug combination, publishing the work anonymously in 1977, the year after the revolution had largely wound down and only in 1981 personally presented the work to World Health Organization (WHO). Artemisinin regimens are listed in the WHO catalog of “Essential Medicines.” Tu won the 2011 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and in 2015 the Nobel Prize In Physiology or Medicine for this work.

[Above: Artemisia annua. Below: Tu Youyou with teacher Lou Zhicen in 1951]

Tu_Youyou_and_Lou_Zhicen_in_1951.TIF

Six.

It may be a human conceit to think of ourselves as the singular species on Earth capable of self-improvement. Considering the impact of Coffey, Feynman, Wilson, and Tu among other intellectual superheroes, imagination at their levels seems a rarity in the universe. Yet, any sentient creature wants to improve its comfort as well as its immediate and future prospects, for who is to say that a whale, a dolphin, a gorilla, or an elephant cannot somehow imagine a more comfortable, happier, or otherwise better tomorrow? In anticipation of another day, birds make nests, ants make tunnels, and bees make hives.

We humans have extraordinary powers of language, skill (with our cherished opposable thumbs), and imagination that provide unprecedented capacity to improve ourselves. Accordingly we easily imagine ourselves in better situations, whether physically, materially, intellectually, or morally, and as it is said, if we can imagine something we probably can create it.

Imagination of a better tomorrow is part of the drive for change as we consider our political future, although this can be risky. The intoxicating saying out with the old and in with the new has led to such things as the United States of America in 1776 or the Maastricht Treaty and European Union in 1992. Change, however, does not always produce happy alternatives, as evidenced by the Third Reich, the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Arab Spring, or Venezuela’s Chavez era. Disestablishment does not predictably improve life for most people. The human construct, at its best and most creative, rests on a fragile establishment of geopolitical, economic, and environmental stability. The status quo that has been established may be imperfect, but is disestablished only at considerable risk.

Representational government and cosmopolitan society seem to be the best-case scenario for what might be called the human experiment wherein various factions of a diverse population come together to create a just social agenda and build a better tomorrow. The threat to this utopian scenario comes from factionalisms and tribalisms that insert narrow self -interests and litmus tests for cooperation into any consensus for agenda. We see this in the mid-east, in the European Zone, and in American presidential election cycles. Generally ignored or forgotten by competing factions and litmus-testers is the worst-case scenario of civil collapse. We experienced limited episodes of this in two World Wars, southeastern Asian catastrophes, central African genocides, Yugoslavia’s dissolution, and the collapse of Syria to name some instances. However sturdy we think human civilization may be, it is only a thin veneer in a random and dangerous universe. Civil implosions of one sort or another occur intermittently in complex societies, however we must become better at predicting them, circumventing them, and most importantly preventing their dissemination. Their catastrophic nature surpasses any sectarian interests or individual beliefs beyond the survival of civilization itself.

Seven.

The Blue Moon, mentioned earlier, is a picturesque metaphor for an uncommon event. It’s actually not random, inasmuch as a blue moon is a second full moon in a given month (or other calendar period), so the next one can be accurately predicted. Since a full moon occurs about every 29.5 days, on the uncommon occasions it appears at the very beginning of a month, there is a chance of Blue Moon within that same month. The next Blue Moon we can expect will be January 31, 2018.

The song is a familiar one. It was originally “MGM song #225 Prayer (Oh Lord Make Me a Movie Star)” by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart in 1933. Other lyrics were applied, but none stuck until Hart wrote Blue Moon in 1935.

Nothing is visually different between blue moons or any other full moons. I took this picture (above) of a nearly full moon this June after some trial and error. A full moon is a beautiful thing and can’t help but give anyone a sense of the small individual human context. Friend and colleague Philip Ransley, now working mainly in Pakistan, spent much of his career aligning his visiting professorships around the world with lunar eclipses and lugging telescopes and cameras along with his pediatric urology slides. Receiving the Pediatric Urology Medal in 2001, barely a month after the tragic event of September 11, 2001, he spoke on lunar-solar rhythms, shadows, and their relationship to the human narrative: “… I would like to lead you into my other life, a life dominated by gravity and its sales rep, time. It has been brought home to us very forcibly how gravity rules our lives and how it governs everything that moves in the universe.” [Ransley. Chasing the moon’s shadow J. Urol. 168:1671, 2002]

[PG Ransley c. 2005]

Ransley is currently working in Karachi, Pakistan at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, the largest center of urology, nephrology, and renal transplantation in SE Asia. The pediatric urology unit at SIUT is named The Philip G. Ransley Department. [Sultan, S. Front. Pediatr. 2:88, 2014]

Eight.

