Mercy Medical Center – Baltimore Magazine

The City That Cures: Baltimore’s Countless Contributions to Modern Medicine

Aaron Hope — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 18:00:28 +0000

Health & Wellness

The City That Cures

From the automatic defibrillator to the first public medical school in the United States, we celebrate the countless contributions Baltimore has made to modern medicine.

By Jane Marion and Christianna McCausland

Illustrations by Alicia Corman

November 2024

hen Harford County-born John Archer graduated from the inaugural class of Philadelphia’s medical school (which later became the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine) on June 21, 1768, he became the first person in the 13 Colonies to earn a diploma from a medical college. That distinction was purely by dint of his last name—diplomas were given out in alphabetical order. Regardless, it was a red-letter day for the entire graduating class.

From the minutes written by the Board of Trustees it was declared: “This day may be considered as the Birthday of medical honors in America.”

After graduation, Archer returned home to practice in Bel Air. But back then medicine was hardly the prestigious occupation it is today. Even with his medical degree, Archer practiced what many would now consider folk medicine. Reportedly making his rounds on horses slung with saddlebags packed with medical equipment, he favored early practices like bleeding a patient to rid the body of bad spirits and treating smallbox with purging. A popular saying coined by Colonial historian William Smith was that “quacks abound like locusts in Egypt,” and it was just as likely that doctors would maim—or even murder—their patients than heal them. In fact, staying home was often considered safer than heading to the hospital.

In 1799, the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland (now MedChi, The Maryland State Medical Society) was founded by a group of concerned physicians “to prevent the citizens [of Maryland] from risking their lives in the hands of ignorant practitioners or pretenders to the healing art.”

From these humble beginnings, The College of Medicine of Maryland (later the University of Maryland School of Medicine) was founded in 1807. It was the nation’s first public medical school and helped Baltimore establish itself as not only a medical town, but a place that would lay the foundation for the future of modern medicine. Into this burgeoning era of medical professionalism hospitals came, went, and even merged. In 1874, six Sisters of Mercy came to Baltimore to take charge of the Baltimore City Hospital health dispensary, a merger between the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Washington Medical College. The hospital was renamed Mercy Hospital in 1909 and became the Mercy Medical Center we know today in 1988.

When The Johns Hopkins Hospital opened in 1893, it pushed the frontier further, helping to establish and improve standards for the profession and ensuring that all doctors were properly trained. William Osler, one of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s “Big Four” founding professors, invented Grand Rounds in 1889, giving students the opportunity to tag along with seasoned physicians as they performed their hospital rounds. And standards of care, including the idea of formal medical residency for specialty training, was instituted and is now the norm in most training hospitals.

The seed of this story was planted when we received a pitch about the history of Medstar Union Memorial’s Curtis National Hand Center, the largest hand center in the world—sending us on a quest to identify other advancements and achievements. It turns out there are more medical milestones in our city and surrounding counties than we could count.

We studied historical timeline walls at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. We visited the rare book library at MedChi and the Gibson Museum at Sheppard Pratt. We held the first surgical rubber glove at The Johns Hopkins Hospital (now embedded in plexiglass) and paged through Samuel Mudd’s dissertation on dysentery at the University of Maryland. (If your history is rusty, Mudd was the one given a life sentence for aiding John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.) We made a field trip to the oldest continuously operating medical school classroom in the country (Davidge Hall). And debated over what should land on our list not wanting to leave anything—or anyone—out.

And while we think this list represents an impressive array of medical innovations and innovators, the reality is that we’ve just skimmed the surface.

So much of global medical practice that now seems standard was born in Baltimore. We’ve come a long way since Archer was paid by his patients in pork and cords of wood. Thanks to all the people listed below, Baltimore continues to lead the way for medical innovation in the 21st century.

Above: JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL FOUNDING PROFESSOR WILLIAM OSLER (SEATED) EXAMINES A PATIENT. —COURTESY OF THE ALAN MASON CHESNEY MEDICAL ARCHIVES OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS

1. Occupational Therapy Starts Here

Sheppard Pratt is the birthplace of modern occupational therapy, a type of treatment founded by William Rush Dunton Jr. Dunton believed that participation in daily activities, including hobbies and sports, had a therapeutic effect on people struggling with mental illness. The asylum included a building that drew patients from their rooms for pastimes such as bowling, billiards, and basket-weaving, and patients were often tasked with tending to the instituition's gardens and grounds. “Occupation,” wrote Dunton in 1928, “is as necessary as food and drink.” OT is still widely used as a treatment tool.

