Winter

Expectations and epistolaries

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Matula Thoughts
January 1, 2021
Expectations and Epistolaries

2941 words

One.

Calendar reset. After all the hoopla, brouhaha, and general ruckus, today’s customary greeting “Happy New Year” looks ahead with optimism. Human nature, on the other hand, nudges us to also look backward with caution, Janus-like. One year ago, few people expected 2020 would be dominated by a tiny RNA virus. Clues were present but, even without those signals and others soon following, common sense alone should have kept us, vulnerable species that we are, on guard for recurring global pandemics, the last massive one having been only a century ago. [Above: Janus, Wikipedia, source Vatican.]

Some argue that the present pandemic is more accurately described as a syndemic: an unfortunate coincidence of a global infectious disease and a range of noncontagious comorbidities. The term came from medical anthropologist Merrill Singer in the 1990s, referring specifically to the interactions among substance abuse, violence, and AIDS (SAVA). Syndemic now denotes occurrences of multiple categories of disease interacting in specific populations. The Lancet expanded the concept for a new series in the journal beginning in 2017. [The Lancet, 389:881, 2017.] A Lancet article this autumn discussed the syndemic nature of COVID-19 in India and the dangers of false optimism as restrictions were lifted there in June. [The Lancet, 396:867, 2020.] In syndemic terms the COVID-19 situation is an acute respiratory viral condition interacting with an array of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) that tend to cluster within social groups. The key operative words here are respiratory viral infection and social groups (social translates to behavioral, economic and caste). DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32000-6

It is beyond ironic that, when the worldwide COVID deaths reached one million by the end of September last year, the United States accounted for 20% of fatalities although representing only 4.25% of the world’s population and arguably possessing much of the world’s best resources to contain the virus. Lacking in this country were national leadership, public trust, and the good will and sense of its people to take sensible measures to minimize spread of a somewhat fragile and moderately contagious virus, SARS-CoV-2.

 

Two.

Expectations. History shows that uncertainty about what a new year will bring is nothing new. New years bring gains, losses, and some recoveries as I’ve seen while researching the story of Michigan Urology with far more discovered than two books and Matula Thoughts could contain. One letter found in the Bentley Library fits this January essay nicely: a note sent by UM Medical School Dean Victor Vaughan to his friend Dr. Arnold Lorand in Karlsbad, Czecho-Slovackia, written January 12, 1920. The two friends had lost touch during the terrible war that disrupted their lives, as it had millions of others. They were lucky to reconnect. 

“Dear Doctor:-
Mrs. Vaughan and I were much pleased to receive your Christmas card. We have often wondered what had become of you, and we have often expressed the wish that we might look down upon Karlsbad, its splendid mountains, and its beautiful walks, many of which awaken in us pleasant memories. We have gone through the dreadful cycline [‘cyclone’], I and my five sons were in the Army, and my oldest son now rests in French soil. I often wonder whether I will ever desire to visit Europe again. However this may be, we remember you with the greatest pleasure, and we send you best wishes, not only for the coming year, but as we hope, for the many years to come. Yours truly, V.C. Vaughan.”

Lorand (1865-1943) was a physician at the Carlsbad Spa, longevity researcher, and pioneer of modern geriatric medicine. His 1911 book, Old Age Deferred, was popular in America and went through a number of printings. [New England Med Gazette, 47:845, 1912.] He was one of many academic friends gained and visited by the Vaughans during their lives, and epistolaries such as Vaughan’s were the common way people kept in touch, taking more time and crafting than today’s phone calls, emails, or texts. [Below: Lorand and 1913 edition of his book.] 

In 1919, with the end of WWI in sight, the Vaughans looked forward to better times as they returned from military duty in Washington, DC to Ann Arbor, but grief followed that summer when their son “Clarence” drowned accidentally while swimming in a river in France, just as troops were drawing down near the end of the war. Dean Vaughan had gotten the news while at the American Medical Association national meeting in Atlantic City in mid-June 1919, just as he was to chair a session. After a few moments to collect himself he stepped onto the stage and took the chair. It was also during this meeting that Vaughan first met Hugh Cabot who had recently returned from more than two years on the Western Front in France serving with the British Expeditionary Forces. Allied Powers and Germany ended their conflict and signed the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, but within the next 20 years, Germany would break its postwar agreements, subsume Czechoslovakia, and initiate another world war.

After a difficult 1919, the Vaughans hoped for a happier 1920 and the Christmas Card from the Lorands was a happy signal.

 

Three.

Little things, unnoticed by most people at this first moment of 2021, may become consequential to us in the near future, just as they did last year and every previous new year. The little things may be microorganisms, memes, or people. For example, few in Ann Arbor noticed in January 1933 when Adolph Hitler became chancellor of Germany, although the world soon took note. Many people admired his German patriotism in the dark days after the Treaty of Versailles with his ability to energize domestic industry and get railroads to run on time, but autocratic governance and tyranny never serve a people well and end badly.

In contrast, the 1933 presidential inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on March 4 was universally noticed throughout Ann Arbor and beyond, marking a turning point in the Depression, although his new administration disturbed many conservative citizens. Where Reed Nesbit stood on this issue can only be imagined as he was not as public with his political beliefs as had been his mentor, Hugh Cabot. Nesbit, however, seemed always to favor the common man.

Roosevelt may not have been a “common man”  but his disability brought him close to the myriad daily struggles of common people. Few Americans knew, at this time, that FDR needed assistance to stand and walk, due to polio, it had been believed, incurred in 1921 although a modern view suggests that Guillain-Barré was the more likely cause. [Below: a scene unimaginable in 2021 – Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt together enroute to 1933 inauguration. Library of Congress.]

In retrospect those 1933 transitions began a new chapter in the recurring contest between democratic rule and authoritarian rule, in this instance precipitated largely by the residue of WWI and the Great Depression. Which system best solves a nation’s problems and improves the lives of its people? Hitler exploited his nation with coercion and physical force, while Roosevelt deployed a lucky mix of democratic process, capitalistic enterprise, “New Deal” big government, and moral authority. The public, the press, and academia took far too little notice of this contest until it spilled over into another world war that would give democratic ideas and humanity another reprieve. Cats have a finite number of lives, but we hope democracies have more. 

 

Four.

Annus mirabilis. In January 1971 Jack Lapides began his second year as Section Head of Urology and it was an extraordinary one. As someone who had grown up in Depression times, served in the Pacific in WWII, and seen university and national politics up close, Jack was no “Polly Anna.” Yet, while cautious of threats ahead politically, economically, and globally he relished the opportunities of his new position and robust ideas. 

Now, a half century later, it is tempting to try to understand his thoughts as 1971 opened up. Just like today, that New Year began on a Friday. This would be the year Lapides broadcast his ideas on clean intermittent catheterization (CIC) that at the time contradicted medical convention, initially bringing him more ridicule than praise. Nonetheless the concept proved worthy, opening the door to a new era of surgical urinary tract reconstruction and improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people with urinary tract dysfunction globally.  A generation later, leaders like Bernie Churchill in Toronto equated Lapides’s retrograde idea to the most “Nobel Prize worthy concept” in urology.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2016.10.080

Lapides (above) published nine papers in 1971 and was appearing on the national center stages of urology regularly just as his predecessors at UM, Hugh Cabot and Reed Nesbit had in their times. At the American Urological Association (AUA) annual meeting in Chicago, May 16, 1971, Lapides moderated a panel called “What Constitutes a Good Urological Residency,” consisting of Peter L. Scardino of Savannah (father of our friend Peter T. Scardino), Clarence Hodges of Portland Oregon (trainee of actual Nobel Prize winner Charles Huggins of UM and then the University of Chicago; later mentor of John Barry), Ralph A. Straffon of Cleveland Clinic (trainee of Reed Nesbit), W.V. Tynes of Norfolk, J.J. Buchierre of Rochester MN, and John Hall of Ann Arbor (chief resident at UM). 

The UM urology brand was in wide display at the 1971 AUA in Chicago. Notably, the chairman of the Society of Pediatric Urology that year was Ian M. Thompson, formerly from Ann Arbor, but currently chair in Columbia, Missouri. The 1971 AUA Meredith Campbell lecturer, Willard E. Goodwin of UCLA (a friend and supporter of Lapides) spoke on “Some hermaphrodites, pseudohermaphrodites, ambisexuals, and other ambiguous types I have known.” An “Ask the professor” session featured Goodwin and John J. Murphy urology chief at the University of Pennsylvania. Murphy was a 1952 graduate of the Nesbit program. Residents on the podium “grilled” the professors about their training and absorption into the field of urology, and “seemed to have the feeling somehow that they had been misguided in a urologic career.” [AUA Centennial History Vol. 1 p. 58.]

That oddly negative view of those residents was not repeated the following years nor did it seem to indicate a trend. Lapides’s trainees in Ann Arbor harbored nothing less than great respect and admiration for their chief and experiences in Ann Arbor, as based on my recent conversations with many of them. In the summer of 1971 Charles Adams, Sahir Cittan, John Gambee, and the late Ed Tank completed their urology training at UM while Robert Barnett, Thomas Kub, Thomas Newman, Lee Underwood, and Robert Vinson began their three years of residency under Lapides. I began my training at UCLA that summer, falling under Goodwin’s spell and far from ever feeling misguided considered myself lucky to be there. Sadly 1971 was the year that Jack’s wife, Alice, passed away.

 

Five.

Ups and downs. A half century ago, 1971, was a great year for an ascending Jack Lapides, but it was a tipping point into despair for another UM alumnus who lost faith in his own future, and indeed the future of our species. This individual dropped out of the conventional world and stepped off the so-called grid to a hermit-like existence in a cabin he built in rural Lincoln, Montana, much in the manner of Henry David Thoreau, or so it seemed at first. The modern-day recluse, however, had far darker thoughts, believing that industrial society could not control its own future and would destroy not only our species, but all others and the planet around us. These ideas took over his brain like a virus and led him to believe that the only recourse was to mail bombs to people targeted as symbolic in industrial society. He anonymously delivered at least 16 bombs that maimed and killed a number of people between 1978 and 1995, becoming known and feared as The Unabomber. In 1995 he sent the New York Times a letter promising to suspend his campaign of terrorism if it printed a rambling essay he included, “Industrial Society and its Future.” Meanwhile, a large FBI team at work since 1978 had failed to identify this “Mad Bomber,” until his brother became suspicious enough to supply the critical tip that led to arrest in 1996 and current imprisonment.

That incoherent essay of Ted Kaczynski (UM Mathematics Ph.D. 1967) has been reformulated to a book, Technological Slavery, available on Amazon where it is described blandly.

“Logical, lucid and direct, Technological Slavery is more than an expansion on the ideas set forth by Theodore Kaczynski in Industrial Society and its Future (aka ‘The Manifesto’). It radically reinvigorates and reforms the intellectual foundations of an age-old and resurgent world view: ‘Progress is a myth. Wild nature and humanity (including human freedom, dignity, and autonomy) are fundamentally incompatible with technological growth.”

Kaczynski is now incarcerated at Federal Prison ADX in Florence, Colorado, serving a life sentence for his murderous campaign, and receives no remuneration for the book. 

Considering our ineptitude as a species and society in dealing with many existential crises  – pandemics, terrorism, extreme weather, earthquakes, environmental deterioration, poverty, food insecurity, economic and social inequality, ongoing regional warfare and destructive geopolitical conflict – it is no huge surprise that a small subset of our 7 billion people become unhinged by reality. To be so certain of belief and driven to terrorize others by mayhem and murder as Kaczynski, however, is clearly far beyond the pale. And others follow, notably Anthony Warner, last week in Nashville. [Below: Pales of settlement; Ireland 1488 and 1901 Poland and Russia. Wikipedia.]


Surely there are myriad constructive ways to build better futures for ourselves and the planet, although we’d better find them more quickly as the opportunities are slipping away.

No one can fully know what 2021 will bring, but we can predict some things will be lost this year: for a start – certainly much glacial ice and rain forest, and likely some essential species. Whatever other critical events we ignore at our peril – time will tell.

 

Postscripts.

Letters to self. We sent What’s New by email for 20 years and continue to publish the web version, Matula Thoughts, on the internet (maulathoughts.org) on the first Friday of each month.

What’s New, the communication, began in Allen Lichter’s Dean’s Office of UM Medical School in 2001. Some in the office then believed that “we can’t communicate too much” whereas others felt burned-out from the daily barrage of “Too Much Information” on physical and electronic desktops. The idea of producing something predictable but not too frequent, while interesting (one hoped) and reasonably concise, seemed preferable to random uncurated attachments and messages. We began What’s New then at predictable monthly intervals (first Fridays) to provide a finite “weekend read,” of around 15 minutes. The essay transitioned to the Urology Department in 2007 with the web version (easier to access and manage if “followed” on the website) in 2013 as matulathoughts.org making this number 95. 

The Dean’s Office of Faculty Affairs, now in the capable hands of Brian Zink, and the Department of Urology, under the excellent stewardship of Ganesh Palapattu, are creating their own modes of communication to fit their new times. Matula Thoughts continues a monthly cadence of essays relating loosely to medicine, Michigan, urology, biology, or other matters in the cabinet of curiosities, from a professor making the final round of bases in the game of academic medicine. This year seems a good time to free up people’s email and liberate many from an unwanted monthly weekend assignment, so we will discontinue the email distribution of What’s New. We will, however, continue the web format Matula Thoughts, that can be accessed by the click of a button on the web site, providing a monthly email and link to matulathoughts.org.

Trees fall in forests. 

Why write these essays? The essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) was an initial inspiration and exemplary modern expressions of the urge to communicate in writing are flourishing. Even if few people in the forest witness the falling tree of an essay, it serves a primal purpose. [Above: Hartwick Pines State Park, Grayling, Michigan, September 2020.]

Comparing the essay form to the nearly-obsolete hand-written letter, the author Claire Messud commented:

“The review and the essay remain a more public, yet ideally still intimate, version of the epistolary. Not a place to share one’s private details, to be sure, but certainly to try to communicate, as precisely and with as much complexity as possible, one’s experience of a work of art, or the evolution of one’s thought….” [C. Messud, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write. W.W. Norton, NY, 2020, p. xx.]

A letter assumes an audience, usually of one, although not necessarily of anyone. The act of writing provides a measure of satisfaction and deliverance (of an observation) even if it is simply a “note to self.” Messud’s book is both “an autobiography in essays,” as it’s self-described, followed by a collection of 16 literary and visual art contemplations, but most importantly, one suspects, it is an extraordinary series of personal notes-to-self that bring clarity to the writer. 

Metrics
Nothing is beyond the pale on the internet and much of it is measurable. Matula Thoughts took a small dip when the author ceased to be departmental chair of urology at UM in 2019 but readership is back with a rise this year with views at 3458, 3357, and 3929 (31 Dec.) for 2018, 2019, and 2020. This past year 16 countries produced 10 or more “views’ and another 55 countries had “single digit visitors” – enough observers in the cyber forest to justify continuing Matula Thoughts for 2021. Of course, “a view” or “a visitor” is not necessarily a thoughtful reader, but merely a measure of notice within the forest and, happily in terms of forest sustainability, Matula Thoughts doesn’t require many falling trees. Nonetheless, after nearly 20 years of this essay, it remains primarily a “letter-to-self,” if only an affirmation of self that sometimes resonates with someone else. [Below: Word Press readership for Matula Thoughts 2020.]

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts this January 2021.
David A. Bloom

 

December

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Matula Thoughts

December 4, 2020

Change and hope

2810 words

One.

Hope. Change and uncertainty are inevitable, but hope is the part of the human tool kit that helps people navigate life’s turbulence. Change may bring hope or horror, as imagined in the fictitious scenario (shown above) of audience response to the novelty of moving pictures in 1895 when the magic of film was an expectation beyond reasonable hope. [Above: “Panic in the Audience when Lumiere Shows his first Film.” Figure from Suddenly this Overview. Peter Fischli and Davis Weiss, Exhibit, Guggenheim Museum, April 2016.]

It is rational to hope that things will return to a semblance of normal after this “final wave” of Covid-19 disrupts workplaces and education, prolongs social isolation, and disturbs belief in science and reason. Humans rebound after bad times and new forms of creativity emerge from calamities, as seen with RNA vaccines. Still, we would do better to remember those bad times and plan for their inevitable return. [Below: Michigan Theater – mostly closed in Covid times and its big screen moving pictures sorely missed.]

