Carl Van Appledorn, friend, Nesbit alumnus, and colleague, passed away last week. Carl trained under Jack Lapides and fulfilled an illustrious career as a superb urologist and beloved physician at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital. He spent a mini sabbatical in pediatric urology in Cambridge, England working with Bob Whitaker and when I came to Ann Arbor, Carl welcomed me most generously although I was “the competition.” We talked periodically about patients and I admired his work and gracious manner. As a University of Michigan and Nesbit alumnus, he supported his alma mater to the hilt. Later in his career Carl and his wife Sue developed an interest in international health for the underserved and they focused their attention in Ghana. Among other efforts, they facilitated care for a youngster with bladder exstrophy whom they brought to Ann Arbor and Mott Children's Hospital with his mom for reconstructive surgery by John Park. The Van Appledorns generously created an endowment between the departments of Urology and OB/GYN for clinical and educational links to Ghana and the program is ongoing and growing. Carl's passing is sad news indeed, but his name will carry on with his global program.
One. May, at last.
Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan Campus are especially lovely just now (shown above from the west side of the Cardiovascular Center last year). Cold days and wintry mixes are over and we are primed for spring. May brings, among other things, academic commencements, watershed moments when change is in the air. Last month in this column we referred to a commencement address by President John F. Kennedy at American University in 1963, for its relevance to environmental stewardship.
With Cuba “back” in the news recently, Kennedy’s speech is also relevant at a geopolitical level. In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, when a showdown with the Soviet Union took us very close to the brink of nuclear war, Kennedy knew that world security was precariously dependent on constructive dialogue with our adversaries and his commencement address, called Strategy for Peace, helped turn the tide of the escalating confrontation and ushered in an improved era of diplomacy. A cautionary phrase from the speech is worth repeating again this month: "For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."
Thanks to the Internet, you can scour the world for notable commencement speeches, that while typically forgotten in the momentary excitement of most graduates and families, are retained the collective human memory of newspapers, libraries, and YouTube clips. An NPR web site (npr.org) lists 354 of The Best Commencement Speeches, Ever.
Two. Significant speeches.
Even when unconnected to graduations, speeches may open opportunity for commencement of a new idea, if an audience picks up on it.
Around this time of year in 1850, May 15 to be exact, a young physician Ignaz Semmelweis gave a talk to the Imperial Viennese Society of Physicians urging physicians at Vienna General Hospital to clean their hands when they went to the delivery room. Animal experiments and clinical observation, coupled with a mentor’s death after an autopsy wound in 1847, convinced him that childbed fever was due to contaminating agents. His clinical experiment showed that the simple act of hand rinsing in chlorine markedly decreased the high incidence and fatality of childbirth sepsis in his hospital. While not a commencement speech, his talk might have commenced a new era in health care, but few in Semmelweis’s audience accepted the idea. (Our colleague at Michigan and current editor of Milbank Quarterly, Howard Markel, presented a discussion of this on PBS News Hour last year and John Park recently referred to it in his Mott Children’s Hospital blog.)
The same opportunity had been missed seven years before the Semmelweis speech when Oliver Wendell Holmes advanced the contagiousness concept at an evening scientific meeting of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement, yet the idea gained no traction. In 1867 Joseph Lister working in Glasgow wrote 2 papers in The Lancet that conclusively showed how antiseptic techniques converted the universal fatality of open fractures into probable survival, yet colleagues again failed to accept the idea. Listerian antiseptic methods were first only appreciated by German physicians and the idea diffused slowly back to England and the rest of the world over the next 20-30 years. Even today, we could do a better job of regular handwashing (actual washing, rather than “Purell” propaganda, in vogue today).
Failure of commencement of the ideas of Holmes, Semmelweis, and Lister is another cautionary tale for us today. A quote on a cover of The Lancet several years ago sums it up well: “The most entrenched conflict of interest in medicine today is a disinclination to reverse a previous opinion.” [Yudkin, Richter, Gale. Lancet 377:1220-1221, 2011.] While academic health centers have self-righteously implemented stern conflict of interest policies, we seem oblivious to the proven fact that it is not the ballpoint pen with drug company logos or the pizza from surgical suppliers at grand rounds that we have to fear, rather it is our own prejudices that close our minds to new ideas.
{If you want to read more of What’s New this month, please open the attachment herein or go to matulathoughts.org; our usual 3000 or more words is too much for the short bandwidth and fast thinking of email.}
- The AUA Michigan Urological Surgery Improvement Collaborative (MUSIC) Reception will be on Saturday, May 7 from 5:00-7:00 PM at the Omni San Diego located at 675 L Street at Gallery 1 (located across the street from the front entrance of the hotel). All are welcome.
- The UM Department of Urology AUA Nesbit Society Reception will be on Sunday, May 8 from 5:30-7:30 PM at the historic Horton Grand Hotel - Courtyard. Located at 311 Island Avenue in San Diego. If you have not RSVP'd, you may email April Malis at [email protected] and she will have a name tag ready for you. We hope to see many of our alumni and friends there!
- Last month our internal weekly "What's New" profiled: a) Urologic Care at the Hamilton Community Health Network in Flint and the new Residency Video; b) Brent Hollenbeck's thoughts on his time as Acting Chair; c) Emergency Weather Preparedness; and d) an update on the Division of Endourology and Stone Disease. https://medicine.umich.edu/dept/urology/april-2016-whats-new
Thanks for looking at our monthly commentary for May 2016.