—COURTESY OF SHEPPARD PRATT

2. The Blue Baby Operation Saves Lives

Helen Taussig is considered the founder of pediatric cardiology in 1944 and is known for her trailblazing work on “blue baby syndrome.” Along with her Hopkins colleagues, surgeon Alfred Blalock and surgical technician Vivien Thomas, Taussig developed a transformative operation to correct the congenital heart defect that prevents the heart from receiving enough oxygen, resulting in the baby turning “blue.”

Since its inception, the operation known as the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt has saved countless lives and ushered in a new era of cardiac surgery that led to the advancement of open-heart surgery in adults.

Hearing-impaired from childhood, Taussig’s innovative work has been attributed to her ability to detect the rhythms of the heart through touch rather than sound. “Learn to listen with your fingers,” she once famously said.

—COURTESY OF JOHNS HOPKINS/PROVIDED BY THE KARSH ESTATE / © YOUSUF KARSH, 1975

3. In 2018, a team of nine plastic surgeons and two urologists performed the world’s first total penis and scrotum transplant at The Johns Hopkins Hospital on a veteran injured by an explosive device in Afghanistan.

4. A Treatment for Rabies

In 1897, Charles Henry Stewart became the first patient in Maryland to receive a life-saving rabies vaccine. Stewart, a Prince George’s County resident who was bitten by a rabid English setter, was treated at the City Hospital, now Mercy Medical Center, at its Pasteur clinic. Named for the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who created the rabies vaccine in 1885, it was only the third such clinic in the United States.

5. What Is...Sinai Hospital?

Sinai Hospital physicians Drs. Michel Mirowski and Morton Mower had an unusual idea: Create a battery-operated defibrillator so small it could be implanted in people with arrhythmia and provide a life-saving jolt whenever necessary, rather than waiting to get to an external paddle defibrillator at an emergency room. After years of innovation, Mirowski and Morton’s automatic implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, which was about the size of a deck of cards, was implanted in a human at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1980. The device is credited with saving many lives. In 2019, Mirowksi, Mower, and their invention appeared as clue on Jeopardy!

6. William Halsted Invents, Well, Everything

William Stewart Halsted was a founding physician at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and the first chief of surgery. He was considered one of the most influential surgeons in the U.S. Along with Department of Medicine chief William Osler, he introduced a formal multitier surgical residency program in 1889 in which students and recent graduates of the new medical school trained—and lived—at the hospital (hence, the term “residents”). At that time, they had to be unmarried. The program, whose motto was, in Halsted’s words, “See one, do one, teach one,” is the model for modern residency training. Halsted’s other accomplishments include perfecting the radical mastectomy (90 percent of breast cancer patients in the U.S. received the procedure until the 1970s). Halsted was also an anesthesia pioneer, though his work led to lifelong addiction issues after experimenting with using cocaine as an anesthetic. Additionally, he invented the idea of using surgical gloves to protect his favorite scrub nurse (and later wife). Gloves were soon serendipitously found to protect patients from infection.

—COURTESY OF THE ALAN MASON CHESNEY MEDICAL ARCHIVES OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS

7. An Historical Heart Transplant

In December 2021, Bartley Griffith, MD, and Muhammad Mohiuddin, MBBS, of University of Maryland Medicine asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for an emergency provision to conduct a xenotransplant of a genetically modified pig’s heart into a human patient. Much to their surprise, the request was granted. In January, 57-year-old David Bennett, a Maryland resident with terminal heart disease, became the first person to successfully receive this form of transplant.

Although pig heart valves have been used in humans for years, the concept of whole-heart transplants was largely abandoned after the death in the 1980s of “Baby Fae.” The difference with this procedure is that changes could be made to the pig’s complex genome to reduce the likelihood of organ rejection. Bennett, who was severely medically compromised prior to surgery, died two months after the procedure. But for the nearly 110,000 Americans waiting for an organ transplant, his story brings hope for a new era in transplant surgery.