Ruthless foragers. Earlier this summer a friend and colleague from Boston Children’s Hospital, David Diamond, brought me along for a bluefish excursion off of Cape Cod. These formidable eating machines travel up and down the Atlantic coast foraging for smaller fish. Like many other targets of human consumption, blue fish are not as plentiful as they once were, although they are hardly endangered today.

[From Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission]

Just as we label ourselves Homo sapiens, the bluefish are Pomatomus saltatrix. Both, coincidentally, were named by Linnaeus, the botanist who got his start as a proto-urologist, treating venereal disease in mid 18th century Stockholm. His binomial classification system (Genus, species) is the basis of zoological conversation, although genomic reclassification will upend many assumptions. Also like us, the bluefish is the only extant species of its genus – Pomatomidae for the fish and Hominidae for us. Thus we are both either the end of a biologic family line or the beginning of something new. Our fellow hominids, such as Neanderthals, Denisovans, or Homo floresiensis didn’t last much beyond 30,000 years ago, although they left some of their DNA with us. It may be a long shot, but I hope H. sapiens can go another 30,000 years.

[Bove: ruthless foragers]

Like us, Pomatomus saltatrix are ruthless foragers, eating voraciously well past the point of hunger. Their teeth are hard and sharp, reminding me of the piranha I caught on an unexpected visit to the Hato Piñero Jungle when attending a neurogenic bladder meeting in Venezuela some 20 years ago. Lest you think me a serious fisherman, I disclose there’ve not been many fish in between these two.

[one of 4 piranha geni (Pristobrycon, Pygocentrus, Pygopristis, & Serrasalmus that include over 60 species]

Linnaeus gave bluefish a scientific name in 1754, describing the scar-like line on the gill cover and feeding frenzy behavior (tomos for cut and poma for cover; saltatrix for jumper, as in somersault). I learned this from the book Blues, by author John Hersey (1914-1993), who was better known for his Pulitzer novel, A Bell for Adano (1944) or his other nonfiction book, Hiroshima (1946). [Below: Hersey]

Michigan trivia: Hersey lettered in football at Yale where he was coached by UM alumnus Gerald Ford who was an assistant coach in football and boxing for several years before admission to Yale’s law school. Hersey became a journalist after college and graduate school in Cambridge. In the winter of 1945-46 while in Japan reporting for The New Yorker on the reconstruction after the war he met a Jesuit missionary who survived the Hiroshima bomb, and through him and other survivors put together an unforgettable narrative of the event. The bluefish story came later (1987).

Nine.

Today & tomorrow. Today is the start of the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where 500,000 visitors are expected, presumably well covered and armed with insect repellent due to fears of Zika, an arbovirus related to dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, and West Nile viruses.
Tomorrow is a sobering anniversary. I was 11 days old, on August 6, 1945, when, at 8:15 AM, a burst of energy 600 meters above the Aioi Bridge in Hiroshima, Japan incinerated half the city’s population of 340,000 people. Don Nakayama wrote a compelling article on the surgeons of Hiroshima at Ground Zero, detailing individual stories of professional heroism. [D. Nakayama. Surgeons at Ground Zero of the Atomic Age. J. Surg. Ed. 71:444, 2014] We reflect on Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) not only to honor the fallen innocents and to re-learn the terrible consequences of armed conflict, but also to recognize how close we are to self-extermination. A new book by former Secretary of Defense, William Perry, makes this possibility very clear, showing how much closer we came to that brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis. [Perry. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford University Press. 2016]

Ten.

Self-determination vs. self-termination. Life, and our species in particular, is far less common in the known universe than Blue Moons, it might be said, although those moons actually are mere artifacts of calendars and imagination. Art and medicine are distinguishing features of our species, Homo sapiens 1.0. The ancient cave dwelling illustrations of handprints on the walls and galloping horses, are evidence of our primeval need to express ourselves by making images. The need to care for each other (“medicine” is not quite the right word) is an extension from the fact that we are perhaps the only species that needs direct physical assistance to deliver our progeny. If our species is to have a future version (Homo sapiens 2.0) we will have to check ourselves pretty quickly before we terminate ourselves, through war and genocide, consumption of planetary resources, or degradation of the environment. While representational government, nationally and internationally, may be our best hope to prevent termination we will have to represent ourselves a lot better. That’s a fact whether here in Ann Arbor, in Washington DC, in China, Africa, Asia, or Europe.