Last year just around this time, our department hosted its annual Holiday Party, an event inaugurated by Jim Montie after the Urology Department emerged from a Department of Surgery division 20 years ago. As the department expanded, the get-togethers outgrew Ann Arbor venues and moved to Fox Hills Golf & Banquet Center with the help and generosity of Kathy and Mike Aznavorian. Further growth and blurred administrative boundaries over the years stretched even Fox Hills’s capacity for the UM Urology family, their children, and guests to mingle, see Santa, dine, and dance. A few of our staff put their hearts and souls into planning and deploying the event, with food, avionics for Santa, and gifts for children. When the financial uncertainty of 2008 struck, we hesitated but continued the party.  Little did we anticipate an emergent virus from the other side of the planet would break our annual run of holiday parties. Covid not only brings the monetary concern, but also precludes the social interaction and reminds us how much we miss gathering. 

[Above: Santa, Holiday Party 2013. Below: Keller and Osawa families, Holiday Party 2015.]

UM Urology has gotten so large and far-flung that hardly any of us knows everyone else – a far cry from my first days here in Ed McGuire’s Section of Urology.  With clinical and research activities of our department in at least 15 geographic locations, the challenges of communication and cultural identity are great. Families, organizations, and nations tend to grow far from their roots, straining integrity of the whole. Periodic gatherings can be forms of thanksgivings to recall roots and purpose, restore connectivity, and celebrate diversity. We hope and expect to gather again. 

 

Two.

Origins. With December here, a new year just around the corner, and the second century of urology at UM ahead, thoughts turn to the origin stories that ground our views of the world. Personal origin stories as well as organizational ones are idiosyncratic and complex – and all are rich in certainty, invention, and selective memories. The UM urology narrative, is assembling on our website. [Above: Cropsey painting of early UMMS.]

https://medicine.umich.edu/dept/urology/about-us/our-history/origin-story

Origins are never perfectly clear. The past can never be fully ascertained or known as completely as it actually happened. It can, however, be illuminated and investigated not merely out of curiosity but also to understand options for today, reinforce essential values, and prepare for the future. Our origin stories are lean in the details of the original peoples of the Americas who were displaced by explorers and colonists. Examination of origins forces us to see what’s missing, what’s right, and what’s wrong, thus giving opportunity to improve what’s lacking and what’s incorrect with ourselves and our organizations.  

Historians elicit facts, create narratives of the past, and measure it all according to values then and now so as to understand the meanings of those stories. This expansive evaluation is, at first glance, contrary to that of scientists who generally take reductionist approaches that render observations to the simplest explanations. Through methodological analysis   scientists may hope to find grander truths in general rules, laws, and theories. Health care providers, ideally, combine the story of a patient (the larger narrative of their past and present) with the facts of observation and clinical investigation.

 

Three.

Urology is a small detail in history’s medical narrative and its roots at the University of Michigan are uncertain. [Above: medieval uroscopy – man with a matula.] We have no practice logs from UM’s first genitourinary surgeons, Cyrenus Darling and Ira Loree, nor reminiscences to know what they thought of the 1902 “urology” neologism, although they chose not to adopt it. Their recollections of WWI and the Influenza Pandemic can be assumed unpleasant, but how those large events affected their daily lives, families and friends, and political responses can only be vaguely imagined. Who in their time would have thought that the “war-to-end-all-wars” would be followed so quickly by another one and who knew that the 1917 pandemic would end after a third wave in 1920? Who could have doubted that other pandemics wouldn’t follow? Most astonishingly who would dispute, today a century later, that face masks, social distancing, and rudimentary hygiene limit the spread of respiratory infections? 

The thoughts of Darling and Loree concerning their replacement in 1919 by  “Modern Urologist” Hugh Cabot were not positive and those impressions were exacerbated by his brusque manner, causing their swift departure to the welcoming St. Joseph Mercy Hospital a block away. From this disruptive transition, the UM Section of Urology was born.

No less disruptively ten years later Hugh Cabot, Medical School dean by then, was fired by the regents after losing confidence of the faculty. Reed Nesbit, Cabot’s second trainee, built the Section of Urology from 1930 through 1967, when he retired to Sacramento. Then, after an uncertain six months, Nesbit’s trainee Jack Lapides, was named successor and continued the clinical, educational, and research missions of the Section of Urology from 1968 to 1983. Like Nesbit, Lapides trained a great cohort of urologists of all types, including a great string of pediatric urologists: Norm Hodgson (Nesbit 1958), Tomohiko Koyanagi (N’70 – see Postscript), Ed Tank (N’71), Steve Koff (N’75), Evan Kass (N’76), and Barry Kogan (N’81). Still under the administrative management of the Surgery Department, UM Urology gained Ed McGuire (trained at Yale by Bernie Lytton) as Section Head.  This transition, too, caused disruption, with the loss of Ananias Diokno to the Beaumont system. 

The five-person Section of Urology under Ed McGuire (above) welcomed me and my family to Ann Arbor in the summer of 1984. The small section of five is now the large Department of Urology of 50 full-time faculty led by Ganesh Palapattu. Our academic space, initially on the fifth floor bridge between the old Mott and old Main University Hospital, moved to the second floor Taubman Building when it opened in 1986, and then the third floor of Taubman in Jim Montie’s early years as Urology Chief. That space underwent a well-needed facelift this autumn. Although this is the administrative hub of the department, our faculty have offices in the Cancer Center, North Ingalls Building (the old St. Joes Hospital), North Campus Research Complex (our Dow Division of Health Services Research in the old Pfizer Research campus), Muskegon’s West Shore Urology, and clinical and surgical activities at more than a dozen other sites.

 

[Above: Taubman Administrative Urology. Sept. 15, 2020. Below: September 30, 2020.]

The challenges of this Covid year are not over, as we yearn for a return to social proximity and in-person conferences. The postponement of the yearly Nesbit Alumni Meeting, along with other regular medical and scientific sessions was disappointing, but not unprecedented. The AUA, for example, also cancelled this year as well as in 1918, 1919, 1943, and 1945.

Academic routines are changing into new normals, such as our zoom visiting professor lecture in mid-November from Jim Hu at Cornell, shown below in one of his slides. Still, we miss our conference rooms.

 

Four.  

Narratives. The writing process for the UM urology story has strengthened my admiration of others far better at that art. My career, not primarily one of writing, was directed to what Hippocrates narrowly considered “the art of lithotomy,” but grew into its surgical cousins of orchidopexy, hypospadias repair, pyeloplasty, bladder reconstruction, and other needs of modern urology.  Turning facts into authentic narratives is a different occupation and certain writers stand out: John McPhee and E.O. Wilson for nonfiction, or Kazuo Ishiguro and David Mitchell for fictional story-telling. McPhee at age 89 continues to weave artful narratives of fact and people, while Wilson at 91 explains science with clarity and grace. Mitchell at 51 creates tapestries of fact and imagination, crossing fictional genres. Nobelist Ishiguro, at 65, writes novels that explore the uncertainty of memory and its deceptions. The authenticity of great fiction is a mirror to reality; as the Good Lord Bird miniseries proclaims: “All of this is true, most of it happened.” 

Our parochial story, The First Century of Urology at UM, is an accounting of real people and events that built a small specialty in a great public university amidst the contexts of its times, providing and creating state-of-the-art clinical care (such as it was), generating new ideas, educating successors, and leading colleagues.

We were fairly certain of the sequence of Nesbit’s early trainees and associates in our Origin Story of Urology at UM, but new information kept popping up. For example, Susan Dorr Goold, daughter of our recently deceased colleague Dick Dorr (Nesbit 1968), gave me pictures from her dad’s office but the identity of one drew a blank. Skip Campbell and Mac Whitehouse identified the photo as Rigdon “Rod” Ratliff, (Transylvania College A.B. 1924, UMMS 1929) who practiced urology at St. Joe’s. In medical school Ratliff became interested in surgery and urology under Cabot and Coller, and was likely influenced by Huggins and Nesbit – trainees and later junior staff under Cabot. With his MD in hand, Ratliff went across the street for internship at St. Joe’s and fell under the influence of Ira D. Loree, the UM genitourinary surgeon displaced nearly a decade earlier by Cabot. The cataclysmic stock market crash a few months into internship undoubtedly shaped Ratliff’s career plans and he remained at St. Joe’s in practice with Loree, the early years serving as a de facto residency in urology.  

By 1935 Ratliff was considered a legitimate urologist and Nesbit appointed him “Instructor in Urology” without salary. Loree died on August 11, 1936 and Ratliff took over his practice, revising his UM title in 1938 to “Part-time Instructor,” allowing more time for St. Joe’s practice. Ratliff maintained this title until 1946. Curiously, Ratliff didn’t join the AUA until 1946, his application endorsed by Nesbit and Robert Breakey, a Lansing urologist.  Ratliff continued to teach students and interns, and one of them, Tom Newman (Nesbit alumnus 1974 – now retired in Tucson), recalls Ratliff teaching him the “Water sink window test.”

Ratliff (above) collected urine samples in clear specimen bottles (modern matulas) before cystoscopy, holding them up to the window by the sink in the cystoscopy suite and if clear to daylight he poured the urine into the sink and completed the cystoscopy. Only if turbid, would he send the specimen for urinalysis, culture, and sensitivity.  At University Hospital, however, Newman discovered a very different approach; Lapides insisted on routinely spinning the urine and staining it with methylene blue before examination under the microscope and then dipstick urinalysis, with culture and sensitivity, if necessary. One approach was practical and cost effective, the other was richly academic. Newman fondly recalls Rigdon as a quiet gentleman. Clearly, Dick Dorr shared that admiration. Ratliff retired in December, 1973, according to the AUA files (found for us by Tupper Stevens) transitioning his AUA status from active member at $75 per year to senior member at $15. At home on 231 Corrie Road in Barton Hills, Ratliff died of a heart attack January 29, 1977. He was the last link between Hugh Cabot’s era and ours. 

 

Five.

The uncertainty of history. This turbulent political season, a friend referred me to the recent book, American Dialogue, by American historian, Joseph Ellis, who explained a central irony in his field.

“There is an inconvenient truth that most historians acknowledge under their breath, admitting that objectivity, in the sense that mathematicians or physicists, use the term, is not a realistic goal for historians. The best they can strive for is some measure of detachment, which serves the useful purpose of stigmatizing the most flagrant forms of ideological prejudice (i.e. cherry-picking the evidence to claim that Thomas Jefferson was an ideological Christian or Andrew Jackson was a New Deal Democrat). But as you believe that the study of history is an ongoing conversation between past and present, detachment itself is delusional. In his Style in History (1974) Peter Gay put the point succinctly: ‘History is always unfinished in the sense that the future always uses the past in new ways.’ In fact, the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable or forgotten. History is what we choose to remember, and we have no alternative but to do our choosing now.”  [Ellis, American Dialogue, 1918. p. 7.] 

Certitude, whether moral, intellectual, or political, is a tricky matter as reflected in this column last month when we tried to make a case for an enlightened Certainty 2.0 that allows one to retain some degree of uncertainty to allow for “I’m not so sure” and keep asking questions. Perhaps H.L. Mencken overstated the matter when he claimed that moral certainty should occupy a low rung in the ladder of human intellect, but he had a fair point.  

The moral certitude of John Brown, in song, epic poem, or current Showtime series, The Good Lord Bird, epitomizes the smugness of Certainty 1.0.  Timothy McVeigh’s ideological certainty terrorized Oklahoma City in 1995, striking against the Federal government by bombing a federal building, killing 168 people and injuring more than 680 others. Similarly, Ted Kaczynski (UM Mathematics Ph.D. 1967), certain that industrial-technological society was subjugating mankind and destroying the planet, responded by sending bombs to university faculty and airlines in 1978, to “get back at the system.” He wreaked havoc on the lives of random people who represented modern society or happened to be in the way of the bomb.  This campaign precipitated a long FBI investigation that ended with arrest in 1996 (see Wikipedia). Religious certitude (perhaps a form of ideological certainty) fueled the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. 

Self-serving certitude, another broad form of certainty, is that of psychopaths who justify their actions by personal convenience, often framed by occupation or paycheck, as mentioned here last month, with attribution to H.L. Mencken, Lewis Sinclair, C.E. M. Joad, and others: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Closely related is political certitude, as in recent seasons has tested the flexibility of the American Experiment.

Immaculate Misconceptions, the title of a section of the Law chapter in Ellis’s book  includes two extraordinary quotes relevant to certitude and to stimulate your uncertainty as a reader we defer their sources to the postscript.

Source A. “When a case comes to me, I don’t do whatever I feel like doing, I have a standard. That standard is what would the people at the time the Constitution was enacted have said.”   

Source B. “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. … We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”  

These ideas relate to the question of the role of originalism or textualism in law. Adjudication of today’s uncertainties according to the exact words of a set of historic bylaws might be considered a cop-out, relieving decision-makers of consideration of contemporary complexities and values. One expects that was not Scalia’s intent in his heart of hearts, but rather his starting point to consideration of legal questions. We surely hope our judges and wise leaders struggle intellectually with uncertainty to arrive at a Certainty 2.0 in their consequential decisions.  

 

Postscript.

Sources. A. Antonin Scalia, speech at the University of Fribourg, March 8, 2008.  B. Thomas Jefferson to Simon Kercheval, July 12, 1816.  [J. Ellis, American Dialogue, The Founders and Us. Vintage Press, NY, 2018. p. 151.]

The Good Lord Bird, is a 2014 book by James McBride on John Brown and its Showtime dramatic series offers an ironic introductory quote, “All of this is true, most of it happened.” This complements Don Coffey’s enduring admonition to his research students to try to understand the difference between facts and true facts, reminding how certainty is tenuous but some things are deeply true to us.

Congratulations. The Japanese Government recently awarded Tomohiko Koyanagi The Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in recognition of outstanding contributions to medical education and research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Sacred_Treasure

[Above: Tom Koyanagi. Below: Order of Sacred Treasure.]

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts this December, 2020.

David A. Bloom, University of Michigan Department of Urology

 

2020 – a new blank slate

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Matula Thoughts 3 January 2020

A new blank slate

2376 words

One.

 

Tabula Rasa 2020.

Optimists begin New Years with clean slates. Most people negotiate internal tension between optimism and pessimism, but the sense of opportunity that comes with a new year generally tilts the balance toward optimism and the chance to start anew with mistakes and sins of the past perhaps forgotten, if not forgiven. The blank slate, though, is only a metaphor; each year ahead will build on stories of the past – history – and the contingencies of immediate moments. [Above: Blank wax tablet.Wikipedia.]

The new year, next decade, and century ahead for Michigan Urology, may be shaped by the century that unfurled after Hugh Cabot came to Ann Arbor late in 1919, but the critical determinants of the future will be the ingenuity, industry, and success of our educational programs, research, and clinical delivery. The idea that the essential deliverable of academic medicine is patient care, while not historically prominent, is absolutely clear today. That essential deliverable, as we have said in our department of urology for some years, is kind and excellent clinical care, thoroughly integrated with education and innovation. With that, as the “North Star,” navigation becomes simple.

The Latin phrase tabula rasa originates from blank slates or waxed tablets that, after erasure of chalk or melting the wax, are available for fresh notation. Aristotle was one of the early thinkers who likened the mind to a clean writing slate and Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, and John Locke, among many others, expanded the idea until modern neurobiology brought science to the matter. Metaphors are merely tools for thinking and communication, not absolute “true facts” that Don Coffey sought to recognize amidst the litter of contemporary information. Steven Pinker’s book of 2002,Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, calls out the metaphor and explains that human behavior is not constructed on a blank slate, or tabula rasa, but is heavily programed. [See Pinker’s TED Talks 2008 and 2019.]

Blank Slate is also the clever name for an Ann Arbor Ice cream shop, the actual ice cream serving as a medium for an ingenious palate of flavors. Ice cream, one of the great inventions of humankind, is a delight in any season, although winter demand slackens enough for the Creamery to close up for the coldest months (above at Liberty and S. First Streets). Having borrowed the metaphor for this monthly message, I was duty bound to ask (and receive) permission from Michigan grad Janice Sigler who opened Blank Slate in July, 2014, with her husband.

 

Two.