Planes, Trains, Automobiles, Spaceships

Dramamine was being tested as a treatment for allergies at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1947, when a woman who had broken out into hives found that taking the antihistamine also cured her chronic motion sickness. Since then, the drug has staved off nausea for people on the go—and even been taken to outer space as a cure for space motion sickness.

Organs Take Flight

For the first time ever, an unmanned drone delivered an organ to University of Maryland Medical Center in 2019, potentially changing the speed and efficiency with which donor organs can now be dispersed. The kidney was successfully transplanted into a 44-year-old patient.

Tooting Their Own Horn

In the 1880s, the Sisters of Mercy managed to book John Philip Sousa (the Taylor Swift of his time) to play a fundraiser for their new hospital. The concert netted a whopping $20,000—over half a million in today’s dollars.

A Hospital for Everyone

In the 19th century, Baltimore’s Jewish population faced antisemitism at area hospitals. Jewish doctors were excluded from instruction and employment and Jewish patients struggled to receive equitable care. Undaunted, Baltimore’s Jewish citizens rallied to open Sinai Hospital of Baltimore in 1866 to serve anyone regardless of age, race, or gender.

8. Facing the Future

In 2012, a team of plastic, reconstructive, and maxillofacial surgeons, along with over 150 nurses and support staff, completed the world’s most comprehensive full-face transplant. Although the year prior a face transplant was completed at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the transplant at R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center included the jaw, teeth, and tongue as well as all the muscles needed for the recipient to both feel and use his new face.

—COURTESY OF THE ALAN MASON CHESNEY MEDICAL ARCHIVES OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS

9. The electronic defibrillator is invented by William Kouwenhoven and his team at JHU in 1957 leading to another breakthrough: modern-day CPR.

10. Landmark Hand Surgery

In 2016, the Curtis National Hand Center performed the first-of-its-kind surgery in the U.S. for radial club hand. The patient, a 7-year-old boy, was born with a shortened forearm, a bent hand, and no thumb. Surgeons used bones, a joint, a toe, and growth plates from the patient’s foot to form a functioning right arm and thumb, and to construct a full-length radius to restore the child’s forearm. Today, the boy, now a teen, is continuing to grow and has improved dexterity in his fingers and hand function that he wouldn’t otherwise have had without the surgery.

—COURTESY OF THE ALAN MASON CHESNEY MEDICAL ARCHIVES OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS

11. Rounds and Residencies

In the late 19th century, Sir William Osler, the first physician-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Department of Medicine, forever changed the course of medical training when he devised the concept of “rounds.” At that time, medical school education consisted of classes in basic science and lectures in which a physician examined patients in an amphitheater while students looked on. It was Osler who moved the mentoring to the hospital wards (which were then octagonal) where visits to the patient’s bedside with a team of physicians—known as “rounding”—became a critical component of clinical training. This allowed aspiring doctors to learn from physicians, patients—and each other. (Osler once famously said that he hoped his tombstone would read: “He brought medical students into the wards for bedside teaching.”)

On the days that Osler, known for his encyclopedic knowledge, arrived unannounced to test the residents’ understanding, the sessions were dubbed “grand rounds.” The legendary physician also instituted the idea of a medical “residency” (along with colleague William Halsted) in which staff physicians lived in the administration building of the hospital, often for many years. To this day, rounds and residencies are an essential part of medical training at teaching hospitals.

12. Safety Cap Changes Baseball

Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon (and avid baseball fan) Walter Dandy, along with orthopedic surgeon George Bennett (see below), is credited with developing a cap to protect batters from “bean balls”—a pitch thrown directly at a batter’s head. The invention—a plastic protective shield that slides into a zippered pocket of a baseball cap—was inspired by a jockey’s helmet and commissioned by Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager Larry MacPhail, who’d witnessed a few too many injuries on the job.

It was invented in 1940 and first donned the following year by future Hall of Famers Joe Medwick and Pee Wee Reese—both of whom had suffered injuries—during Dodgers’ Spring Training in a game against the Cleveland Indians. It became the prototype for the modern baseball batter’s helmet. When the game was over, MacPhail told the media that they had just witnessed “the biggest thing that has happened to the game since night baseball.” By 1971, all players were required to wear batting helmets and the national pastime was changed forever.