Tribalism resonates with many deep human needs and it has gotten our species along this far, but H. sapiens 2.0 will have to make the jump from tribalist behavior to global cosmopolitanism. Sebastian Junger, a well-known war journalist, has written a compelling book that explores the human need for a sense of community that he describes by the title, Tribe. While we need better sense of community in complex cosmopolitan society, we cannot accept primitive tribalism, sectarianism, or nativism of exclusivity that exacerbate conflict among the “isms.” Tribalism cannot create an optimal or even a good human future whether the version is Brexist or ISIS, paths retrograde to human progress and the wellbeing of humanity in general.

[Girl with Pearl Earing, Vermeer, c. 1665, & viewers at Mauritius Museum, The Hague]

Reflections on art and medicine lead to cosmopolitan and humanitarian thought and behavior. Humanistic reflection, shared broadly, should track us more closely to a utopian scenario, rather than to catastrophe that is only a random contingency away.

[Anatomy Lesson of Nicolaes Tulp. Rembrandt, 1632. Mauritius Museum, The Hague]

Thank you for reading our Matula Thoughts.

David A. Bloom
University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

Matula Thoughts August 7, 2015

Posted by dabloom

Fair weather, formicidae, fables, and funambulism

3415 words

August in Ann Arbor with long days of sunlight, warm breezes, and summer clothing is especially sweet by contrast to our winter days. Thanks to generous rains filling our rivers and refreshing the ground water Ann Arbor’s August is immersed in green. [Above: view from the roof of the Brehm Tower of Kellogg Eye Center. Below: kayaks by the Huron]

Birds, cicadas, tree frogs, and lightning bugs create accidental symphonies of sound and light in my neighborhood. Summertime in the Northern Hemisphere brings a measure of balance, relaxation, and sunny public spaces. Vacation allows time to recharge and summer in Ann Arbor is pretty much as good as it gets for doing that.

[Michigan Stadium from Ann Arbor Golf Outing]

August in parts of Europe is almost entirely set aside as vacation time for many workers, whereas in North America “work-life balance” is stricter with a week or two of vacation, plus the long weekends of Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day. These thoughts remind me of an animated cartoon that I loved as a kid called the Grasshopper and the Ants, an ancient fable of Aesop recast by a young Walt Disney in 1934 in The Silly Symphony (you can find it on YouTube – it runs 8 minutes).

The gist of the story was that a grasshopper had fun and played all summer, while the neighboring ants aligned industriously to work throughout the sunny days storing up food and preparing for winter. When winter came, the cold and hungry grasshopper realized his sorry situation and came begging to the ants for food and shelter. According to Disney’s version, after a momentary reprimand the ants kindly took in the pitiful grasshopper who then entertained them with his fiddle over the winter. In the Aesopian corpus this story is The Cicada and the Ant (classified as Perry 373). The simplistic moral to the story is a useful lesson for children, but humans, unlike ants, need vacations; motivations in the human sphere differ from those in ant land.

[EOW by DAB 2002]

Ants and humans, E.O. Wilson teaches us, are among the very rare eusocial species on Earth. These colonial animals live in multi-generational groups where most individuals cooperate to advance the public good and to perpetuate the species into the next generation. In effect, their colonies are superorganisms that transcend individual biologic lives and create civilizations turned over to successive generations. The meaning of individual lives, then, is simply to be found in their contribution to their tomorrow and the tomorrows of their successors. Ants accomplish this work by communicating via pheromones, chemical signals that Wilson and his collaborators elucidated. Pheromones, added to genetic and epigenetic capabilities, vastly enhance the ability of eusocial organisms to deal with and transmit information. The human luck of spoken and written language allows us to process information (sensory, narrative, and numeric), work cooperatively, and create new information that we deploy and pass along to successive generations. The cultural and scientific ways of thinking that emerged from language have produced creativity that has changed the Earth. Whereas internal motivation and environmental pressures inspire personal creativity, it is largely personal and political freedom that allows its dissemination, thereby expanding civilization intellectually and materially.