January 1920 was an optimistic time for Hugh Cabot in Ann Arbor at a high point of his career. Modern Urology, his noteworthy 1918 textbook, capped his 15 year rise to central authority in the field. An early volunteer for the European conflict, well before American entry made it a world war, Cabot commanded a 2,500-bed general hospital on the Western Front by war’s end. His return to Boston at the end of January 1919 was front-page news in the Boston Herald, although not without glitches. Cabot’s team of doctors and nurses was blocked from leaving the train at the Boston station where a reception was waiting for them. A military authority ordered the ensemble to remain on the train and continue on the train to Camp Devon, Massachusetts and then New York City for official discharge of duties. After discussion Cabot declined the order and the entire medical team disembarked from the train to join the waiting reception and then dispersed into the crowd to resume civilian life. [Below: Boston Herald. Front page. “Harvard Surgical Unit held prisoners by error on arrival in Boston.” January 31, 1919.]

As Cabot resumed civilian life the world seemed enroute to a better future in terms of public health, geopolitics, economics, technology, and art. The devastating Great Influenza Epidemic was over, but other pandemics followed. Geopolitical solutions to WWI would pave the way to WWII and later conflicts. The economic world collapsed in less than a decade. Rapid advances of technology that seemed so wonderful in the early 20thcentury proved two-sided by century-end with antibiotic resistant bacteria threatening food safety, robots displacing jobs, computer malware holding businesses and cities hostage, identity theft via internet, and social media manipulation of public elections. The public eagerly embraces Orwellian Big Brother – reassuringly renamed Alexa, Hey Google, and Siri – with ubiquitous cameras on streets and in homes paving the way to authoritarian control of society through artificial intelligence.

 

Three.

The “blank slate” of the new year, brings to mind resolutions and the human itch for personal mastery of something – work, play, family, or hobby. Just as they were once inspired, Bach and Casals are posthumously inspiring future composers and musicians today. The cello suites have had a remarkable 300-year journey since Bach started writing them as exercises for his young wife in 1717. Casals discovered the largely-forgotten music in a shop in 1890 and mastered its performance by 1896 when he became principal cellist in Barcelona at the Gran Teatre del Liceu. [Below: Title page of Anna Magdalena Bach‘s manuscript: Suites á Violoncello Solo Senza Basso. Wikipedia.]

Casals had ups and downs, like everyone, but the worst immobilized him for two weeks in 1939 when he didn’t leave his room in Paris, exhausted from recording the six Bach suites (Casals hated the recording process) and despairing over Franco’s take-over of Spain. Casals was thoroughly burned out, although the favored terminology of the time described him as emotionally exhausted and depressed. Thankfully, he rebounded and his career reached new heights. Nearly 20 years later, at age 80, he married 20-year-old Marta Montañez y Martinez, dismissing concerns over their age discrepancy: “I look at it this way: if she dies, she dies!” [Cesare Civetta. Mar 14, 2018. “Pablo Casals sacrificed his career to protest Franco.” https://CesareCivetta.com/blog] [Below: From Encyclopaedia Britannica, Pablo Casals, 1965. Erich Auerbach, photograph, Hulton Archive/Getty Images.]

The inspiration of the suites lives on: Yo-Yo Ma was inspired by Bach’s cello suites at age 4 and today, at 64, travels six continents to perform all six suites in single sittings at 36 locations.

Combustion control has been a defining feature of our species beginning around campfires for comfort, cooking, and conversation. Heat may erase tabula rasas, but metaphoric self-combustion in modern society seems a new thing. It is not clear when burnout is a “legitimate” dysfunction or an extension of quotidian fatigue? That state of reduced personal efficacy, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization describes the condition today called burnout, that suddenly, it seems, has become epidemic in many professions, including health care. Conferences, surveys, and editorials proliferate and  medicalize the matter. The Lancet offered a useful perspective in an editorial, Physician burnout: the need to rehumanise health systems. The wording is counterintuitive – the “rehumanization” of human health care. [The Lancet. 394: 1591, 2019.]

 

Four.

So how is it that health care became “dehumanized”– that very suggestion seems to be an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, as René Magritte cleverly depicted in his surreal paintings such as the 1953 Wonders of Nature (©René Magritte). The dehumanization phenomenon in medicine seems linked to the systematization, corporatization, and commoditization of healthcare. Systems are necessary in modern healthcare, of course, but the displacement of what historically was called the doctor-patient relationship with checklists, guidelines, and clinical pathways distracts from the human element. The EHR-directed patient “encounters” have largely replaced the narratives of the human conditions wrapped-up in taking “the history.”. Corporate medicine is quickly replacing small practices and bringing with it tainted ideas of business management, specifically the failed ideas of Taylorism, managerial accounting, and the North Star of shareholder value.

The idea of the limited liability corporation has largely built the modern world, as human society has given corporations many special rights such as limited liability, free speech, and some special benefits that ordinary people cannot have. (Back around 2003 Julian Wan gave me a book that explains this – The Company – A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.) Undeclared but implicit in that Victorian innovation is a social contract that businesses exist not merely for shareholder value, but more broadly for stakeholder value – jobs, employees, benefits, suppliers, community – and for value to society-at-large, the most important stakeholder of all.

It is natural that some parts of health care are legitimate commodities, functioning optimally in a market-based economy without the necessity of an intermediary professional agent. Examples are many – flu shots, over-the counter medications, food supplements, and countless others. Other healthcare functions are complex, multilayered, and highly professional, such as renal transplantation, mental health treatment, and management of malignancy. In between these extremes are the essential transactions of visits to physicians, dental care, emergency department visits, orthopaedic care, periodic eye care, and treatment of urologic conditions – these are a mix of commodity and profession. The arbitrage of those two elements of society is an endless conversation.

The extension of personal mastery in one’s subject of choice, whether by New Year Resolution or not, is self-vaccination against burnout. The enhanced personal well-being can re-humanize your medical workplace in more ways than this essay can explain. Recently, up in Flint at the Hamilton Community Health Center, Mike Giacalone, Jr., the Chief Medical Officer, was explaining Hamilton to interviewing journalists and said that for the Flint patients, “every visit is not just a medical visit, but equally so a social, economic, and behavioral visit as well.” While particularly relevant in Flint, this should be a universal aspiration in health care. The medical gaze should try to “take it all in” and triage the needs of a patient and family as best possible, in spite of the rigidity of the EHR- constrained medical encounter programmed around a chief complaint.

 

Five.

Media and messages. Whether the medium is ice cream, canvas, blank paper, musical instrument, computer screen, stage, construction site, clinic room, operating room, or learner – artistry can be performed.

Everyone is a lifelong learner, but the health care field demands special attention. Undergraduates and beginning medical students are the most impressionable blank slates and for that reason the responsibility of role models, teachers, and mentors is perhaps the greatest for them among the learners we teach. For many of the younger set their first experiences seeing a physician, nurse, or physician’s assistant at work (sometimes in instances of personal care of a UTI, stone, or surgical correction) imprints and fosters a lifelong pursuit. Whenever possible, these opportunities for shadowing or introductory teaching should be embraced. Residency training, however, is the most critical blank slate of all in medicine, fashioning the knowledge, skills, artistry, and professionalism for a career. [Images above & below from “the internet.”]

Blank slates are opportunities, but risk erasure of the past although that is necessary with wax tablets and chalkboards. Parchment and paper were a big improvement allowing durable manuscripts and books, still at risk from fire (accidental or intentional) or other forms of destruction or deterioration. The new world of digital information carried the conceit that humans could become “paperless”, but that is ultimately not only impractical but also a genuinely bad idea for free societies.

When governments, sectarian authorities, or corporatocracies control printing presses, airwaves, or other social media – society is captive to a few reigning opinions because inconvenient stories, opinions, ideas, or truths are conveniently avoided or erased. Clever memes and tweets easily subvert social groups and human ideals. One great feature of the human condition is the testing and synergism of opinions, ideas, and technologies that can build civilization for the greater good of mankind and sustainability of the planet. The central idea of free speech at the heart of civilization, is being sorely tested by the unexpected opportunities of modern technological social media.

From our parochial perspective in the art and business of health care, erasure of history is an especially unfortunate reality, but we see it with each change of technology in health records. The operative procedure notes and pathology reports from the earlier part of my career seem to have vanished with the paper records we utilized when I started here in Ann Arbor, as I have learned when trying to answer requests from people regarding, say, an exstrophy closure operative report in the 1940’s, a hospital course in the 1960’s, or thyroidectomy pathology findings from the 1970s. Those floppy discs we had in the 1980s and zip-drives of the 1990s are increasingly difficult to access as obsolete technologies disappear. No one today can ensure that the massive data in electronic records will be converted to the media of the future – it seems unlikely that the “data cloud” of 2020 will be maintained in a future data cloud or its equivalent of 2050.

When Ed McGuire brought me to Ann Arbor in 1984 my blank slates were 3×5 index cards and the newly launched Macintosh Computer. Our hospital then had separate inpatient and outpatient paper charts. The Surgery Department administrators cautioned me to not get used to my Apple Computer as UM was preparing to launch the Wang Computer System. I didn’t listen – but still have the cards (one for with every patient I saw at Michigan) and that original Macintosh (now a book end).

 

Postscript

Matula Thoughts analytics, 2019. We have no sense of the total readership of the monthly What’s New delivered by email, but the web version matulathoughts.org has levelled off at 3357 views and 2199 visitors from 78 countries as of 31 December 2019, down from 3458 views, 2226 visitors from 89 countries in 2018, probably due to personal retreat from the chair position of the Urology Department at the University of Michigan. This past year we shortened the essay from 10 to 5 numbered items and dropped the word count to 2000 or so, although still far less convenient than a 140-character microblog tweet.

This leveling-off of Matula Thoughts recalls the Hippocratic Aphorism: Art is long, life is short, opportunity fleeting, experience hazardous, and judgment difficult. Other interpretations of the Ancient Greek vary the nuance and words, but clearly this personal essay, the first Friday of each month, is anachronistic and risky in offering personal judgments and observations. Those facts are more than balanced by the personal delight in hearing back from a handful of readers each month, thus extending these essays to dialogue and conversation, challenging facts, pointing out errors, and teaching me. Comments last month were especially appreciated. For all these, thank you.

 

David A. Bloom

Department of Urology

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Mastery

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Matula Thoughts December 6, 2019

Mastery

2473 words

 

One.

Master cellist Pablo Casals received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on this December day in 1963, among the first cohort of recipients, in a bittersweet ceremony two weeks after President Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy had come up with the idea for the award, but Lyndon Johnson presided at the event by default.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom was a successor to the Medal of Freedom that derived from Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9586 (signed July 6, 1945), establishing an award for notable civilian service during WWII. Over 20,000 such medals were given out, mainly by the secretaries of state, war, and navy up through 1961. Kennedy re-oriented the award with his Executive Order 11085 (signed February 22, 1963), broadening the name to Presidential Medal of Freedom and shifting its scope to include cultural achievements. Other awardees with Casals that evening December 6, 1963, were architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; painter Andrew Wyeth; singer Marian Anderson; writers E.B. White, Thornton Wilder, and Edmund Wilson; Rudolf Serkin pianist; Edwin Land inventor; Edward Steichen photographer; Clarence Randall businessman; educators Genevieve Caulfield, James Bryant Conant, Alexander Meiklejohn, and George Taylor, and others including John Enders for his vaccine work. It was quite a gathering. [Above: Casals at Carnegie Hall, 1917. Bain Collection, Library of Congress.]

Casals, one of the great cellists of all time, at age thirteen had found a tattered copy of obscure Bach unaccompanied cello suites in a Barcelona shop, mastered the six pieces, and took them to international attention that would inspire generations of cellists such as Yo-Yo Ma. On Wikipedia you can find audio clips of Casals playing parts of the First Cello Suite. The Casals entry from the same source offers a quote from George Carlin attributed to Casals, who when asked at age 93 why he continued to practice three hours a day replied, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.” Fact or true fact, it’s a beautiful thought and one certainly in keeping with the artist’s persona.

 

Two.

Born in Catalonia Spain in 1876, Casals died in Puerto Rico in 1973. His life was one of mastery and professionalism, interrupted by a terribly low point around the time of the Spanish Civil War, when he was a refugee in France. Fleeing Franco’s efforts to liquidate political foes, Casals learned that he would have his arms cut off if he returned. Anguished over the fall of the Spanish Republic, distressed by it abandonment by democratic nations, fearful of his own safety in France as the Nazi’s rolled across Europe, and exhausted by demands of recording the Bach cello suites (the first recording made of them), Casals fell into a deep depression and didn’t leave his room in Paris for two weeks. Burned-out, as some people now would say, he eventually rallied and got back to his work. Much later Casals gave his memoirs to a writer, Albert E. Kahn, who published Joys and Sorrows: Pablo Casals, His Own Story in 1970.

Kahn, it should be noted, was nephew of the master industrial architect Alfred Kahn who worked with Hugh Cabot in Ann Arbor to plan and build Michigan’s acclaimed University Hospital in 1925. Kahn also designed Hill Auditorium, Clements Library, Angell Hall, Betsy Barbour Residence Hall, Burton Memorial Tower, Harlan Hatcher Library, Ruthven Museum, among other buildings on campus. Kahn’s son, Eddie, a contemporary surgical trainee with Nesbit under Cabot, became Michigan’s second neurosurgeon (after Max Peet). Sixty Kahn buildings are on the National Historic Register list, but it was the Clements Library in Ann Arbor for which Kahn wanted to be most remembered.

Stories of the Bach suites and Casals are interwoven by Eric Siblin in The Cello Suites (Grove Press, New York, 2009). Mastery is an aspirational trait that most people seek in one way or another, whether it be mastery of a skill or hobby, mastery of a job, or mastery of parenting. Kennedy’s idea for the Presidential Medal expanded a national honor related to war to the mastery of the constructive skills of civilization – the humanities. Kennedy’s empathy and respect for those arts reverberates today and marks him as a master statesman, no doubt imperfect as is anyone, but a master of the presidency. [Picture: Casals performing for the Kennedys at the White House, November, 1961.]

 

Three.

Kennedy had a special linkto the University of Michigan dating from his campaign speech on the steps of the Michigan Union at 2:00 AM on October 23, in 1960 when he proposed the idea of the Peace Corps. The national shock at his assassination only three years later was profound for most people, no matter how they had voted. [Above: Time cover from John F. Kennedy Library, Boston.]

At this time in 1963 the Section of Urology of the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan was in the final stage of Reed Nesbit’s leadership. Nesbit’s mentor, Hugh Cabot, had been an undisputed master of the subject of modern urology in the early 20th century, while Nesbit subsequently became the undisputed master of many of its skills, most notably transurethral resection of the prostate. Nesbit was also a master educator, training at least 83 residents and additional fellows, although we are still trying to get a precise count (demonstrating once again how elusive true facts and actual history can be).

In December 1963, as Nesbit was winding up another good year as chief of urology at Michigan, he undoubtedly read of Casals and the other Presidential Medalists the following day in the Ann Arbor and national newspapers. The only other senior faculty member in the Section of Urology faculty with Nesbit in the Section of Urology in 1963 was Jack Lapides who was Chief of Urology at the VA and at Wayne County General Hospital (since 1950). Joe Cerny (N ’62) was a junior faculty member. Harry Lichtwardt had been Vice Chair of Urology at Wayne County General Hospital, since 1951. The three new residents in 1963, halfway through their year at this time of the season were Dale Alkema, Larry McDonald, and Bernie Sloan, while the chief residents were Robert Bishop, Dewey Heetderks, and Harold McDonald. Nesbit was likely starting to think about his annual Christmas letter around this time. Meanwhile I was in my first year of college, oblivious to the field of urology and wondering if I would master anything at all.

The news cycle, one hundred years ago, centered around the daily papers with a 24-hour rhythmicity. The national news for December 6 contained little information that today’s newshounds would recognize, except perhaps for mention of the Warren Commission in the New York Times, an Oswald reference in the Ann Arbor News, and a Big 10 athletic scholarship limit reported in the Michigan Daily. [Thanks to Katie Baxter for finding these.]

The inaugural Presidential Medals of Freedom winners were not revealed to the public until the next day, December 7, in addition to other newsworthy items, including the 22nd anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

 

Four.