—COURTESY OF THE ALAN MASON CHESNEY MEDICAL ARCHIVES OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS / WALTER DANDY PAPERS, C.1941

GEORGE BENNETT

If you ever suffered a shoulder injury playing baseball and received treatment, you may want to thank the memory of orthopedic pioneer George Bennett. Bennett trained at University of Maryland School of Medicine (graduating in 1908) and went to work at Johns Hopkins University. Although he had many orthopedic achievements, he is best known as the father of sports medicine, not surprising given his own love of athletics. (He played semi-pro baseball as a teen.) Bennett garnered a national reputation and treated world famous athletes including Joe DiMaggio. At the time, he was one of a very few physicians to make a correlation between sports and medicine.

JOHN SHAW BILLINGS

John Shaw Billings, a battlefield surgeon during the Civil War, made many contributions to The Johns Hopkins Hospital and medical school, including overseeing the planning and 11-year construction of the hospital and integrating teaching and research at the institution. After supervising the dismantling of dozens of military hospitals during the war, Billings became a leading expert on hospital construction in the U.S. But his most important contribution was the indexing, storage, and retrieval of information at the Office of the Surgeon General in Washington, D.C., which laid the groundwork for the National Library of Medicine. Under Billing’s directorship, it became the largest and most complete library of medical literature in the world.

RUDIGER BREITENECKER

It’s not an overstatement to say that Breitenecker changed the landscape for how rape victims are treated in Maryland. A pathologist who studied in his native Vienna, he was the assistant state medical examiner until he joined GBMC Healthcare in 1967. Breitenecker was appalled by how rape victims were treated and in 1975 he founded the Rape Care Center at GBMC, now its Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence (SAFE) Program. He ensured women did not wait hours to be seen and that they were given compassionate care. Most notably, he made rape kits more uniform and kept DNA samples from cases, believing that someday the technology would exist to analyze those samples to identify perpetrators. He was correct. The more than 2,000 samples he preserved have been used to exonerate the innocent and prosecute the guilty and the SAFE program he created is considered one of the most notable in the country.

ANGELA BRODIE

Angela Brodie not only opened the door to a new way to treat breast cancer, she built the door from scratch where no one even felt a door needed to exist. The British-born scientist, who spent 37 years at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, pioneered the research that led to the creation of the first selective aromatase inhibitor, Formestane, to treat breast cancer. But when she was in the early stages of research, she struggled to get backing. Knowing her science was sound, she took matters into her own hands, using materials donated by a supply house and working with several post-doctoral students to synthesize the aromatase compound herself. “One needs to be tenacious if you think what you’re doing is going to work,” she said in a 2006 interview with Baltimore. Her research is the basis of a class of drugs that prevents the recurrence of breast cancer in postmenopausal women. While most of the cancer survivors who are alive today thanks to Brodie’s efforts would not even recognize her name, in the world of science, the physician, who died in 2017, is a star.

CAROL GREIDER

In 1984, molecular biologist Carol Greider discovered telomerase, an enzyme that is critical for the health and survival of all living organisms found at the end of chromosome strands (known as telomeres). Greider found that when telomeres are too short or too long, they contribute to disease. Her research now focuses on discovering how to keep the cells the right length to maintain chromosomes and mitigate disease. Her finding has deepened our understanding of cancer, lung, and bone marrow conditions, and other age-related diseases. Greider, now director of the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work.

ALAN GUTTMACHER

Alan Guttmacher was a pioneer and international leader in reproductive rights. While practicing as an ob-gyn at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, he observed a disparity in fertility rates among his patients with different socioeconomic backgrounds. One of his findings was that women who lacked access to private physicians also lacked access to contraceptive information and services. In 1933, he published the first of a controversial series of books which gave ordinary citizens access to information about pregnancy, delivery, contraception, abortion, and infertility. Guttmacher, who later served as president of Planned Parenthood, joined the birth control movement and promoted family planning, which he called, “an urgent, democratic form of medicine.”