It is a beautiful thing to see people acting in harmonious synchrony. This picture I took outside the de Young Museum in San Francisco this spring shows a display of T’ai chi (太極拳), a Chinese martial art practiced for its health effects, focusing the mind for mental calm and clarity. No pheromones or visible rewards motivate this alignment, the motivation is internal. T’ai chi is lovely to watch, the harmony and synchrony registering pleasurably in the hardwiring of our brains. This is the stuff of art, the deliberate work of other people that we admire and that sometimes astonishes us. You can find beauty in a myriad of other aligned performances. The Stanley Cup playoffs are one example of exquisite and harmonious alignment of teams. Surgical procedures may fall into this realm; it’s interesting that in Great Britain the operating room is referred to as the surgical theatre. When synchrony is harshly enforced, however, as in the dark vision of industrialism depicted by the Diego Rivera murals in Detroit or the failed experiments of communism, alignment is not so pretty.

The cartoonish stereotype of disheartened industrial assembly line workers in the Rivera murals has been reinforced by generations of business schools and accounting management ideology. The belief was that managers should determine work-flow methodology and set production targets as if assembly lines were machines to be sped up or slowed down as managers deemed necessary. This is the essence of accounting-based management. The Toyota Process System, now embraced world-wide by forward-looking businesses as lean process methodology, turns this paradigm around, having shown that where workers are empowered to think, innovate, and take pride in their work, better products, greater efficiency, and customer satisfaction will result. Ironically, Toyota’s innovation was initiated over 60 years ago when the company’s founder visited Ford’s massive River Rouge plant just as Japan was rebuilding its industrial base after WWII. Where the American managers saw one thing in the Ford assembly line, the Japanese leaders saw something completely different. The following quote explaining “What Toyota saw at the Rouge” comes from an excellent book called Profit Beyond Measure, by H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Bröms: “When Eiji Toyoda told Philip Caldwell that Toyota had discovered the secret to success at the Rouge, his comment implied that what Toyota had perceived about operations at the Rouge was very different than what Caldwell and his Ford colleagues or their counterparts in the other Big Three auto companies had seen. For one thing, it seems that Toyota people did not view low cost at the Rouge in terms of its scale, its throughput, or its managers’ effort to impose external targets for speed and cost on workers in the plant. Instead, they seemed to perceive a holistic pattern permeating every minute particular of the system. On one level, the pattern that caught Toyota’s attention was the overall continuous flow of work in the Rouge as a whole. But at a much deeper level, they observed that work flowed continuously through each part of the system – literally through each individual work station – at the same rate that finished units flowed off the line.” (Caldwell was President of Ford at the time.) Toyoda saw an organic self-learning system in the assembly line, where expertise at work stations is continuously harvested by motivated workers to improve work flow and product. Jeanne Kin and Jack Billi floated this book to my attention a few years ago and it continues to strongly impact my view of organizational systems.

4. Just as modern industry is embracing the concepts of Toyota Lean Processes, health care systems in their frenzy to cut costs while complying with increasingly onerous regulation are oddly embracing the failed experiments of management accounting that impose cost and throughput targets on health care providers. Data (numeric information) should inform decisions whenever possible, but it cannot be the sole driver of key operational choices. All data must be viewed as suspect for, after all, the numeric information we produce for ourselves is merely an artifact of human invention: numbers and their manipulation may or may not reflect reality accurately. Intense focus on data tends to obliterate stories (narrative information). Truth is elusive and while stories can be just as false or misleading as data can be wrong or misinterpreted, when stories resonate with truth, prove to be genuine, or otherwise offer value they get repeated and stick around. While the accounting mentality examines data for consistency and at its best extracts useful stories from data, the scientific mentality examines and hypothesizes stories and then seeks data to support the story and create a better one. Accounting is a matter of numbers, but science is ultimately a matter of stories. The human brain is hard-wired to relate to meaningful stories, and those ancient ones that endure, such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Bible, endure because they give artful evidence of larger truths, exemplary behavior, or experiences that we keep repeating. Some stories are extremely succinct, but have enough truth that we keep repeating them like: Pythagoras’s story that for a right-sided triangle the area of the square on the side opposite the right angle equals the sum of the areas of the squares of the other two sides. Another durable story is that the area within a circle is its radius squared times an irrational number called pi.One might argue that by its very substance this story is irrational, but it sure seems to have held up through time. A newer story tells of the ultimate connection of light, matter, and energy, that is, is e=mc². These stories seem to be true and have found their Darwinian niche in the human narrative.