Senait Fisseha. Not every week does The Lancet feature an article on a Michigan faculty member, but that happened recently with a profile on Senait Fisseha, Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology. [Lane R. Profile. Senait Fisseha: empowering women through reproductive health.The Lancet. 394:1405, 2019.]  Medical Director of the University Center for Reproductive Medicine in 2008, Director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility in 2011, and creator of the University of Michigan Center for International Reproductive Health Training, Senait  has developed a partnership between Michigan and St. Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Another shout-out for The Lancet relates to Ella Doerge, who graduated from our program last year and is currently pursuing further training in a London fellowship with Tim O’Brien. She recently sent me the following comments and picture she took at The Lancet Library.

Hi Dr. Bloom,

Just dropping you a line to see how things are going back on the homefront in Michigan. I’m a month or so into working at my fellowship at Guy’s and am getting more and more familiarized with life in the UK, both in the health care system and in the city at large. While we share the English language with the English, there have been more differences in culture and conversational conventions than meet the eye that I’ve been uncovering. While it’s been good here, I think I’m irrevocably American, in mentality, how I prefer to practice medicine, and how I interact with my environment.

Anyway, I thought of you in particular a few weeks ago because I had the opportunity to spend a day with one of the lead editors of The Lancet. I got to peruse the library with volumes dating back to their first publications which I’m sure you would have found particularly interesting (photo attached). I also sat in on their weekly editorial board meeting with their editor-in-chief in which they made all the decisions for papers to include in the coming week’s issue.

 

[Above: Lancet Library; Below: Ella with Duncan Morhardt during their days at Michigan.]

 

Five.

Burnout is a hot topic. It rightly focuses attention on our students, residents, and colleagues who are struggling more than usual. It offers many opportunities for blame, administrative burden, the electronic record, mandatories, administrators in general, third party payers, regulations, fee-for-service systems, RVUs, corporate medicine, throughput demands, constrained schedule grids, and the gray days of winter. It provides new opportunities for talks, papers, and even jobs. But let’s not blame burnout, per se; many physicians lose a sense of the magic in their profession and others are truly overwhelmed by “TMI” and conflicting responsibilities. And, of course, some organizations provide poor workplaces.

Burnout cannot be detected by biomarkers and as of yet has no ICD 10 diagnostic code. Once it was considered a binary phenomenon – you either have it or don’t, just as Casals in his darkest days couldn’t leave his room to re-engage with the world. Individuals, at some point, may be overwhelmed by work and can’t continue it. Surveys and questionnaires (“instruments”) allegedly diagnose “degrees of burnout” which seems to have been externalized, from an internal or personal condition, to a workplace fault. No responsible leader can avoid discussing the topic and “measuring” their teams for it with further surveys, thereby adding counterproductively to the enlarging ambient administrative burden. By medicalizing burnout and viewing it as a “disease,” like a generalized form of carpal tunnel syndrome, we gas-light the matter, conveniently obscuring leadership a causal factor, but no matter how we frame it we, as leaders, are responsible for workplace conditions that heavily contribute to the condition.

It is unreasonable to expect successful people, even the masters of their arts to be “on fire” every day. Pablo Casals had days of tedium, frustration, annoyance, and – as is well documented – anger and embitterment over the political realities of his nation. His dysfunctional interlude in Paris was multifactorial in origin – the recording process was particularly alien and painful for him – but he rebounded. Could intrinsic motivationbe the converse of “burnout” or provide a “vaccination” against it? Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, caught my attention in my early days as chair and affected my world-view. I gave out numerous copies of it and had many productive discussions on it with executive coach David Bachrach and faculty colleagues. The ideas integrated beautifully with concepts of lean processes that Toyota, John Shook, and locally Jack Billi, Jeanne Kin, and Malissa Eversole have shown me. The key features of intrinsic drive,or self-motivation, that Pink teaches are purpose, mastery, and autonomy.

Purpose envelops healthcare professions, you shouldn’t have to look far to find it, although it can become obscured in crowded and tense modern workplaces. Mastery is a matter of training, life-long learning, and deepening maturation of perspective. Our residencies and fellowships get us started, our practice and continuing education hone our skills, and hard-won wisdom opens the door to mastery, which is never complete, as Pablo Casals lightly noted in 1964 when he said: “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.”

Autonomy is the challenge, in these times of complex health care teams. Of course, no person is an island – we are members of a deeply interwoven eusocial species and rely on others to bake our bread, brew our beer, and prepare our meats and tofu. Autonomy is relatively conditional. In rare instances, some people can effectively bully their way into great degrees of autonomy and achieve wonderful things, although usually with a personal toll – e.g. Steve Jobs. The challenge for leaders, whether at single unit levels or presiding at large systemic levels, is to understand and protect the autonomy needs of workers under their authority. The complex teams of modern medical practice preclude absolute autonomy of any one person. Everyone reports to someone from custodian to CEO, yet members of most teams function best when driven by their own intrinsic motivation rather than external carrots or sticks, targets or incentives; the challenge is unleashing that intrinsic motivation. When employees understand their contribution is valued, when they have freedom to improve that work, and when they feel fairly compensated, then intrinsic motivation can thrive – and that is the best inoculation against burnout.

 

Postscript.

Dick Dorr passed away last month. He was an iconic figure in Michigan Urology and a pillar of the community, leader of St. Joseph’s Mercy, and faculty member in the University of Michigan Department of Urology in his later career. Richard Paul Dorr was born 8/17/1936 in Saginaw and became a loyal Spartan at Michigan State prior to coming to the University of Michigan Medical School to obtain an MD in 1961. After surgical internship at Wayne County General Hospital he served as Captain in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and Commander of an Airborne Division Medical Company at Fort Benning, Georgia. Dick returned to Ann Arbor in 1964 for urology residency at the University of Michigan that began under Reed Nesbit and concluded under Jack Lapides in 1968, when he went across the street to St. Joe’s to begin urology practice and develop a superb team with Tim McHugh and Hugh Solomon. Dick served as chief of the medical staff from 1980-82. He became a member of the American College of Surgeons, in the tradition of Dr. Nesbit. A master of urology, and ever the student, Dick completed a fellowship in pediatric and reconstructive urology with the cutting-edge team at East Virginia Medical College in 1984. Following that he had important corporate roles in the St. Joe’s system before returning to fulltime practice in 1990 with Tim and Hugh. In the last six years of his career he worked at the University of Michigan Medical Center during the leadership period of Jim Montie. Dick died on 11/6/2019 and these pages cannot do justice to that master of urology. He is survived by two siblings, his wife Jane, and children Richard, Susan Dorr Goold (colleague in Internal Medicine here at UM), and Mark. Dick and Jane have five grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

 

David A. Bloom

University of Michigan, Department of Urology, Ann Arbor

December

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Matula Thoughts Dec 7, 2018

3930 words

 

One.

Tiny Tim Cratchit and Ebenezer Scrooge come to mind in December when seasonal good cheer expands the possibilities of latent human kindness, turning some Scrooges into their better selves, exemplified by Charles Dickens’ 1843 tale. The author played the story well, for who can’t empathize with Tiny Tim, whose disability reminds us of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), signed by GHW Bush in 1990? The late president said, at the signing, that he was glad to help take down “that shameful wall of exclusion,” little knowing that the ADA would help his own access to public spaces during his wheelchair years 25 years later. [Above, upper Liberty Street, cold afternoon. Below: Tiny Tim & Bob Cratchit. Fred Barnard illustration for 1870 ed.]

We don’t need Marley’s ghost, to exercise our philanthropic nature this month. [Above: Scrooge enlightened by Marley’s ghost. John Leech Illustration in A Christmas Carol, Chapman & Hall, London. 1843. British Library.]  Tax advantages, to a dwindling extent, also enter the philanthropic calculus as people evaluate well-constructed requests for their dollars. Pleas for out-of-pocket “spare change” from panhandlers is a complex matter, sometimes linked to homelessness, but just as likely separate and multifactorial. Like most human enterprises, it grows if supported. Solicitations on the streets are often more a business rather than a solution to hunger, homelessness, poverty, mental illness, or substance abuse. Panhandling makes downtown spaces a little uncomfortable, and although handing over a buck provides momentary satisfaction, it doesn’t further the greater good of the truly needy or the public.

The community of Ann Arbor has come together for excellent programs such as the Delonis Center, Ozone House, Alpha House, Salvation Army Shelter, Dawn Farms, Home of New Vision, Packard Clinic, Hope Clinic, and Neutral Zone, but these don’t fill all the needs of homeless or otherwise at-risk people. Spare change gifting has a doubly negative effect: it encourages the business of panhandling, and it relieves guilt of panhandled individuals, who preferably could expend constructive efforts on durable solutions to the causes and needs of the people who seek help. Shelters, food banks, health care, public safety, job programs, education, and low-income housing, need political support, public policy solutions, volunteerism, and philanthropy. If you encounter a panhandler and feel guilty, consider pointing out a nearby shelter or offering a nutrition bar.  [Below: Sidney Paget illustration, The Man with the Twisted Lip. Arthur Conan Doyle, 1981.]

 

Two.

Galens Medical Society, founded in Ann Arbor in 1914 as a liaison between students and faculty, began charitable Tag Days in 1927 and solicits funds on the streets the first weekend in December.  Medical school became costly in the 20th century and in the 1930s Galens established scholarships and a loan fund. Galens now targets its funds to children’s needs in Washtenaw County.

Salvation Army kettles usually decorate December streets, although I saw few this past weekend. This evangelical church began in 1865, when Methodist circuit-preacher William Booth and his wife sermonized at the notorious Blind Beggar tavern in East London. The Salvation Army is best known for its crusade against alcoholism, as portrayed in George Bernard Shaw’s 1907 play, Major Barbara. The organization uses military titles, the CEO is referred to as General, and the kettles began in 1891 when Salvation Army Captain Joseph McFee placed one at San Francisco’s Market Street Ferry Landing to collect Christmas dinner money for impoverished members of the community. Disaster relief is another function of the organization.

Homelessness also applies to pets, and the Huron Valley Humane Society is another consideration for your generosity. Philanthropy, or anthrophilia, is a restricted form of biophilia, a term embraced by E.O. Wilson, who wrote:

“… to explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends upon this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its current.

There is more. Modern biology has produced a genuinely new way of looking at the world that is incidentally congenial to the inner direction of biophilia. In other words, instinct is in this rare instance aligned with reason. The conclusion I draw is optimistic: to the degree that we come to understand other organisms, we will place a greater value on them, and on ourselves.”  [Wilson EO. Biophilia. Harvard University Press, 1984. p. 1-2.]

 

Three.

The urology chair will transition next year as the Michigan Urology Centennial approaches, and the first part of the Michigan Urology story should be in print at next year’s Nesbit Society meeting, October 3-5, 2019. The early history of UM reveals the foundational role of philanthropy, beginning as a partnership of community, state, and generous people who wanted to create something worthy and great in Ann Arbor. The same was true for its first hospital. With declining support from local and state government, philanthropy becomes mission-critical, evidenced by the recent University of Michigan campaign with $1.5 billion dollars for Michigan Medicine, celebrated last month at the North Campus Research Center. [Below: Becky and Randy Tisch flanked by Harry and Natalie Mobley.]

Endowments and endowed professorships impact our department greatly. The Babcock Fund jump started dozens of research projects and bolstered our residency and fellowships for 80 years. The Lapides endowment affected my career, Stuart Wolf’s small renal mass data set changed the worldwide approach to kidney cancer with the Brain and Mary Campbell family gift, and the professorship from George Valassis very positively helped the careers and academic work of Jim Montie, Dave Wood, Ganesh Palapattu, and Khaled Hafez. The Brandon survivorship gifts have been of inestimable value to hundreds of patients and the career of Professor Daniela Wittmann. The Chang, Nesbit, McGuire, and Moyad professorships followed, as did the Complementary/Alternative Medicine Program under Mark Moyad, initiated by Phil Jenkins, Bob Thompson, and Josh Pokempner. We are still short by ten of the need to match professorships to the expanding ranks of senior faculty.  Endowed professorships will be the essential structural elements for any great clinical department of the future.

Jerry May, UM Vice President of Development, steps down after 30 years of bountiful leadership (above, during a tough day in Columbus). Eric Barritt (below with John Copeland) has effectively led Michigan Medicine development for four years and we have enjoyed Vince Cavataio as urology’s development officer over the past two years. Endowment-building requires diligent work with a good measure of luck. In this sense, it is both stoichiometric (assembly with the right elements and proportions) and stochastic (random).

[Below: at Nesbit tailgate Vince and Tonya McCoy.]

 

Four.

Moral dilemmas of health care were explored in another Shaw play, The Doctor’s Dilemma, first produced November 20, 1906. Its Preface provides an even sharper dissection of the medical profession than the play itself. Parsing of scarce medical resources was exemplified in the story by a new cure for tuberculosis (TB) that its physician-inventor, Sir Colenso Ridgeon, could only provide to ten patients at a time. From his first group of 50 TB patients Ridgeon had to select ten “most worthy” of cure. Personal foibles added to the doctor’s dilemma when an irresistable young woman asks him to cure her dissolute husband. Around the same time a poor but noble colleague of Ridgeon’s with TB also appeals for help. Suddenly, Sir Colenso has 52 patients in need, but still only resources for ten. His other dilemma was the timeless conflict between medicine as a profession and a personal business.

Shaw modeled Ridgeon on Sir Almroth Wright (1861-1947), British bacteriologist and immunologist (below) who was one of the first to predict that antibiotics would create resistant bacteria, an idea Shaw used in his 1932 comedy, Too Good to Be True. Wright was opposed to women’s suffrage and their entry into professions, writing a book in 1913, The Unexpurgated Case Against Women Suffrage. Wright’s contrary nature probably made him suitable for Shavian friendship and earned him the names “Almroth Wrong” and “Sir Almost Right.” Wright would have raised his eyebrows had he visited Ann Arbor when the Galens Society began and found women included in the Michigan medical school class since 1871.

An essay by Michael O’Donnell in the British Medical Journal, might inspire you delve further into Shaw’s play and its Preface. O’Donnell recently adapted the play “as if for radio” and had performers read their parts, on the 100th anniversary of The Doctor’s Dilemma. O’Donnell’s essay concluded with a barb directed toward the banal teaching of “communication skills” rather than venturing into the “richer territory explored by dramatists”:

“If doctors are to treat illness as successfully as they treat disease they have to enhance their medical experience with some understanding of the world in which they and their patients struggle to survive. Their need, I suggest, is not ‘communication’ but the empathy and understanding that, thanks to Shaw, we and our audience shared on that memorable evening. And we never knowingly deployed a key communication skill.” [BMJ. 333:1338-1340.]

The years immediately following Galens origin and Shaw’s heyday severely tested Ann Arbor and the world beyond. The First World War, a catastrophe for millions, rearranged global geopolitics. The influenza epidemic, known as the Spanish Flu, infected one third of the world population with one in ten (50 million) dying from it. Spain can’t be blamed, for the disease didn’t originate there. As a neutral party in WWI Spain freely reported news of flu activity while other nations restricted information to maintain public morale and to mask information about troop illness. The War spread the flu through close quarters, troop movement, and hygiene disruption. The first U.S. flu wave commenced in the spring of 1918 in military camps and cities. A second wave emerged that September at U.S. Army Training Camp Devens outside Boston. A third and final wave in 1919 ran through the spring. When President Wilson collapsed at the Peace Talks in Versailles, Paris was still in the throes of the flu, and it has been speculated that Wilson was suffering from it. The flu was gone by summer, but H1N1 virus persists.

 

Five.

December 7, 1941, jolted Ann Arbor, like the rest of the country, with the Pearl Harbor attack. Wayne Dertien of Hudsonville shows the December 8, 1941 edition of the Grand Rapids Press, the day after Pearl Harbor (above). This picture (online from 12 June 2013 MLive.com) demonstrates how people saved newspapers or magazines to memorialize a milestone event and, presumably, return to it from time to time. How this will happen now that Gutenberg has gone digital is anyone’s guess, although it should be noted that the convenience of the internet brought me to Mr. Dertien’s picture. We located Wayne and spoke to him recently to get permission to repeat his picture and story, and he commented on how he found the article in a basket his late mother had kept with other articles and magazines that she valued, including an article on the Kennedy assassination.

For urological reasons, 1941 was also noteworthy: a paper that year by Charles Huggins, one of Michigan’s first two urology trainees, led to his Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1966. The other original trainee, Reed Nesbit the first titular head of urology at Michigan, was extraordinary in his own right, as a formative figure in urology practice, education, and research.