JANET HARDY

Janet Hardy, a pediatrics professor at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, led a landmark study that provided information on teen pregnancy and medical and social issues. In 1957, Hardy help design a federal study of 60,000 expectant mothers and their children that lasted for 20 years. She served as the lead researcher for the Baltimore portion of the 12-city project, which focused on inner-city mothers and the development of their children. Hardy was the first researcher to document the dangers of rubella during pregnancy. She also showed that the children of girls younger than 18 had lower IQs and other physical and developmental issues later in life. Her studies helped establish public programs for the economically disadvantaged and inspired investigation into the effect of environment on children’s health.

WILLIAM ALEXANDER HAMMOND

Battlefield medicine has come a long way since Hammond’s day, but today’s modern military hospitals are a credit to his contributions. Briefly a professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Hammond became surgeon general of the U.S. Army during the Civil War. There he created a system of ambulance wagons and hospitals that significantly decreased mortality while increasing the efficiency of moving the wounded. He instituted sanitary measures, and improved record keeping, eventually founding what is today known as the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Though his tenure in Baltimore was brief, he found time to introduce microscopy to the medical school, eventually creating one of America’s largest microscopic collections.

LEO KANNER

Known as “the Father of Child Psychiatry,” Leo Kanner founded the first pediatric psychiatry clinic in the United States at The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Harriet Lane Home for Invalid Children in 1930. He also published the first English-language textbook on child psychiatry in 1935. In a landmark paper written in 1943, Kanner was the first to define and coin the phrase “infantile autism” (aka “Kanner syndrome”). He was also a devoted social activist who fought for the rights of children with autism and other disorders and is one of the co-founders of The Children’s Guild.

THEODORE WOODWARD

When Woodward graduated from the UM School of Medicine in 1938, he intended to open his own practice. World War II intervened. Woodward found himself studying infectious diseases like dengue fever in Bermuda. As part of the U.S. Army Typhus Commission, he helped combat major breakouts of that disease among Allied soldiers, work for which he received numerous awards, including from President Roosevelt. After the war he studied antibiotics and other treatments, including one that he and his colleagues found beneficial in curing typhoid fever. That work netted him a Nobel Prize nomination. Now considered a father of infectious disease study, Woodward founded one of the world’s first Divisions of Infectious Diseases (at UMB) and helped found the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

13. The Modern Birthing Room Is Born

In 1978, a time when women labored alone and dads were excluded from the delivery room, Alan Tapper, a founder of GBMC HealthCare’s ob-gyn department, established the first birthing room in Maryland. It was an appropriate step for a hospital that’s been called “the Baby Factory,” as it delivers more babies than any other facility in the Baltimore area (3,462 in the last fiscal year). GBMC’s birthing room allowed fathers and other loved ones in the room to offer support as a woman gave birth. Rooms had a homey décor—with wallpaper, paintings, and drapery—and medical equipment was largely out of sight. GBMC has other claims to ob-gyn fame, including the first perinatal center in Baltimore County (1985), establishment of the first Lactation Department in the Baltimore area (1989), and the first robot-assisted gynecologic surgery at a community hospital in the mid-Atlantic (2006).

14. The University of Maryland School of Medicine launched a preventive medicine course in 1833, the first of its kind in the U.S.

—SCHOOL OF MEDICINE CATALOG, 1835. HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS, HEALTH SCIENCES AND HUMAN SERVICES LIBRARY. UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE

15. First Program for IVF in the U.S.

Georgeanna Seegar Jones was one of the country’s first reproductive endocrinologists in 1939. Her groundbreaking research on the pregnancy hormone (human chorionic gonadotropin) led to the finding that hCG was produced by the placenta, not the pituitary gland, as had been previously thought, making way for the development of the pregnancy tests that are currently on the market. Decades later, in 1981, she became one half of Hopkin’s husband-wife team that created the first program for in-vitro fertilization in the U.S. The work led to the birth of the first “testtube” baby here. Thanks to Jones, IVF flourished and gave hope to countless couples struggling with infertility.

—COURTESY OF THE ALAN MASON CHESNEY MEDICAL ARCHIVES OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS

16. First Sex Reassignment Surgery in the U.S.

Way ahead of its time, The Johns Hopkins Hospital established The Gender Identity Clinic in 1966. The clinic was the first academic institution in the U.S. to perform gender reassignment surgery at a time when many hospital boards banned it. The clinic became a model for other such centers across the country, but bias and stigma led to its closure in 1979. By 2017, thanks to societal shifts leading to increased acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals, the hospital opened the Center for Transgender and Gender Expansive Health. Since then, the center’s services have included vaginoplasty, penile construction, as well as hormone and voice therapy.

