Anyone who has spent time around Patrick Walsh has likely heard this quote from Francis Peabody. These are words Walsh lives by, and it is a message he has taught throughout his 50 years at the Brady. At the Research Symposium in honor of Walsh, Brady urologist Jacek Mostwin, M.D., Ph.D., gave a memorable talk on this topic. He began with the story of a life-changing encounter.

The year was 1982, and Mostwin had been asked to drive Hugh Judge Jewett, M.D., to the Mid-Atlantic meeting of the American Urological Association. “Dr. Jewett was one of the most distinguished urologists of the 20th century,” he says. “His entire professional life was dedicated to the Brady and the treatment of prostate and bladder cancer. He was the first to show evidence that radical prostatectomy could cure early prostate cancer. Now he was approaching 80 and knew that he had prostate cancer.”

Mostwin and Jewett arrived a day early for the conference and ate together that evening. “It was a quiet dinner,” Mostwin recalls, “mostly filled with Dr. Jewett’s reminiscences, at the end of which he said, ‘It’s been a good life, after all.’” Over the next few days, Jewett began to develop bone pain from metastases from prostate cancer. “I searched around the local pharmacies to find a synthetic opiate to ease his pain, and also obtained a supply of the recently released ketoconazole, which would immediately reduce his testosterone levels to provide rapid relief of the pain caused by the expanding tumor in his spine,” says Mostwin. “The following day, we drove back to Baltimore in relative silence. As we neared his apartment, he said to me, ‘All my life I’ve treated this disease, but I never understood it until now.’”

This idea of “understanding it now” stayed with Mostwin, and he is working to help students and practitioners develop a deeper understanding of illness. He teaches a seminar course to Johns Hopkins undergraduates. The students read and discuss books written by patients and by doctors, and study films looking at medicine from both the patient’s and the doctor’s perspectives.

In addition, he is collecting and studying first-hand accounts of illness and its treatment. “Our library consists of 16,000 book titles from 1990-2020, and it is growing,” he says. Some of these works are being used to teach undergraduate premedical students, “who respond with enthusiasm and gratitude for opening their eyes to the human side of medicine,” Mostwin continues.

“We foresee a library and a project that can be enlarged, studied, and curated using advanced computer methods, creating new educational resources and programs for medical education and a broader public literacy. We are combining the skills and lessons learned from a lifetime of clinical work such as that of Dr. Jewett and today’s Brady family with the understanding that he found through his personal experience.” The idea of understanding it now, he explains, “has shown us a way to work toward a practice of medicine that will be more truly human.”

Access to Mostwin’s talk and more information about the course (including a book list!)