In 1941 Nesbit brought two young men to Ann Arbor for residency in his 13th class of residents: Dolphus Compere and Robert Plumb. (Nesbit would eventually have 36 “classes” of trainees.) I got to know Dolph through the tireless work of Maureen Perdomo, one of our development officers in the earlier years of my term as chair. Maureen was totally devoted to our urology alumni and had tracked down Dolph to a retirement home in Fort Worth. Dolph Compere (1916 – 2012) was raised by his mother in Texas after his father, a physician, died of injuries suffered in WWI. Dolph graduated from the University of Texas in 1937 and got an MD from Baylor in 1941. He came to Reed Nesbit and UM for residency in the summer of 1941 and returned to Texas to get married during his December vacation. WWII had broken out just days before the wedding. Returning to Ann Arbor Dolph asked Nesbit for permission to enlist, but Nesbit said he “wasn’t ready.” In 1943 Nesbit released him for duty. We have Dolph’s story of his time in the Pacific Theater and will include it in the Michigan Urology story. Dolph’s co-resident, Bob Plumb, is another story we are pursuing. [Below: Dolph Compere welcoming me and David Miller to Dallas in 2010.]

 

Six.

Events that conspired to cause the two world wars of the past century centered around national misunderstandings among governments that had been high-jacked by extreme points of view. Great efforts were made after WWI to minimize the chance of another great war by promoting international cooperation. Going through papers of University of Michigan president Hutchins at the Bentley Library, I found documents asking him to support a League of Nations, that was established January 10, 1920, and resulted in a Nobel Prize for Woodrow Wilson. The United States never joined and, whether related to that fact or not, a second World War broke out twenty years after ‘the war to end all wars” had ended and the League was dissolved in 1946. With these thoughts in mind, it should give us pause that international cooperation has given way to the deal of the moment. This may reflect a post-truth attitude in human society where are facts are relative or utilitarian, without shared belief in objective truths that transcend nations and disciplines. We see this in politics, in the news industry, and in entertainment. This attitude is infecting journalism, academia, science, and medicine.

Urology makes the world small because of collegial friendships, belief in inquiry, and collaborations connecting us around the world in spite of oceans, borders, walls, or professional turfs. I took this picture a year ago on the Great Wall (above), after a meeting at the home base of one of the most innovative pediatric surgeons and urologists of our time, C.K. Yeung (below).

Whatever the Great Wall divided or protected is long gone. Our guide said it may be the largest cemetery of our species, as fallen workers were buried in or alongside it as they died.

Intellectual walls are equally puzzling. One example is the deep resistance to Lister’s solid evidence for the effectiveness of antisepsis, presented so clearly in The Lancet in 1867. Resistance to that compelling evidence was plainly obtuse. Many iconic leaders of the time were defiant, notably Samuel David Gross, claimed by many at the time to be “The Father of American Surgery,” and immortalized by Eakins with a bloody bare hand during surgery in The Gross Clinic (1875). The year following the painting Gross wrote: “Little if any faith is placed by an enlightened or experienced surgeon on this side of the Atlantic in the so-called carbolic acid therapy of Professor Lister.”

An educated mind is literate in science as well as the humanistic thought of past millennia. You can’t have one form of literacy without the other to develop the critical thought necessary to understand the important issues of our time. Many are existential concerns, if not for us, then for those who follow us. [Below: paradigm shifts, Hong Kong Harbor, December, 2017.]

When paradigms shift, as they always and inevitably do, walls don’t serve us well.

 

Seven.

Charles Dickens dealt with many existential concerns of his time, poverty, environmental deterioration, ignorance, crime, violence, malnutrition, and health disparities. These continue today. Born February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth, England, Dickens lived only 58 years, dying after a stroke in 1870. Most notably for my profession, pediatric urology, he was a supporter and philanthropic fundraiser for the fledgling hospital, Great Ormond Street (GOS), where modern pediatric urology began a century later with the work of Sir David Innes Williams (below, flyer for Dickens reading to benefit GOS). Imaginative literature produces colorful language for the medical profession.

Writing under the pseudonym Boz, in 1836, Dickens contributed to a publication called The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, eventually taking over the monthly periodical. The serialized story became Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, and centered on the fictional Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, founder and perpetual president of the club. Kind, wealthy, and rotund, Samuel Pickwick’s phenotype informed a medical condition that came to light more than a century later, in the 1950s. Other figures in the Pickwick Papers included Nathaniel Winkle, Augustus Snodgrass, Sam Weller, and Alfred Jingle. Coincidentally two friends of mine in urology share surnames of those club members.

[The Pickwick Club. Charles Dickens 1838. NYPL Berg Collection.]

Pickwickian syndrome is the obesity hypoventilation condition in which some people, severely overweight, fail to breathe enough to maintain sufficient oxygen levels or low enough CO2 levels, causing sleep apnea. A BMI over 30 kg/m2, hypoxemia, and hypercapnia define the condition. [Kryger M. J. Clin Sleep Med. 8:333-338, 2012.] Other Dickensian conditions include Tiny Tim’s ailment requiring a crutch, perhaps due to Pott’s disease or renal tubular acidosis, and Major Bagstock who exemplified bronchoconstriction & cyanosis. Our own faculty colleague, Howard Markel, did a nice piece on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS, Feb 6, 2016) entitled Was Dickens the first celebrity medical spokesman?

 

Eight.

An essential, existential, meme. The philanthropic idea of Adam Smith was his first big idea. Philanthropy, a generalized warmth toward fellow creatures, extends beyond kith and kin. It is literally “a love of mankind.” This is the foundational condition behind education, health care, and the government of liberal democracy. Freedoms including journalism (“the press”), speech, religion, assembly, lobby, and personal enterprise within the constraints of law, derive from this intrinsic human characteristic of philanthropy.

At the end of a good run, I don’t want to hyperpersonalize my term as our department’s second chair and 9th urology chief, from Cabot to Montie, I was only as effective as the people around me: our staff, faculty, nurses, PAs, and residents are wonderful. I heard a recent interview on NPR that included an alleged quote from the film director Orson Wells, who said something to the effect that the role of a director was “to preside over accidents.” Whether I can trace this quote back to its origin and find it to be a true fact or not, is less important than the thought itself that any director, chair, administrator, or team leader is at the mercy of the randomness of the actions, performances, beliefs, or events that surround the stakeholders and bystanders of the enterprise.

Stochastic events are central to all parts of biology, whether genomic function, epigenetic determination, molecular assembly, behavior of any self, or teams. Life is attended by stochastic randomness, events and processes that may be explained by probability distribution, but are not precisely predictable. In this sense they are, perhaps, accidental or random. These events and processes may be mathematical, chemical, epigenetic, or social like an Orson Wells play or the management of an academic urology department. Ideas and memes, possibly the most complex biologic products, are also stochastic, as they arise. They may be good or bad, useful or destructive, true or false. We may think our dreams and ideas are accidental, stochastic as they seem to appear randomly, although they are not quite random – they have sources, coming from some conditions, memories, anxieties, wishes, or other places in the mind.

The idea of stoichiometry, so close in sound, is something quite different, intending a precision based on the chemical idea of conservation of mass. A film director or a leader of an academic clinical department needs people, props, and data. For the director, a film has a budget, it needs equipment, sites, actors, support teams (including those “best boys”), props, food, payroll systems, and a distribution plan. These are the necessary components of motion pictures. The many performances that comprise the final product, however, cannot be determined by numbers, data, or stoichiometry. Although performances may be studied, rehearsed, and coached, they are ultimately accidental. A director must provide milieu, and perhaps inspiration, but if good actors are on the scene, a good director might be most effective by getting out of the way of the characters and their art. A producer may go to an accountant to help manage the accounts, but not to direct a film. Academic units are not greatly different.

 

Nine.

Philanthropy is fundamental to humanity at the level of family and tribe, it is built into our DNA as it is in other primates and many other mammals. The love and philanthropy that we give to family and neighbors preserves and grows society, in that it is a specific and necessary component of the human condition. It is part of the stoichiometry of our species, it is a proportionate part of the mix, albeit expressed variably from person to person. It is at the heart of the early religions and cultures that defined humanity and in many cases tried to extend the idea beyond any specific family, culture, nation, or religion. Philanthropy is stoichiometric in that it is a specific and essential part of the mix of our species, but it is also stochastic or random, in the binary sense that it can happen or not happen.

Philanthropy in this sense, as a meme, had its most insightful articulation by Adam Smith, in the first sentence of his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, when he wrote in 1759:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”

As a meme, this particular thought of Smith’s was not totally random in that it was shaped by millennia of human thought, his personal upbringing and education, and the society surrounding him (the astonishing Scottish Enlightenment). But as a thought that inspired his book, it popped up in his brain and was shaped into a very compelling and durable meme – the generalization of philanthropy to all of humanity. While this aspiration had been set out in the great human religions long before Smith, his meme was not compelled by a deity or demanded by a social code.

Smith recognized that each person has some nugget of generalized philanthropy within. In this complex world of 7 billion people, interwoven with perhaps only a few “degrees of separation” from each other, the meme of Adam Smith, generalized philanthropy and its first cousin, global human cooperation, is more than just a meme, it is now an existential necessity. Our genes compelled familial and tribal philanthropy that have carried us this far to human domination of the planet through the powerful tools of education, science, and technology. However, we can’t go much further without full deployment of the memes of philanthropy and global human cooperation.

 

Ten.

Leadership change is around the corner for our department and it comes at a fortuitous time with the Michigan Urology Centennial about to start later next year. This will signal a change in the weekly What’s New email communication of the Department of Urology, as that communication format and paradigm should be a choice of the next administration. On the other hand, the web-based monthly version, Matula Thoughts, will continue as best it can by this writer at the web site matulathoughts.org. The quirky title derives from the uroscopy flask that identified the entire medical profession for many centuries. Laennec’s invention of the stethoscope in 1816, supplanted the matula and is a far better symbol for the medical profession, epitomizing the idea of listening. Furthermore, the stethoscope is far more portable and durable than glass flasks, and contains little in the way of biohazard, except for an occasional bit of wax.

 

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

Marginalia

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DAB What’s New Mar 2, 2018

 

Marginalia of sorts
3732 words

 

One.

Marginalia. As a young reader I recall making casual sideline notations in margins of my books and, in time, detailed marginalia, underlining, and highlighting expanded into my college and medical school textbooks. Later, during residency I heavily personalized my pages of Campbell’s Urology trying to digest them intellectually.

The habit persists and marginal notes help make sense of what I read and leave reference points to which I can easily return. Other reading has replaced textbooks my marginalia drifted to and consolidated on end pages, creating personalized indices of page references and related comments (below “end-page marginalia” in Harari’s Sapiens).

Marginalia-making has been a human habit ever since books existed with numerous famous examples as early as amusing marginal drawings by monastic scribes alongside their serious transcriptions. A notable marginal comment unsettled the world of mathematics for nearly four centuries after French lawyer Pierre Fermat wrote in the margin of a book he was reading in 1637 that he had solved a puzzling mathematical conjecture, but claimed his solution was too large to fit the margin.

The book was a 1621 edition of Arithmetica by 3rd century mathematician Diophantus and its actual margin looks generous by my standards, although I am no mathematician. [Above: Wikipedia, public domain.] It may never be known if Fermat’s solution was correct or if he was joking, although he didn’t seem much of a jokester and his other mathematical work was accurate. Furthermore, his unsubstantiated comment was taken so seriously that it was included in later editions of Arithmetica (below: Wikipedia).

Many others tried and failed to solve Fermat’s Conjecture over the next three centuries until 1994 when British mathematician, Andrew Wiles, came up with the answer.

Scribbling in the margins of library books or books of your friends is bad form, but marginalia in personal materials conveniently identify meaningful passages or record pertinent or tangential thoughts. Some mental process pauses readers from reading long enough to acknowledge the adjacent text in some way. Marginalia are evidence of our effort to find meaning in the things we encounter.

Electronic books allow similar personalizations, although it’s not quite the same, in part because electronic screens lack the comforting tactile sense of paper. Electronic formats, however, offer new opportunities and challenges for marginalia: private marginalia can become public, aggregated, and analyzed. Audio books allow listening as we close our eyes or move physically through life, but as much as I like audio books when driving, the opportunity to make marginal notes is problematic and any spontaneous thoughts I have when hearing certain passages are usually gone from memory by the time I’ve reached my destination.

 

Two.

The compulsion to annotate or otherwise leave personal evidence of one’s presence or thought pre-existed books and is widely exercised on other cultural artifacts and the environment-at-large. Cave paintings, rock carvings, initials on tree trunks, furniture inscriptions, children’s heights on door frames, and urban graffiti are footnotes of ourselves and plant notice of us for the future. The cliché George Washington Slept Here was a 1942 play and film about a couple who moved into a run-down farmhouse (because of their dog) and they discover the first president actually stayed there during the Revolution.

The top of this posting shows a section of the Berlin Wall that faced the free part of the city, while below you see the unmarked reverse side that faced the Soviet side. These sections are on display in Washington, DC at the Newseum and were salvaged after the wall came down in 1989. The contrast is stark.

Urban graffiti, as annoying and vulgar as it can be, are an expression of personal freedom and the 45 words of the First Amendment that represents a core belief of our representational democracy.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

A video display at the Newseum displays interviews on a random street showing that people are far more likely to be able to identify all the members of Homer Simpson’s cartoon family than to know the five freedoms of the First Amendment (religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition of the government). The video references national surveys that support this unfortunate observation showing 20% of Americans can recall all Simpsons, whereas only 3% know all five freedoms.

The marginalia habit fills the strong human compulsion to seek relevance and meaning, a need played out in many ways including early forms of social media content; “Kilroy was here,” “George loves Tina,” and their equivalents have been expressed by our species since the earliest human days. Graffiti as urban social marginalia, occasionally becomes valued public art such as the works of anonymous British artist known as Banksy. [Below: a Banksy image from Wikipedia.]

Historical plaques and other public commemorations are structural marginalia, we mentioned those of the old Ann Arbor Bus Station, last month, on the Residence Inn in downtown Ann Arbor. Historical markers are marginalia of place. You can find plaques at the Michigan Union on the top front landing step and on the building wall commemorating the first occasion that John F. Kennedy publically articulated the Peace Corps idea. It was during a campaign speech October 14, 1960 at around 2 AM, a remarkable time for a presidential campaign speech that highlighted the vigor of the young presidential candidate. Arriving from New York in those early hours he went directly to the steps of the Union where a crowd of around 5000 students was waiting on State Street. Kennedy began his remarks by describing himself as “a graduate of the Michigan of the East, Harvard University.” He spoke about the importance of public service, asking for young doctors and engineers, as an example, to spend a period of time in Ghana or other places. You can find the speech on YouTube and he concluded:

“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 and therefore I’ll finish it. Let me just say in conclusion that 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 asking for your support for this country in the next decade.”

It was an inspiring speech. As an aside, the official portrait of Kennedy (above: painted by Aaron Shikler, whom Jackie Kennedy selected after the assassination) is on display at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, along with all presidents up through Barack Obama (recently unveiled). The Kennedy portrait is the only image of a president looking down and away from the viewer, that having been Jackie’s choice.

Kennedy’s idea continues to tap into a compulsion for relevance and meaning that many students and others feel so acutely. The Peace Corps, finalized in law in the first months of his presidency, continues to resonate with college students across America. Since 1961 Michigan has been among the top four contributors to the Peace Corps with 2720 students volunteering since 1961 (after Berkeley, Madison, and Washington. [Mandira Banerjee. Feb 21, 2018. The University Record.]

 

Three.

Eleven years ago today, 2 March 2007, was the second day of my time as chair. Going to my computer I found digital images from that time in our department, including this early picture (above) of the board in my office. This has served as my functional marginalia for the Department of Urology for the past 11 years. Faculty are in the boxes on the sides and activities, units, and projects in the middle. The board changed over the years as we grew and became more complex. The picture below shows one of our visits to the billing center in the KMS Building south of I 94. Jack Cichon (now retired) was our stalwart Chief Department Administrator (CDA) and Malissa Eversole was then his understudy, having since then come into her own as our current CDA.

Below you see Ed McGuire in the center with 2 of his former fellows (now faculty) on the left (Anne Pelletier-Cameron and Quentin Clemens) plus Stu Wolf (faculty) and Walter Parker (resident) on the right.

Since 2007 the changes in healthcare education, research, and clinical delivery have been head spinning. Today the UM Medical School and health care system is rebranded as Michigan Medicine.