5. We are indoctrinated by stories since childhood. Fables, short stories with moral lessons, typically feature animals with human qualities. Aesop, supposedly a slave in ancient Greece (620-560 BC) a generation after Pythagoras and a century prior to Hippocrates, is the fabulist best known in the Western world. It is an astonishing demonstration of Darwinian durability that his fables have been repeated to children in most languages for well over 2500 years. Ben Perry, the 20^th century authority on Aesop, indexed and edited Aesop’s stories for the Loeb Classical Library in 1952. One of the half dozen fables dealing with health care is The Old Woman and the Thieving Physician. This may have been added to the Aesop corpus rather than an original of the actual fabulist. The tale involves an elderly lady with sore eyes who asks a physician to cure her from anticipated blindness, but her deal was that payment had to await cure. The doctor made repeated house calls to apply salves and with each visit stole anything he could take away from the house. Once the cure was competed the woman refused payment saying that her sight seemed to be worse than ever since she now couldn’t see or find any of her household property. This characterization of the dishonest physician was number 57 of the Perry Index.

6. Ben Perry was born in 1852 in Fayette Ohio and received his B.A. in 1915 from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D from Princeton in 1919. His early academic posts took him to Urbana Ohio University, Dartmouth, Western Reserve, and then, for the bulk of his career from 1924-1960 at the University of Illinois. He returned to Michigan as visiting professor in 1967 and died back in Urbana, Illinois in 1968. Perry concentrated his work in two minor genres, the fable and the ancient novel. The Perry Index includes all fables related to, ascribed to, or connected to Aesop and goes from #1 The Eagle and the Fox to #584The River-fish and the Sea-fish. In addition, the Extended Perry Index goes from #585 Sick Lion, Fox and Bear to #725 Fish from Frying Pan into Coals. Curiously Aesop offered tales of all sorts of creatures and many occupations, but only the occasional doctor’s story in addition to the ophthalmologic case: #7 Cat as Physician and the Hens, #114 The Physician at the Funeral, # 170 Physician and Sick Man, #187 The Wolf as Physician, or #289 The Frog Physician, and #317The Unskilled Physician. Some of these were matters of impersonations while others like #57 above were character studies of the profession. Perry #427 was the classic Fox and Hedgehog story, resurrected for our time by Isaiah Berlin.

7. The Art Fair is a special time in Ann Arbor. I lived here for about 10 years before I ever walked around in it – summertime is busy for those who take care of children, pediatric urologists included. In 1997 we started the John Duckett Lecture in Pediatric Urology, in honor of a colleague and a friend of Michigan Urology who had passed away that year. The idea was that this would take place on the Friday morning of the Art Fair, and we would close up most of our clinical and research work for the day. Our staff would simultaneously have Staff Education Day in the morning and the afternoon free for the Art Fair or whatever, as their annual birthday present. Over the years we have expanded the intellectual part of our Art Fair week with the Chang Lecture on Art and Medicine Chang on the Thursday and usually added a Lapides Lecture to the Friday session. This year we asked one person, Pierre Mouriquand from Lyon France, to do both the Chang and Duckett Lectures. In effect this was asking Pierre to walk a tightrope between two intellectual towers, and he navigated the line beautifully. As a great pediatric urologist and a painter of substance and daily practice, he is well qualified on both fronts. The Chang Lecture consisted of Pierre’s story Slowly down the Rhône: the River and its Artists. He produced a magnificent talk bringing together not only art and medicine, but also geography.

His Duckett Lecture was Understanding the Growth of the Genital Tubercle: Why it is relevant for the Hypospadiologist. Here he showed his mastery of the field with a brilliant update on embryology and challenging thoughts on surgical reconstruction of difficult dysfunctional anatomy. He fielded a series of case presentations from residents and later in the day attended our Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) team meeting and lunch, where he challenged the modern terminology and presented some videos that showed new concepts in reconstruction. In the evening at dinner our residents and the pediatric urology team got to know Pierre and his wife Jessica mixing technical talk, health systems discussions, and seeing how a couple successfully navigates the challenging world of life, family, and academic medicine.

Regarding this first academic event of the new season of residency training (also called Graduate Medical Education or GME) I need to invoke a sports metaphor and say that “Pierre hit it out of the park.” Events like these fulfill the essential duty of the university: sharpening inquisitiveness, disseminating ideas, widening cosmopolitanism, and educating our successors.