A Golden Idea

For most of the era of modern medicine, a severe accident meant almost certain death. Enter R Adams Cowley who, while serving as chief of surgery for the United States Army in Europe in the years immediately after WWII, saw how quickly European surgeons responded to trauma and the successful survival rate of their patients. Cowley, a heart surgeon and graduate of University of Maryland School of Medicine, formulated from this his theory of the “Golden Hour,” the brief span of time during which trauma patients either get to help at a specialized facility—or die. Cowley overturned the long-held belief that trauma patients should go to the nearest hospital, noting that the teams there likely lacked the necessary training. Instead, he advocated for rapid transit via helicopter to a shock trauma center.

Cowley grew his brainchild from a two-bed center to one that today sees more than 6,500 critically ill and severely injured people annually. Its patients have a 95-percent survival rate. The R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at University of Maryland became a model for how trauma centers were designed around the world. Oh, and when he wasn’t becoming the father of trauma medicine, Cowley was “among the first to perform open-heart surgery, devised a surgical clamp named after him, and helped design a prototype pacemaker used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower,” according to his obituary in The New York Times published in 1991.

A Strong Vision

In 1944, Valley Forge Army Hospital was the epicenter of the treatment of blinding eye injuries sustained by military personnel in WWII. It was here, working with soldier patients, that Richard E. Hoover became interested in helping the blind become more independent. It was not his first experience assisting people who were blind; prior to the war, Hoover was a math and physical education teacher at the Maryland School for the Blind (MSB). For decades, white canes had been used by the blind to help them navigate obstacles but also to alert people—namely motorists—that the person holding the bright white stick was blind. While at Valley Forge, Hoover, along with MSB colleague Warren Bledsoe, devised a new way of using the conventional short, white, wooden cane for greater independence. His idea was to lengthen the cane to match the size and stride of the user and make it of a lighter weight material. He conceived of the “Hoover method” of swinging the cane back in forth to identify obstacles.

At Valley Forge, he trained others who then trained soldiers in the technique. After the war he attended medical school at Johns Hopkins, became assistant professor of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and founded the Dr. Richard E. Hoover Rehabilitation Services for Low Vision and Blindness at GBMC Healthcare. He shared his teachings with MSB students and created university training programs that launched the Hoover method all over the globe..

Lending a Hand

Today we take hand surgery as a specialty for granted, but prior to WWII there was no such thing. Hand casualties in battle were treated much like any other wounded. A group of pioneering surgeons, however, saw the need for a special expertise—one that tapped into orthopedics and neurosurgery as well as plastic surgery—to treat these specific injuries. Among those surgeons was Dr. Raymond Curtis. Curtis completed a general surgery residency in Baltimore and during WWII was chief of hand service in the Army Medical Corps. Upon his discharge in 1947, he returned to Union Memorial Hospital and started a hand-focused practice. Even in the aftermath of war, the specialty was relevant, with industrial accidents and other injuries taking a great toll on patients’ finances and quality of life. Although it would not be named the Curtis National Hand Institute until 1975, by the ’60s, Curtis’ hand program had a reputation for excellence in treating injuries of the hand, wrist, arm, elbow, and shoulder.

The Curtis National Hand Center is now the largest in the world and is designated as a Level 1 Hand and Upper Extremity Trauma Center—the only such center in the U.S. Curtis began training Army surgeons during the war and true to its roots, every Army hand surgeon since 1963 has completed the hand fellowship training at Union Memorial. And Union Memorial continues to send surgeons to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to care for injured soldiers.

17. America’s First Teaching Hospital

In 1807, the College of Medicine of Maryland opened its doors in west Baltimore, becoming the nation’s first teaching hospital. (It was re-chartered in 1812 as the University of Maryland.) Davidge Hall still stands today at Lombard and Greene Streets, the oldest continuously operating medical school building still in use in the Western Hemisphere. No surprise, it has a storied history. It was built to replicate the Pantheon in Rome and features two semi-circular theaters used for instruction including Anatomical Hall, where a plaque still stands commemorating the spot where Revolutionary War hero General LaFayette received an honorary diploma in 1824.