The time has flown by, in my mind, and if this present interval of stewardship of the Department of Urology is deemed successful in any measure, the success is due overwhelmingly to our faculty, our residents, our nurses, our physician assistants, our researchers, and our staff. Sister departments in the Medical School and this great University also account for our success; we flower in fertile soil.

This success should continue to grow with our next departmental leader whom I hope will help our clinical divisions and team do their jobs optimally, as I have tried to do. We want to avoid a repetition of the darker events of the 1990’s (as duly recorded in the Wall Street Journal and the Detroit Free Press), when Ed McGuire’s successful term and Bart Grossman’s interim stewardship were interrupted by a few difficult years until Jim Montie’s leadership brought us into departmental status and initiated the Dow Health Services Research Division. [Below: Khaled Hafez, Hugh Solomon, Jim Montie.]

 

Four.

March brings Spring steelhead to mind. It’s been many years since I’ve been on the Pere Marquette River thigh deep in waders feeling the rush of icy water working its way toward Lake Michigan. Migrating steelhead salmon, pressing retrograde to reconcile with their past, have few things on their minds at that stage and feeding is not high in their priorities. Lures need not be very sophisticated or authentic, as the fish are on their migration to spawn so they are as likely to bite out of anger or random habit than culinary urge. [Above: Brent Hollenbeck and steelhead. Photo credit: Jeff Montgomery.]

Steelhead rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) hatch in inland streams and then swim downstream to forage in the Great Lakes (or the ocean, on the west coast) for 2-3 years. Winter-run steelhead are sexually mature and generally have a shorter run to their spawning grounds, whereas the summer-run steelhead are sexually immature when they leave the lakes or ocean and travel deeper inland. Actual spawning for either type happens in late winter or spring. These Pacific rainbow trout were introduced as immigrants from California to the Au Sable river around 1876 and after many generations are well established residents although state-managed hatchery programs supplement the existing wild fish.

Steelhead provide a loose metaphor for medical professionalism. We train our successors in the streams of academic medical centers and on maturity they go off to do their thing in the wide world. Toward the end of their careers many of them want to reconcile with their origins and travel back upstream to check out their starting points. Forgive me for stretching this analogy, but I do want to put in a plug for our Nesbit alumni, former students, and friends of the department to come back for one of our academic events, particularly in the next two years as we gear up to celebrate the Centennial of Urology at Michigan in 2019-2020.

 

Five.

Fish and urologists. Fish have twofold purposes. Primarily they pass along their DNA to their successors and secondarily they serve the larger planetary ecosystem. The optimal life span of a steelhead allows 4-6 years for one or more foraging careers in the wide world, although some Pacific steelhead live as long as 11 years and grow to 55 pounds and 45 inches, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries website.

Medical professionals have a fundamental purpose of caring for their fellow creatures, motivated by genetically crafted mirror-imaging that produced the essential human phenotypes of kindness and empathy. Secondarily, healthcare people serve their ecosystem by educating their successors and expanding the armamentarium of knowledge and technology. The career of a urologist is 40 years, give or take a decade, foraging in the real world of clinical medicine. While steelhead must adapt to gradual warming of the oceans, urologists need to adapt to rapid changes in knowledge, technology, and regulatory matters. Technology and market forces are driving changes in urologic practice at least as much as scientific evidence, leaving practitioners and patients sometimes uncertain of what treatment fits best.

 

Six.

Urologists are skilled in techniques and technology to solve urological problems but, no less than any other physicians, urologists also offer their personalities, opinions, and reassurances to patients throughout interactions that are bundled under the unfortunate label “encounters” in today’s workplaces and medical records. The language and demeanor experienced by patients often are just as meaningful to them as any treatment or technology. Indeed, the non-technical aspects of the encounter may impact the patient more than any specific medical service. This is a prime difference between the professional and a commodity natures of health care. People, as patients, treasure the right human touch.

The essential deliverable of our department is kind and excellent patient care, thoroughly integrated with education and innovation at all levels. This is not just our priority, but the priority of Michigan Medicine. Below is another picture I found from 2007 showing a faculty member and two residents who exemplified that essential deliverable back then and do so today in their new locations: Gary Faerber, now at the University of Utah; Emilie Johnson, faculty at Lurie Children’s Hospital and Northwestern Medical School; and Kathy Kiernan on the right, faculty at the University of Washington and its children’s hospital.

The human touch is also conveyed by words. A recent Viewpoint in JAMA by Arthur Barsky of the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital is worth reading. [Barsky. JAMA. 318:2425, 2017]. The title sums it up: The iatrogenic potential of the physician’s words. Barsky invokes viscerosomatic amplification to explain how a physician can affect through words and attitude. (As is usual on these pages, we use physician as a synonym for healthcare provider.) Techniques and technology are unquestionably at the core of urologic practice, but the art of clinical practice is far more than its tools and treatments. Kindness, words, and professional touch are no less essential.

 

Seven.

Expectation. Human brains add further dimensions to medical treatments, with the matter of expectation. Every treatment carries the possibilities of real benefit or harm, but another two-edged sword exists in our capacity for imagination, something we cannot easily turn off. We may readily imagine benefit even when no physical or physiologic benefit can be explained (the placebo effect) or we may imagine elements of harm (nocebo).

Placebo and nocebo effects confound medical treatments when a therapy (legitimate or bogus, scientifically-validated or apocryphal) has a more positive or more negative effect than it rationally should have. This reflects changes in psychobiology rather than changes in physiology, pharmacokinetics, or other factors that are directly measurable or attributable to the treatment.

Nocebo, the evil twin to the placebo, is a term coined in 1961 by WP Kennedy. [Kennedy WP. Med World. 1961; 95:203, 2013.] The evil twin metaphor came from Michael Glick in an editorial in the Journal of the American Dental Association. [Glick M. Placebo and its evil twin, nocebo. JADA.2016; 147:227.] The nocebo effect occurs when negative expectation of therapy exacerbates the negative effect that the treatment rationally would cause. For some patients a given therapy, let’s say a radical prostatectomy, in addition to successfully removing a malignancy (from which direct harm might have been years away) with minimal detriment to related anatomic structures, might produce a sense of relief that carries with it additional placebo effect. For other patients a nocebo effect negatively magnifies the overall therapeutic experience and collateral damage of any attendant detriments. Every patient responds individually and idiosyncratically to an expectation and to a treatment. These phenomena, placebo and nocebo, should be anticipated for almost everything we offer in healthcare, and to the extent that we understand these possibilities and prepare patients and their families for them, we will improve the patient experience. This is one of the myriad ways that complex health care cannot be easily managed as a commodity or by artificial intelligence.

 

Eight.

As scientific medicine emerged in the 19th century it consolidated into subspecialty medicine in the 20th century and anatomic, physiologic, and microbial determinants became the focal points of healthcare. Cognitive and social factors were “marginalia” of most patient encounters. Now, in the 21st century it is clear that cognitive and social factors are equally important parts of everyone’s healthcare needs. Our profession and its business are no longer accurately described as the matter of “medical care”, but rather the matter of health care.

A prescription for a treatment or an operative procedure may be based upon symptoms and observations as entered into checklists and databases. Emotional responses and social determinants are not so easily factored in electronic medical records, particularly within the constraints of time-constrained encounters. Watson and other artificial intelligence systems are working their way into examining rooms, bedsides, and operating theaters, but these are not as effective in sensing the co-morbidities, social determinants, and other “marginalia” of the human condition, as is an attentive and kind human being. Artificial intelligence engenders great enthusiasm, but humanity should never surrender its ultimate agency to algorithms created by a self-empowered cadre of programmers.

 

Nine.

Considering gaps last month, including astronomical gaps, calendar gaps, and geological gaps, we saved an important one to mention now. A gender gap has long been present in the field of urology, although Michigan more than most other training programs began to change that imbalance, starting with Carol Bennett, who trained under Jack Lapides and was Michigan urology’s first woman graduate. Carol is now on the faculty at UCLA. In her era of training women in urology were rare. Today the situation is quite different and at Michigan we have had residency classes where women outnumber men three to one. Other years we have returned to 100% men and some year soon we could as easily have all women. In our selection process, we don’t aim for an optical effect, but rather try to pick the best talents and fits for our department from the yearly applicant cohort. Ultimately, individuals from the candidate pool make their selections when they rank the programs. [Below: Peter Knapp, Nesbit 1985 and Carol Bennett, Nesbit 1983.]

Women graduates from the University of Michigan Medical School and women trainees from our urology training program (all are considered Nesbit Alumni) are making significant impact in the world of urology, academically and in the private sector. Below you see a dinner at the recent annual meeting of the Society of Women in Urology. From the left: Cara Cimmino UMMS and faculty at Emory, Priyanka Gupta UM urology faculty, Allison (Lake) Christie Nesbit graduate and urologist in Tennessee, Miriam Hadj-Moussa Nesbit graduate and UM urology faculty, Lindsey Herrel Nesbit graduate and UM urology faculty, Akanksha Mehta faculty at Emory, Amy Luckenbaugh UM resident, and Annie Darves-Bornoz resident at Vanderbilt.)

 

Ten.

John Hall, Nesbit Alumnus 1970, wrote recently and gave me permission to give his note wider distribution here in Matula Thoughts. I came to know John after I came to Ann Arbor, largely through his high-quality practice, a sliver of which I appreciated through his pediatric referrals, as well as his local care of people I knew in the Traverse City area where he worked. Letters like his are one of the great pleasures of mine with What’s New our monthly email and it’s sibling Matula Thoughts, the web version. As we get closer to our Centennial and to reformulating our departmental history, his recollections, and perhaps yours as well, will be important to us.
From John:

“Hi Dave, I was just reading your letter of December 21, 2017. It made me think of the 5-6 doctors who staffed Urology during my training. Your staff will be limited to how many names you can put in the letterhead margin. It’s like how many doctors can fit on the head of a pin.

I finished my training in 1970, Urology 50. By 2020, Urology 100, if I’m still kicking I will be one of the few to span the history of the department. I started my contact with Urology as a student and served as a “nurse” in the Urology dialysis center. I took the vitals as the residents stirred new electrolytes into the Kolff Twin Coil Baths. As a result, I knew many of the residents from the fifties and sixties. Also, since I was appointed to residency by Dr. Nesbit, I met many of his trainees who now directed new urology departments, when they returned to AA [as visiting professors or guests], I also once met Dr. Huggins.

Dr. Nesbit retired in 1967, six months into my residency. So my group became Lapides 1. I’m not going to measure up to your knowledge of urologic history, but I am willing to provide my perspective of Michigan Urology to the Centennial Committee. Please let me know if I could provide some value to the process. Please keep writing Matula Thoughts, the highlight of my month! … John.”

Thank you, John and yes, please continue your perspectives! Much is contained in John’s brief note: the idea of 100 years of urology in AA, the imprinting of students, the Kolff “artificial kidney”,  Nesbit alum and Nobel Prize winner Charles Huggins, and the long list of chairmen Nesbit trained. Overstated only is the disproportion of historical knowledge between me and John – he knows vastly more about that midpoint in Michigan’s urologic story and I hope we can get as much as possible in print for you and others to understand our perspectives.

Since that note, John sent me a copy of his book “I’d Rather Be Sailing” and I expect to go through it and decorate it thoroughly with my own marginalia. As we reconstruct the 100-year story of Michigan Urology it will be the personal marginalia of alumni such as John Hall that provide the context, color, and personalities to illuminate the names and dates of our narrative.

 

With a few weeks until Spring, 2018, best wishes from David Bloom and Michigan Urology.

November matters

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DAB What’s New Nov 3, 2017

3742 words

One.
The matula, an historic symbol of the medical arts and title of this electronic periodical, was the transparent beaker used to examine urine in the pre-scientific days of health care, as people sought explanations for and expectations from their illnesses. Fear and uncertainty exacerbate human illnesses and our earliest prehistoric ancestors found comfort from their fellows in clans and caves to care for and sometimes heal them. The matula is a useful metaphor for the acts of looking, listening, and examining evidence to discover what really matters in clinical situations.

In ancient days what really mattered to people with illness or injury were the issues of treatment and prognosis: what can be done to help, what comes next, will I live, or will I die? The specific matter of diagnosis was most likely subsumed by the idea of what caused the problem. Gods, fates, cosmic forces, evil-doers, bad luck, or obvious injury were likely culprits before germ theory, organ-based dysfunctions, or other explanations based on a verifiable conceptual basis of health and illness. A sense of prognosis, however, was of practical value.

Uroscopists inspected urine for color, consistency, clarity, sediments, smell, and sometimes taste of urine, to find clues for treatment and prognosis. This was not illogical. Pink urine from infection or trauma might be followed by recovery. Gross blood and particulate sediments would suggest recurrent bladder stones. Scanty concentrated urine from dehydration might signal severe gastroenteritis and a grim prognosis. Uroscopy grew into a complex pseudoscience with fanciful claims of prognostic significance based on intricate characteristics of urine samples. Newer tools, such as the stethoscope and microscope superseded matulas and the future will bring better tools.

Thoughts about the future occasionally slide into dystopian visions and invite the question: what really matters to each of us? Putting aside occupational questions of healthcare professionals (making a diagnosis, ascertaining a treatment), political ideology (conservative or liberal, R or D, libertarian or socialist), or pragmatic issues (where do I live, what car do I drive, what’s for lunch?), we each have our own beliefs, although ultimately most people share similar fundamental desires for safety, comfort, and peace of mind. Family and friends matter.

We cherish personal liberty, physically and intellectually. Beauty, curiosity, and clarity matter. Social matters are important to most people; kindness, truth, integrity, respect, belonging, and sustainability are essential in a civilized world. The last item may seem a bit out of place, but as we sustain health, welfare, independence, and safety, for ourselves, our families, our communities, and our descendants, by simple logic we need to sustain our environment.

 

Two.


With Michigan’s gorgeous autumn colors fading in the rear-view mirror, November’s matula brings Thanksgiving into sight and notably the iconic holiday images of Norman Rockwell. His Four Freedoms paintings, based on Franklin Roosevelt’s State of the Union Address in 1941, illustrated the freedoms that FDR thought mattered greatly: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These freedoms extended the sense of the liberty entrenched in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, – that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, …”

Roosevelt’s four freedoms are more specific than the liberty mentioned in The Declaration at the dawn of the Revolutionary War, although political liberty was not far from Roosevelt’s mind when he gave the speech 11 months before the U.S. entry into World War II. The speech also slyly broke with America’s non-interventionism, by advocating support for our allies already in armed conflict. The words of Roosevelt and paintings of Rockwell mattered greatly to Americans in the 1940’s and they seem to matter now in this new century. Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943 and were used in war bond posters and postage stamps.

Rockwell also painted enduring images of healthcare professionals, some modelled on his neighbor Dr. Donald E. Campbell. After this topic was discussed in previous pages of WN/MT (March 4 & May 6, 2016) the doctor’s great granddaughter, Moira Dwyer, kindly sent us information and photographs that the family kept. Dr. Campbell, born in 1906, graduated in 1939 from Middlesex Medical School and practiced in Stockbridge, Massachusetts providing nearly the full spectrum of medical care to his community. He retired at 83 and died in 2001 at 95. Like the English physician, John Sassall, detailed in John Berger’s book, A Fortunate Man, Campbell was an indelible part of his community, providing far more than clinical services for patients by going beyond the specificity of medical conditions of his patients to understand their co-morbidities, inner needs, and social constraints. [Matula Thoughts Oct, Nov, Dec. 2016 & Feb. 2017]

As a footnote to Dr. Campbell, Middlesex College of Medicine and Surgery was founded in 1914 in East Cambridge, Massachusetts and was affiliated with a hospital of the same name. The campus moved to Waltham in 1928 and by 1937, it also included schools of liberal arts, pharmacy, podiatry, and veterinary medicine in addition to its school of medicine. Accreditation by the AMA became problematic, ostensibly due to issues of funding, faculty, and facilities although many claimed the merit-based admission policy and unusually diverse student body of Middlesex grated on the far more homogeneous American medical establishment at mid-20th century. Medical schools then maintained ethnic and religious admission quotas and Middlesex was an unabashed outlier with its diverse student body. In 1946, the Middlesex trustees transferred the charter and campus, with the hope that the medical and veterinary schools would be continued, to a foundation that created Brandeis University two years later. Middlesex Medical School did not survive the transition to the new university.