8. Chang Lecture on Art and Medicine 2016. Our speaker next year will be Don Nakayama, former chair of the Surgery Department at West Virginia. He wrote an interesting article in Pharos last year on the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. [The Pharos 77: 8, 2014] Perceptively, he recognized that the so-called Surgery Panel on the South Wall was not a depiction of “brain surgery” as art historians have claimed, but rather an illustration of an orchiectomy, a procedure much more attuned to Rivera’s view of the Rouge Plant workers. It is a great testimony to the vision of Edsel Ford to have brought Rivera, arguably the world’s best muralist of the time and an ardent communist, to Detroit to produce the work in 1932. Things didn’t go so well later in New York City when Rivera tried to repeat the experiment with the Rockefellers, but that’s another story.

[Lower right mural on the South Wall: the orchiectomy]

Caleb Nelson will be doing the Duckett Lecture and Bart Grossman will be doing the Lapides Lecture next year for an all-Nesbit Line up on that Friday of the 2016 Art Fair.

9. Disney’s Silly Symphonies also included The Wise Little Hen, a version of a Russian folk tale more popularly known as The Little Red Hen. The nugget of the story was that the hen finds a grain of wheat and asks the other animals on the farm to help plant, grow, and harvest it. None chose to help, but after she harvests the wheat she asks again for help threshing, milling, and baking, but none step forward. After the bread is done, she asks who should help eat it – and of course everybody volunteers. The hen, however, says sorry “if any would not work, neither should he eat.” (The Wise Little Hen included the debut of Donald Duck.) President Ronald Reagan referred to this story in 1976, citing a politicized version in which the farmer chastised the hen for being unfair. After the hen was forced to share her bread, she lost the incentive to work and the entire barnyard suffered. This twist on the story made it a cautionary tale slamming the welfare state. While the story teaches children the importance of doing their part in terms of the daily work of the community it lacks the complexity of reality. Modern society is far more complicated than a barnyard and the line between personal responsibility and public beneficence (i.e. government) is tricky to arbitrate. Furthermore, many in society experience tragic bad luck beyond their control or are unable to assume personal responsibility. Reagan’s farmer had the un-antlike characteristic of compassion, a human quality that must have long-preceded even our biblical days. A society has to nurture personal freedom, creativity, and individual responsibility if it is to be successful, but without kindness and compassion a civilization is not a human one. After all, when Disney anthropomorphized his ants he gave them not just language, but also compassion.

Where do we draw the lines regarding personal freedom and such things as immunization mandates, smoking, drug use, obesity, and dangerous behavior? Should motorcyclists have to wear helmets? How do we provide health care to the indigent and incapable? How do we create health care equality and affordability? These questions ultimately get arbitrated in the political arenas regionally and nationally, generation after generation. Our nation walks on a tightrope between the cartoonish ideologies of the welfare state and what some might call individualism, capturing the beliefs of libertarianism, laissez-faire capitalism, and ethical egoism. Obviously neither the welfare state nor any “ism” has it right – the best path for a just, creative, and cosmopolitan civilization is a path in between the cartoons. The bad news of today (and maybe this is the bad news for every human era) is that cartoonish people find their ways to leadership and compel the rest of us along irrational paths that threaten the future we want to turn over to our next generation. All citizens need to step up their understanding of the issues of public policy and health care as well as involving themselves in its regional and national discussions. We can no longer let politicians, accountants, and pundits alone shape the critical decisions.

10. Funambulism. On this day, August 7, in 1974 a 24-year old Frenchman named Philippe Petit walked across a high wire he had rigged between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He actually crossed the wire 8 times, performing for 45 minutes to the amazement of on-lookers in the towers. He must have looked like an ant to those on the ground, and vice versa. Petit’s funambulism represents a perfection of self-alignment in terms of balance that few can achieve, yet it is also an astonishing display of self-confidence, clandestine preparation, and admirable civil-disobedience. Curiously funambulism defines tightrope walking and a show of mental agility interchangeably. Few can deny that serious tightrope walking is as much a matter of mental as physical agility and you have to admire the internal drive that motivated Petit to accomplish this heroic feat. That was art.

Postscript: With the start of August we saw the retirement of Jack Cichon, our departmental administrator, and Malissa Eversole is now steadily in place on the job. Jack managed the business and operational affairs of Michigan Urology for 20 years with great loyalty, integrity, and (at some challenging times) extraordinary courage under pressure. He becomes an honorary member of the Nesbit Society and we hope to continue to see him in the course of our departmental events, noting his broadened smile of relief from the administrative pressures of the University of Michigan Medical School and Health System that he served so admirably.

Thanks for spending time with What’s New and Matula Thoughts.

David A. Bloom, MD

Department of Urology, University of Michigan Medical School

Ann Arbor

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