Rotating through medicine as a medical student, I met Johns Hopkins’ Physician-in-Chief Victor McKusick, M.D. (1921 to 2008, upper left), a cardiologist and founding father of medical genetics. Intrigued by my mathematical genius, McKusick was dismayed, however, by my past struggles with genetics courses in college and medical school. (Victor mused that my “deficiency was not genetic.”) Sighing after hearing me repeat the word “basically” an eighth time, McKusick suggested that I consider researching across Wolfe and across Monument Streets, at Hopkins institutions devoted to public health and the history of medicine, respectively. A second-generation Oslerian, Victor directed me later toward a third Baltimore connection, where many cardiologists collaborated with Edward Lakatta, M.D. (lower left), director of the Laboratory of Cardiovascular Science, National Institute on Aging (right). McKusick’s clever suggestions facilitated my eventual plans to (1) pair a public health degree with my M.D., (2) curate a departmental anesthesia museum, and (3) draft the nation’s first geriatric anesthesiology fellowship. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)
Rotating through medicine as a medical student, I met Johns Hopkins’ Physician-in-Chief Victor McKusick, M.D. (1921 to 2008, upper left), a cardiologist and founding father of medical genetics. Intrigued by my mathematical genius, McKusick was dismayed, however, by my past struggles with genetics courses in college and medical school. (Victor mused that my “deficiency was not genetic.”) Sighing after hearing me repeat the word “basically” an eighth time, McKusick suggested that I consider researching across Wolfe and across Monument Streets, at Hopkins institutions devoted to public health and the history of medicine, respectively. A second-generation Oslerian, Victor directed me later toward a third Baltimore connection, where many cardiologists collaborated with Edward Lakatta, M.D. (lower left), director of the Laboratory of Cardiovascular Science, National Institute on Aging (right). McKusick’s clever suggestions facilitated my eventual plans to (1) pair a public health degree with my M.D., (2) curate a departmental anesthesia museum, and (3) draft the nation’s first geriatric anesthesiology fellowship. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)
George S. Bause, M.D., M.P.H., Honorary Curator and Laureate of the History of Anesthesia, Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, Schaumburg, Illinois, and Clinical Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