 

Three.
It is a profound community asset to have a Campbell or Sassall and it is impossible to fully measure their impact as a citizen, leader, mentor, and role model. These essential anchors of society bring not just their professional skills, but also their values, leadership, and expectation of fairness to a community. They look out for the common man and particularly for the most vulnerable members of the community. It is no coincidence that a universal ploy of anarchists, revolutionaries, and authoritarian pretenders as seen widely across the planet, is assassination of these “honest brokers.” The moral example and leadership of doctors such as Campbell and Sassall is our ultimate expectation for the medical professionals we teach. These mentors and role models act as epigenetic factors for the larger “superorganism” of humanity. They are operational factors between human genetics and civilization.

Education and training of physicians changed since 1939 when Campbell graduated medical school. The 4-year curriculum deepened with the growing scientific basis of biology and disease while graduate medical education (GME) also expanded with enlarging technology and new specialties of health care. The period of residency practice and study is now the career-defining facet of a doctor’s learning. Nearly 80 years since Dr. Campbell’s graduation, medical students enter fields of GME in as many as 150 areas of focused medical practice with learning experiences that may exceed twice the years the trainees spent in medical school.

Healthcare education differs from that of lawyers, engineers, and most other career paths. Physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and dentists require an immediate educational context of patient-care. The University of Michigan recognized this fact in 1869 when it converted a faculty house into a hospital, thereby becoming the first university to own and operate a medical center. We recognized this anew when we began to create a wider health care network, in the past few years, capable of supporting our large educational mission, now educating 900 MDs and health care PhDs, 1100 residents and fellows in medicine, as well as dentists, nurses, and pharmacists. One could easily argue that universities should offer a wider coherent educational milieu. A grander educational vision to include all parts of the health care workforce (physician assistants, surgical scrub technicians, medical assistants, etc.) would have a great effect on state economy and on our workforce pipeline. It could be done with robust partnerships not only with the UM Flint and Dearborn campuses, but also with our adjacent and regional community colleges.

 

Four.
In its more rudimentary days, the UM academic health center was distinguished by its implementation of  fulltime clinical faculty, terminology indicating that physicians who practiced or taught exclusively within a teaching hospital had a fulltime salary independent of their patient care revenue at that site. In the early days of UMMS this model attracted national luminaries such as Charles de Nancrede in 1889 and Hugh Cabot in 1920. de Nancrede was an attending surgeon and clinical lecturer at Jefferson Medical College, among other Philadelphia medical institutions, and was a major name in American surgery as a clinician, teacher, and pioneer in antiseptic and aseptic technique. At Michigan he presided over the construction of the new West Hospital in 1892, established a world-class surgery department where he practiced exclusively, and wrote an influential textbook of surgery. [World J. Surg. 22:1175, 1998.] Cabot was an even more stellar addition, coming from Boston as an internationally known urologist, where he had become disillusioned by the monetary nature of medical practice.

The world of healthcare practice, education, and investigation is different in the 21st century. The few academic medical centers that will survive well in the future will be those with the best and brightest geographic fulltime faculty, the majority of whom will be busy clinicians. Their milieu may well depend upon robust clinical productivity that brings the most challenging clinical problems to them and their facilities, but this will also require a very substantial volume of more routine clinical work as the context for education of all learner groups and clinical trials, in addition to inspiring basic science investigation. This clinical milieu will require a robust array of endowed professorships to give faculty a modest disconnect from clinical practice to allow teaching and academic work.

 

Five.

Fellow professionals. Modern specialty-based health care has shifted emphasis from individual all-knowing utility-player doctors like Campbell and Sassall to large teams that deliver their parts of today’s healthcare. The knowledge base, growing list of specialties, and technology of medicine today is so great that the centrality of a single physician is a model that no longer works well for health care delivery. Furthermore, linguistic confusion arises as other terms are awkwardly deployed to indicate all healthcare providers (not just physicians) more inclusively. This matter became acute as we have been creating bylaws for our new University of Michigan Medical Group (UMMG). A good nomenclature solution arose from Gerald Hickson, a Vanderbilt pediatrician (above), speaking to the UMMG this summer about programs that build professionalism and create a culture of safety. His phrase, fellow professionals, nicely includes MDs, DOs, nurses, PAs, physical therapists, podiatrists, occupational therapists, optometrists, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, medical assistants, etc. [Hickson et al. A complementary approach. Acad. Med. 82:1040, 2007]

 

Six.
Medical professionals are under stress today from many sources, but the idea of a career in medicine still drives some of the best and brightest young people into our work, as judged by the medical school and urology residency applicants we see each year. I’ve just read applications, personal statements, and letters of recommendations from nearly 70 candidates for our 4 positions to start next July, and again I am blown away by the breadth and depth of these fourth-year medical students who will, all too soon, become our successors as urologists. They will have to resist the pressures to commoditize, corporatize, and industrialize their work as the 21st century rolls along. The electronic record is one of the pressures. A paper in Health Affairs last April surveyed primary care physicians and found they spent 3.17 hours on computers (desktop medicine) for every 3.08 hours spent with patients. [Tai-Seale et al. Electronic health record logs. Health Affairs. 36:655, 2017.]

It is impossible to predict the world that will envelop our successors. The conceptual basis they will learn and the skills they acquire are merely momentary assets. Ideas and techniques will change as long as human progress continues. The values, mores, social skills, curiosity, imagination, and ultimate kindness of our successors will be the principle assets to distinguish their careers, their effects on their communities, and their value to society in general. The influence of their ambient role models is as important as the book-learning and clinical skills imparted in graduate medical education. The epigenetic nature of values, mores, social skills, and role models show us, our colleagues, and our successors how and when to deploy the vast stores of information and skills we have accumulated. Just as importantly, some among them will be inspired to discover new knowledge and develop new skills.

 

Seven.

With Thanksgiving coming up, I’m appreciative for precarious and relative world peace, food security, respite from climactic disasters, and the happy, healthy, lives we may have. [Above: Jennie Augusta Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, 1914, Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts.] The great minds who have made this world so interesting are another blessing, people who looked at the world with clarity to make observations or find patterns that escaped everyone else at their moments.

The name, Conrad H. Waddington, probably doesn’t spring to mind, but is worth consideration. Born on a tea estate in Kerala, India, around this time of year in 1905 this British developmental biologist introduced the concept and word epigenetics. At age four he was sent off to England to live with family members while the parents remained at work in India for the next 23 years. In England, a local druggist and distant relation, Dr. Doeg, took the boy under his wing and inspired his interest in sciences. At Cambridge, “Wad” took a Natural Sciences Trips (a flexible curriculum across sciences) and earned a First in geology in 1926. With a scholarship he studied moral philosophy and metaphysics at university, assumed a lectureship in zoology, and became a Fellow of Christ’s College until 1942. During WWII he was involved in operational research for the Royal Air Force, and in 1947 became Professor of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh where he worked for the rest of his life except for one year at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Waddington’s landmark paper in 1942 begins with four lovely sentences.

“Of all the branches of biology it is genetics, the science of heredity, which has been most successful in finding a way of analyzing an animal into representative units so that its nature can be indicated by a formula, as we represent a chemical compound by its appropriate symbols. Genetics has been able to do this because it studies animals in their simplest form, namely as fertilized eggs, in which all the complexity of the fully developed animal is implicit but not yet present. But knowledge about the nature of the fertilized egg is not derived directly from an examination of eggs; it is deduced from a consideration of the numbers and kinds of adults into which they develop. Thus genetics has to observe the phenotypes, the adult characteristics of animals, in order to reach conclusions about the genotypes, the hereditary constitutions which are its basic subject-matter.” [Waddington. Endeavor. 1: 18-21, 1942]

Later on the first page he suggests the term epigenetics to encompass the “whole process of developmental processes” that carries genotypes into phenotypes. The influence of Dr. Doeg, whom Waddington called Grandpa, was no doubt significant. The specifics of Dr. Doeg eluded me as I read about Waddington. Too bad, because it would have been illuminating to understand the nature of the fruitful mentorship that shaped Waddington’s curiosity, lucidity, communicative skills, and sociability that left him a context to discover what he did.

 

Eight.

Black Bart, legendary stagecoach robber, committed his last robbery on this date in 1883. He specialized in Wells Fargo robbery, and it’s a bit ironic that the bank’s more recent history indicates it has internalized that larcenous bent to its own customers. Black Bart was actually Charles Earl Boles, variously known as Charley Bolton, a gentleman bandit in Northern California and Oregon. Born in Norfolk, England, he and his brothers joined the California Gold Rush in 1849. The brothers died and by 1854 Charles was married and living in Decatur, Illinois with a wife and four children. After serving in the Civil War he returned to California and gold prospecting in 1867, leaving his family behind. In 1871 Bolton wrote his wife and described an unpleasant encounter of some sort with Wells Fargo & Company agents and vowed revenge. He fulfilled the vow, adopting the name Black Bart, and robbed at least 28 coaches in California and Oregon, although never fired a weapon or harmed anybody. The last known robbery was in Calaveras County, between Copperopolis and Milton, when he was wounded in the hand while escaping. Detectives found personal items at the scene and through laundry marks traced a handkerchief to a San Francisco laundry on Bush Street. They quickly located Boles, living in nearby boarding house, and convicted him of the November 3 robbery.

Black Bart served four years at San Quentin and after release he was constantly shadowed by Wells Fargo detectives. In a letter to his wife he said he was tired of the attention, and disappeared after being last seen near Visalia on February 28, 1888. A distinctive feature of Black Bart was that he was consistently a gentleman, always polite and never using profanity. It might be said that he was a rare and exemplary professional in his business, living according to his values. His sense of mission will never be exactly known to us today, but Black Bart was somehow compelled to right some perceived wrong and, like most of us, he needed an income so Wells Fargo was a fitting opportunity.

Even in his risky occupation Black Bart remained kind and harmless, other than theft from a corporate entity of questionable kindness itself, it turns out. If he could act kindly in spite of living on the edge as he did, health care professionals such as us might consider him as a role model, although somewhat of a peculiar one. Somewhere along the line he must have had the parenting, mentorship, or experience that built his character of kindness, larcenous though it might have been. [Above book cover. Black Bart: Boulevardier Bandit. George Hoeper. Word Dancer Press, 1995]

 

Nine.

Jack Lapides. As we unearth stories of Michigan Urology, colorful anecdotes come to light and many involve Jack Lapides. The personal story of a patient who underwent a life-changing Lapides vesicostomy was told on these pages in July and that gentleman was ultimately laid to rest in a ceremony at Arlington in August. Another story from a former medical student was that of Jack teaching the students the art of cystoscopy when he would ask the students to peer over his shoulder and look through the scope to describe what they saw.

It is said that Lapides sometimes mischievously disconnected the light source cord as someone leaned in to look and occasionally an uncertain student provided a fanciful description of the dark or black field. This may have been one origin of his Black Jack moniker, although just as likely it might have been related to the fear he struck among rookies in his expectation for high standards and excellence. Dr. Lapides’s conferences were legendary. He was exacting and tough, requiring that all presentations be stripped of jargon and abbreviations. The IVP, for example, was intravenous pyelogram. Conferences today are more causal. The tradition of teaching conferences persists, but on a larger canvas since Lapides’s days with 4-5 faculty, our scale having increased by a factor of 10. Just below is Thursday morning Grand Rounds. Further below is the Friday AM Mott imaging conference that follows a formal review of operations scheduled the following week. In both instances we have outgrown our rooms.

Yet another Lapides anecdote turned up last week when I was at the American College of Surgeons (ACS) meeting and spent an evening with Lou and Ginger Argenta (below: with Tony Atala of Wake Forest, in San Diego October, 2017).

Lou had been our plastic surgery head in my early years at Michigan and innovated, with Michael Morykwas at Wake Forest, the Vacuum-Assisted Closure (VAC) device, a paradigm-changing system to manage burns and wounds. For this he won the Jacobson Innovation Award from the ACS in 2016. Lou recalled how Jack Lapides, in his retirement years, took up welding and small engine repair, learning and teaching them at Washtenaw Community College. Jack kindly performed a welding repair on the broken bicycle of young Joey Argenta, and the work held up for years of further bicycle abuse.

Lapides stories will undoubtedly continue to emerge. The man and his work had a long reach.

 

Ten.
What really matters to us, to our patients, to our colleagues, to our community, and our 7 billion global brethren is a deep question usually lost in the daily hustle of life. Most people have roughly similar ideas about what matters, although each has a particular take on things. Donald Campbell, Charles de Nancrede, Charley Bolton, Jack Lapides, Dr. Doeg, CW Waddington, FDR, and Rockwell had their particular world views that shaped their legacies. All, no doubt, shared many of the things that mattered to them, although each likely ordered and interpreted those characteristics idiosyncratically, perhaps Black Bart most peculiarly.

It is no accident that the four essential freedoms that Roosevelt identified have a strong basis in health care. Freedom from want is most obviously tied into food security, but it could just as easily be interpreted as freedom from needs that rationally include shelter and health care. Freedom from fear was illustrated by Rockwell as a fear of illness, but safety and personal security could just as easily have been the visual that Rockwell used. Liberty in the political sense is not so far from liberty in its mobility sense. An authoritarian regime may enforce curfews or travel restrictions, just as health conditions restrict people from being out and about to participate fully in society. If governments are to promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the four freedoms are essential.

Human values and role models are the factors that translate human beings into the superorganism of human civilization. Those factors can go the way of apoptosis or can epigenetically build a prosperous, just, beautiful, robust, and sustainable version of itself for the next generation.

[Autumn foliage, my neighborhood 2017]

 

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

Matula Thoughts December 2, 2016

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Politics, nutcrackers, and earthly delights
3799 words

One.

election-2016-copy

This has been a year of political surprises with Brexit, the Columbian failure to reconcile with FARC, and the American presidential election. The weekend after our election I happened to be at the Fourth Quinquennial John W. Duckett Festschrift at the Union League of Philadelphia. This venerable institution was founded in 1862 as a patriotic society to support the policies of Abraham Lincoln, whose ideas seem so obvious and mainstream today, but they split the United States nearly permanently at that time. In a Union League reading room you see our friend and colleague George Drach contemplating the meaning of the election for healthcare. Just this past summer George spoke at our Duckett/Lapides Symposium on the implications of the MACRA law, passed earlier this spring with strong bipartisan support. Whether or not the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and MACRA disappear, healthcare policy, regulation, and economics are going to get evermore contentious and confusing. Politics may be easy to distain, but they surround us and shape our lives. This milestone day, December 2, is worth recalling for two examples of politics and ideologies that led nations and people sadly astray.

