When it comes to telling the stories of the extraordinary scientific and clinical advances unfolding everyday across Johns Hopkins, we certainly owe our clinician researchers a debt of gratitude for carving out time from their hectic schedules to work with our writers. Explaining the complex arc of their work — and ensuring we get the facts right — is a nuanced and time-consuming process requiring their patience, flexibility and good humor.
But there are other important players in our health reporting, valuable sources who humanize the pathbreaking advances of our medical teams: the patients who so graciously share their personal stories.
Patients like Celina McHugh, whose experience battling the toxic side effects of immunotherapy you’ll read about this issue in “Toxic Trade-offs.” Or Mark-Keys Moore, a patient with sickle-cell disease who related the impact of his life-changing stem cell transplant with the Johns Hopkins community late last fall (Post-Op). Or Alexandra Piselli, whose dramatic treatment journey served as the through-line for our Winter 2022 cover story by Lacey Johnson, about the Johns Hopkins Fertility Preservation Innovation Center (an article recently honored with a silver award for writing excellence from the Association of American Medical Colleges).
By bravely sharing the intimate details of their medical odysseys, these patients — and many others — bring heart, and hope, to so many in our reading audience. For that, we are immensely grateful.
Letter to the editor:
The Rest of the Story
I enjoyed reading “Medicine’s Homegrown Luminaries” (Fall 2022), about the book written by Ralph Hruban [A Scientific Revolution]. I recalled that during my nearly 50-year career at the hospital, I knew Mary Elizabeth Garrett’s $500,000 gift allowed the medical school to open and required women to be accepted.
But lately I learned something that should also be part of the “lore” while reading volume 1 of my father’s Life of Sir William Osler by Harvey Cushing (which was inscribed to him, as a third-year Harvard medical school student, by the author). It was stunning to learn the $500,000 and proviso were offered to Harvard Medical School. Harvard turned the offer down!
Harvard Medical School didn’t accept women until 1945, when male applicants were at war — that was by necessity, not foresight. Hope you can find a way to add this to Hopkins Medicine history.
Paul S. Wheeler, M.D.
Connections Galore
Congratulations on another excellent Hopkins Medicine (Fall 2022).
The letter from Trustee Emeritus William Baker brought back wonderful memories of his father, Dr. Benjamin Baker. Dr. Baker was part of the Hopkins pantheon of superb physicians and superb people. From my time as a resident and then a faculty member, he was an icon of a caregiver, leader and consummate gentleman who encouraged others to achieve. Although he was 30 years my senior, he insisted that I call him Ben. It is not surprising that he developed a friendship with Dr. Osler’s widow, in view of his sincerely engaging personality.
The article featuring Mike Weisfeldt was excellent (“Harnessing the Hopkins Brain Trust”). Mike always showed a strong commitment to the Hopkins institutions and encouraged development of others. He should be given credit for bringing Dr. William Brody to Hopkins as chairman of radiology, which eventually led Brody to be president of the university, which then led Hopkins to an era of unprecedented growth through Brody’s contact with Michael Bloomberg. Mike Weisfeldt’s encouragement of women faculty and support of Redonda Miller within the department started her movement to her current position [as Johns Hopkins Hospital president].
The “In Memoriam” article about David Knox reminded me of many hallway chats and viewbox discussions with Dave. He was thorough in his looking for related health issues through the presenting eye problems. And I enjoyed the alumni update on Dr. Selwyn Vickers, now CEO of Sloan Kettering. My contact with Selwyn was when he was a surgical resident at Hopkins. He had abundant energy and radiated enthusiasm while working in a field with demanding hours and with a faculty with very high standards. I was very pleased when he became department head of surgery in a “Deep South” city [University of Alabama], and I am delighted that he has taken a next step in leadership in medicine.
In the 1987 class notes, Carolyn Meltzer’s appointment as dean of the Keck School of Medicine at USC is noted. Carolyn was an excellent resident in radiology at Hopkins and became a neuroradiologist on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh before being named radiology department head at Emory, where she did an excellent job and became nationally known for her very solid leadership abilities. The Hopkins-Emory connections have grown similar to long-established Hopkins-Penn connections.
Bob Gayler, M.D.
Adjunct Faculty, Department of Radiology and Radiological Science