First example: red scares. The Cold War, following WWII, instilled legitimate anxiety over the spread of communism in the West where scoundrels capitalized on that fear and created the Second Red Scare (1947-57). A First Red Scare (1919) followed WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Both phenomena occurred during times of patriotic intensity and exploited fears of communism. The second scare lasted far longer than the first and came to be known as McCarthyism after its central figure Joseph McCarthy, US Senator from Wisconsin.

herblock1950

[Above: Herblock cartoon March 29, 1950 Washington Post, introducing the term McCarthyism.] Paranoia crossed the United States from Washington to Hollywood and left its effects in Ann Arbor, where 3 faculty members were dismissed by the University for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Mark Nickerson (UMMS Pharmacology), H. Chandler Davis (UM Mathematics), and Clement Markert (UM Biology), suspected of membership in the Communist Party, were called to Lansing on May 10, 1954 to testify before an HUAC sub-committee. The professors refused to answer certain questions, claiming Fifth Amendment privilege, and UM President Harlan Hatcher promptly suspended them pending a faculty inquiry related to “intellectual integrity.” Nickerson was fired out of concern that he was damaging the reputation of the Medical School and University. He went on to a distinguished career in Canada. Davis was also fired and later served jail time for contempt of Congress. Markert was retained but left UM soon thereafter. While this breech of their civil rights passed public muster in the Red Scare fervor, the breech of their tenure rights (Regents bylaw 509) tripped up the university and caused an academic firestorm. The American Association of University Professors would later ask the UM to make “a significant gesture of reconciliation” and that became the annual Davis, Markert, Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom. [James Tobin. Seeing Red. Medicine at Michigan Spring, 2009; 11:14-15] That second Red Scare began to wind down later in 1954 on this day, December 2, when the United States Senate voted 65 to 22 to censure McCarthy for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”

castro

Second example: smoke and mirrors. On this day in 1961 Fidel Castro, in a nationally broadcast speech, announced that Cuba would adopt Communism, surprising us in the north and setting off a chain of events with the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year that nearly brought the world to nuclear confrontation. A recent book by former Secretary of Defense William Perry (My Journey at the Nuclear Brink – mentioned here a few months back) offers a frightening account of that time and a more frightening preview of the world ahead of us now. While Castro’s iron grip endured for a half century his ideological experiment failed and he died just 7 days ago. Venezuela under Hugo Chavez tried to reprise the Cuban experiment, but that too didn’t turn out well for its people. Chavez died in 2013 after treatment in Cuba for unspecified malignancy. Both dictators rode waves of populism in their countries, where celebrity ideology support them even to this day, in spite of the economic and social disintegration they left behind, showing once again that populism usually turns out poorly for the populace at the end of the day. [Picture above: Wikipedia]

 

 

Two.

colors

Autumn colors peaked late this year, reaching well into November in Ann Arbor even past election day. After a nontraditional election season the people spoke and the transition of power is following its honorable historical precedents. What this will mean in terms of health care remains to be seen. The ACA will be problematic to unravel and, with it or without it, deployment of fair and excellent health care, the mission of academic medical centers, and the stability of the health care industry are at risk regardless of whatever party dominates the day. Healthcare has been a hard nut to crack in America and a viable menu of choices for its deployment remains elusive.
The University of Michigan urology microcosm, however, seems reasonably in balance. Last month we completed residency application interviews for more than 60 prospective trainees. The four to match here will begin their 5 years of residency in July of 2017 and graduate in 2022. [Above Medical School foliage. Below view from Bank of Ann Arbor headquarters]

baa

Last month was also notable for its super supermoon (below). The moon’s orbit came so close to the earth that it was larger and brighter than any time since January 26, 1948. Having missed it back then, I took the picture below on November 12. To a lesser degree supermoons occur every 14 months when a full moon occurs at its perigee (closest encounter). More periodically the moon’s oval orbit elongates to create the super supermoon effect.

supermoon

Michigan Football’s last home game was an exciting victory over Indiana, bringing the first seasonal snowstorm in the fourth quarter when we also saw snow angels on the field during time outs.

first-quarter

[Above: first quarter. Below: fourth quarter from Sincock suite]

snowy-4th

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The season ended a week later with an unprecedented double overtime loss in Columbus.

 

 

Three.
We shouldn’t leave 2016 without mentioning once again, Jheronimus van Aken, the Flemish painter known as Hieronymus Bosch who died 500 years ago. His Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych in The Prado, depicts strangely imagined hedonistic days of mankind between the Garden of Eden on the viewer’s left and the Last Judgment on the right. Bosch painted the work around 1497, which for historical perspective was five years after Columbus landed on a Bahamian island and claimed the adjacent continent of diverse people, flora, and fauna for the King and Queen of a nation thousands of miles away.

el_jardin_de_las_delicias_de_el_bosco-1

Bosch also painted a strange work called The Wayfarer, mentioned here last month for its stranguria depiction. The world of Hieronymus Bosch around 1500 was probably a pretty grim place, although not devoid of earthly delights, as he imagined in his triptych. A later triptych, The Last Judgement (c. 1527) by another Dutch artist Lucas van Leyden, depicts the actual day of judgment in the middle panel flanked by heaven on the left on hell on the right.

van-leyden

The times of Bosch and van Leyden were framed by fierce religiosity that juxtaposed nations and perpetrated conflicts negating the very values of the religions. Earthly delights, in the minds of those artists and most of their contemporaries, were only a brief interlude before the Heaven and Hell that defined mankind. Native Americans, suffering the European invasion, had no pretension to those ecclesiastical visions of heaven and hell, but rather sought to make the most of their experiential present, albeit with respect to their forefathers and the spirits of their present-day world. It was quite a contrast of civilizations and the Europeans surely brought dimensions of ecclesiastical and actual hell to North America.
Ecclesiastical visions have rightly become personal matters in most of western society. The separation of church and state, as espoused in The Constitution, was a forward step in the self-determination of mankind, although it remains under constant challenge at home and abroad. If The Garden of Earthly Delights is all we can expect in life (before Heaven or Hell) then it should be fair and just, and health care is central to the mix of basic expectations.

 

 

Four.

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After viewing van Leyden’s triptych at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam early this autumn, while en route to a pediatric urology meeting, I was stopped in my tracks by street musicians playing an enchanting soft tuba staccato note that morphed into the familiar beginning of Vivaldi’s Concerto No. 4, “The Winter.” It hardly felt like winter at the moment, but it was a beautiful interlude. Known as The Red Priest (Il Prete Rosso) Antonio Vivaldi wrote The Four Seasons around 1723 and published it in 1725, coincidentally in Amsterdam. Vivaldi clearly was familiar with the nastiness of freezing rain and treachery of icy paths as seen in the narrative that accompanied his piece (below).

Allegro non molto
To tremble from cold in the icy snow,
In the harsh breath of a horrid wind;
To run, stamping one’s feet every moment,
Our teeth chattering in the extreme cold
Largo
Before the fire to pass peaceful,
Contented days while the rain outside pours down.
Allegro
We tread the icy path slowly and cautiously,
for fear of tripping and falling.
Then turn abruptly, slip, crash on the ground and,
rising, hasten on across the ice lest it cracks up.
We feel the chill north winds course through the home
despite the locked and bolted doors…
this is winter, which nonetheless
brings its own delights.

Winter Solstice will be here soon (December 21) and after that interlude of shortest daylight, each passing day will be a step closer to spring, in spite of “the harsh breath of a horrid wind.”

 

 

Five.
Mirror neurons again. Since I read John Berger’s A Fortunate Man last summer, Dr. John Sassall and his deep empathy for his patients in an impoverished English hamlet have haunted me. The lives of those people in the mid 1960s were perhaps not so far removed those Bosch depicted across the North Sea before the Industrial Revolution. While Sassall may seem hypersensitive, he was not so different from the rest of us but for our lesser imaginations. The journalist’s impressions of Sassall’s thoughts are worth repeating.

“Do his patients deserve the lives they lead, or do they deserve better? Are they what they could be or are they suffering continual diminution? Do they ever have the opportunity to develop the potentialities which he has observed in them at certain moments? Are there not some who secretly wish to live in a sense that is impossible given the conditions of their actual lives? And facing this impossibility do they not then secretly wish to die?” [Berger. A Fortunate Man. p. 133]

lange

[Classic photo of Dorothea Lange. Destitute pea pickers in California – mother of 7. 1936. Library of Congress.]
My daughter Emily, a young English professor at Columbia, teaches Aristotle’s three methods of persuasion: ethos, logos, and pathos. Visual art, Dorothea Lange’s photography for example, captures the suffering that troubled Sassall so greatly and should trouble us too. We are insulated from pathos by the professional boundaries of ethos and the logos of our science, metrics, and computers. The grim thoughts of Sassall stretch the role of a physician. Yet, who in society has a greater mandate to defend mankind’s well-being specifically and generally? Clergymen, teachers, and rare politicians share this charge, but day-in and day-out, healthcare providers are most consistently on the front lines with some of the best tools to ameliorate the daily pains and continual diminutions of individuals around us. Urologists and other specialists may claim turf protection, but can’t forget that they are physicians first and foremost. Berger’s last sentence was most likely targeted to the difficult days at end-of-life, the time when the garden of earthly delights has run out – familiar terrain for most urologists.
The toll of pathos was considered by Jennifer Best, from the University of Washington in Seattle in A Piece of My Mind column in JAMA called The Things We Have Lost [JAMA 316:1871, 2016].

“When most people consider the grief endured by physicians in training, they look first to the devastating narratives of patient care – sudden illness, agonizing decline, putrid decay, untimely death, haunting errors, and crushing uncertainty. Even more than a decade from residency, I am pierced by these tragic moments and faces – each still heart-shatteringly vivid.”

Best goes on from this opening statement to suggest not only confronting these griefs in “curricular endeavors” such rounds or narrative sessions with trainees, but also considering personal losses as we play out our roles in what she calls physicianship. Her claim is that when we accept the role of healthcare provider, we step into a new identity and lose some of our freer, ad lib, selves. Growing our sense of empathy, yet maintaining resilience is the challenge. Best rejects counter arguments that her considerations are “first-world problems” or that because “it could be so much worse” we need not be overly concerned with professional fragility. Her column offers a good footnote to A Fortunate Man.

 

 

Six.
Department of complaints. We spoke last autumn at some length on medical error and argued that our profession can never be free from it. Error is a fundamental property of life and intrinsic to all its processes. We study error in healthcare to minimize it and fortunately most error is nonlethal, although even when trivial it can hurt. The University of Michigan Health System, like any large scale enterprise, has many processes susceptible to error. With 2 million ambulatory care visits and 50,000 major surgical procedures yearly countless opportunities arise for untoward events ranging from missed blood draws to serious complications in ICUs. Every complaint is a gift, of a sort, providing opportunity for improvements in individual actions, processes, and structures. I recently heard complaints that targeted team leadership factors and the “hotel” functions of hospitalization.
Complaint A. Who is my doctor? Patients generally are thankful about their care from the doctors, nurses, and other members of the team, however fumbled handoffs or inability to identify the responsible member of a healthcare team on any given day are vexing. You can find analogies for this in baseball or air travel industries where the buck stops with the general manager of the team or the pilot. Both endeavors, like health care, require complicated teams, but each fan or traveler can usually identify who is in charge. Health care teams and systems need to make their ladders of responsibility more visible.
Complaint B. Must I share a room? Double room occupancy at UM Main Hospital is a vestige of an older era of health care, but is no longer acceptable for a variety of reasons including privacy, infection control, safety, comfort, and patient satisfaction. Our failure to convert the remaining double rooms over the past 20 years is an embarrassment today and correction is in the works, but  it’s nearly a billion-dollar fix including a new patient tower estimated to open in 2021.

 

 

Seven.
MACRAnyms. Acronyms abound in most occupations and populate the shop talk that distinguishes workers from the public at large. The big acronym for health care in 2017 is MACRA – the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. Sponsored by Congressional Representative Michael Burgess (R-TX-26) this act removes the sustainable growth rate methodology for the determination of physician payments and extends aspects of Medicare and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). I can’t pretend to understand this large and complex set of regulations outside of a few salient details, but fortunately we have experts among us at Michigan such as Tim Peterson (below – Medical Director Population Health Office UMMG). Like many well-intended public policies, unintended consequences are inevitable in MACRA, so the better we educate ourselves the more capable we will be to help patients lost in the regulatory shuffle and the greater likelihood we will have to protect the mission and values of healthcare education, clinical delivery, and research.

peterson-tim

 

MACRA attempts to displace the dominant model of physician payment from fee for service (FFS) to payment for value. While it is fashionable to vilify the motivational factors of FFS as a driver of health care expenses (and presumably unnecessary services) there is risk in terms of motivating the restraint of healthcare services. I also recognize a healthcare safety net is direct of a civilized society; universal access to health care is in the national interest. I equally recognize the downside of a system that does not reward work in terms of time and quality.
The intent of MACRA in shifting payment from FFS to payment for quality and value, set by complex government formulas, is an unproven experiment. Market forces should largely determine value and quality, while professional organizations should set basic standards for services. National healthcare cannot be left exclusively to the invisible hand of the market or the heavy hand of government. Healthcare affects everyone, employs one in six people in this country, and is a huge piece of our economy. The present systems of healthcare (there is no single “system”) need huge improvement, but changing it on a massive scale can be dangerously disruptive.
We need various systems of healthcare in simultaneous play, from the private and the public sectors to provide equity, excellence, innovation, and value. The private sector can best supply competition, value, innovation, and stakeholder responsiveness. The public system can best supply the safety net, equity, rules, education, and research. No single system, set of laws, organization, or paradigm can do it alone and we must be suspicious of any grand “answer,” for healthcare is a very hard nut to crack.

 

 

Eight.

nutcrackercollection
The nutcracker comes to mind at this time of year – not for the compression of urologic structures by the superior mesenteric artery and aorta, but for the ballet based on ETA Hoffmann’s story in 1816, Nutcracker and Mouse King. [Above: Nutcracker collection. Wikimedia Commons] The original story featured a nutcracker whose jaw was broken by an unusually hard nut, triggering political intrigue, revenge, hate, battle, and murder. Alexandre Dumas in 1844 lightened and popularized the story as The Tale of the Nutcracker, that became the basis for Tchaikovsky’s ballet in 1892. It is a rare American community in December where you can’t find an amateur or professional version to attend. You can read a synopsis of the morbid original story in Wikipedia (and perhaps give a modest annual contribution to keep that great public good afloat).
Our own great cardiologist, Kim Eagle, years back as editor of the NEJM section Images in Clinical Medicine, published a classic image of a 52 year-old woman with mild episodic gross hematuria from renal vein compression by the superior mesenteric artery. [Kimura & Araki. NEJM. 335:171, 1996] Improved CT technology offers a better image (below) in a more recent paper from the Mayo Clinic Proceedings. [Kurklinsky & Rooke. Mayo Clinic Proceedings 85:552, 2010]

nutcracker

[Computed tomographic venogram: nutcracker phenomenon.
Distended left renal vein (black arrow) compressed between
aorta and superior mesenteric artery.]

 

 

Nine.
Nutcracker politics continue to play out in life and art. The innovative House of Cards on Netflix is a very dark modern political nutcracker story. People need politics, crave leadership, and tolerate a fair amount of nut cracking.

house-of-cards

Ideology and celebrity can hijack brains like zombie viruses resulting in political choices and actions that prove contradictory to an individual’s ultimate interests. Politics, a term derived from the Greek “of citizens”, is the process of decision-making and governance of stakeholders. Political systems are frameworks that define acceptable political methods in a given society. Confucius, Plato, Aristotle and countless other thinkers have advanced political thought throughout the history of mankind. Formal politics prescribe public elections, national healthcare policy, and self-government as in our UM Health System. Informal politics are at play in all human activities, real and fictional, even as portrayed in The Nutcracker or House of Cards, where acceptable political methods get conveniently perverted to attain political power.

Politics, whether played fairly or unfairly, are essential to operationalize democracy, which is more of a biologic phenomenon, perhaps akin to quorum sensing, than an ideology or mere political system. This amazing universe of possibilities has arisen from 23 pairs of human chromosomes, their 3 billion base pairs, and 21,000 genes. Civilization is a house of chromosomes.

 

 

Ten.
Political parties developed to create candidates for public elections since the days of our first and last politically independent president, George Washington. Our present bivalent political system dates from 1854 when the USA has had two main parties, the then-dominant Democratic Party and an upstart party of anti-slavery activists, modernizers, ex-Whigs, and ex-Free Soldiers. The upstarts coalesced into a Republican Party that held its first official convention in Jackson, Michigan July 6, 1854. Within 4 years Republicans dominated all northern states and in 1860 they won control of both houses and their candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president. He had a tough presidency and many expected little of him, but Lincoln rose to the occasion of the office and the issues of the day. Two years into his single term, the Union League of Philadelphia was founded. One room (below) features portraits of every Republican president of the United States.

repub-pres

Democratic and Republican parties dominated the American political landscape since Lincoln’s time, while other parties have failed to gain leverage. The Constitution, Green, Libertarian, and other small parties continue to field candidates but attract only small numbers of followers. Candidates for office independent of political party are not uncommon in local elections, but rare in higher office. Washington was the last independent president. Bernie Sanders is the longest serving independent in the history of the US Congress, although he aligns with Democrats. The Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901, never produced much of a winning ticket and dissolved in 1972. The Communist Party USA founded in 1919 was closely tied to the US labor movement, but never gained enough foothold to even have warranted the Red Scares; examples of its failed experiments near to us and in distant nations have dispelled serious interest in modern literate nations.
The 2016 election is over. Democrats will need to reconcile with Republicans and vice versa. The voting closely split the country and each party needs to learn from the other. More importantly both parties need to govern effectively, wisely, cooperatively, and justly. Health care policy is a muddle in the middle of things. Ultimately, though, what really matters above all is financial world-market stability and geopolitical stability. Without these, little else remains, so as with every president – we hope for the best.

political-promises-copy

[A cautionary slogan for politicians: Glen Arbor Fourth of July Parade, 2012 – Decker’s septic pumping truck with slogan: “another truckload of political promises.”]

 

Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts this first Friday in December, 2016 – and best holiday wishes.

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