Its early graduates range from the famous—like Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, who was depicted in Field of Dreams—to the infamous, like Samuel Mudd who notoriously treated John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Lincoln. Speaking of notoriety, the school practiced the dissection of corpses and was the first school in the country to make anatomical dissection compulsory, in 1848. (That lab is now home to the alumni association offices.) While considered a normal part of anatomy instruction today, two hundred years ago dissection was thought so reprehensible that a wall was erected around the hall to keep out angry mobs that would’ve burned the building down. (In fairness, the school did sometimes obtain bodies for study through illegal means.) Since 1997, Davidge Hall has been recognized as a National Historic Landmark.

—COURTESY OF MARYLAND CENTER FOR HISTORY AND CULTURE / JULIUS ANDERSON PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION, 1925

18. Cutting-Edge Treatment for Depression

In 2017, Sheppard Pratt conducted the largest study ever done on patients suffering from severe treatment-resistant depression. (Roughly 30 percent of those currently treated with medications for depression are drug-resistant, according to the NIH.) The results found that an implantable vagus nerve stimulation device (aka “a pacemaker for the brain”) paired with antidepressant treatment (including medication, psychotherapy, and electroconvulsive therapy) can alleviate symptoms. The study represents 10 years of research and is a new potential treatment for millions of people who do not respond solely to medication.

19. A University of Maryland professor, Dr. John Crawford, discovered germ theory in about 1790, and also determined that insects were related to human illness. Colleagues of the time dismissed his theories, but history has had the last word.

20. Understanding Lead Paint Poisoning

In 1958, J. Edmund Bradley, chief of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, co-wrote a paper with Samuel Bessman, Poverty, Pica, and Poisoning. In it, he reported that of a random sampling of 333 children that came through his clinic, nearly half had abnormally high levels of lead in their blood. The study collected paint samples from the homes of low-income families and found extremely high levels of lead. Through this study, Bradley correlated poor living conditions with childhood lead poisoning and called for “the cooperative effort of physicians, nurses, and social workers of municipal health and welfare departments” to combat the environmental public health issue.

21. Better Fracture Care

Dr. Nathan Ryno Smith was a chair of surgery at UMD for 50 years beginning in 1827. He is credited with inventing a better way to set leg fractures to decrease deformity. His “anterior splint” involved suspending the limb, once made rigid, so it didn’t rest on the bed. Smith’s invention was perfected just in time to be widely used during the Civil War. As the treatment record of one patient, Theodore Pease, who took a musket ball to the right thigh at Gettysburg stated: Smith’s anterior splint continued in its use. The wounds are discharging freely and bone is practically united.

—COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

22. World’s First Medical Illustration School

Johns Hopkins’ Department of Art as Applied to Medicine trained illustrators in scientific illustration to help practitioners understand the workings of the human body. Established in 1911 under the direction of Max Brödel (and teaching continuously ever since), it was the first program of its kind in the world. Brödel is world-renowned for his life-like renderings based on observation of surgeries and autopsies. He single-handedly created the profession, which led to the founding of other programs across the country and remains pivotal to medical education today. “Leave paper and pencil alone until the mind has grasped the meaning of the object,” Brödel said. “Medical illustration is not drawing a pretty picture. It’s not just knowing the science. It’s being able to take science and the art and combine them to communicate.”

—ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE MAX BRÖDEL ARCHIVES IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ART AS APPLIED TO MEDICINE, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE. USED WITH PERMISSION

23. Advances In Limb Lengthening

For years, the best method of treating limb length discrepancies was to use painful external fixators, metal devices that are attached to the bones. (Amputation was another possible solution.) Sinai Hospital physicians John Herzenberg and Shawn Standard innovated a better way. The two co-developed with another physician the Precice internal limb-lengthening nail. Introduced in 2012, the nail is a metal rod with a magnetic motor inside of it. Using an external remote control, the nail slowly lengthens the limb with less pain and scarring. As one patient stated, “Before, I had a limp in my walk; now I have a spring in my step.”

24. In the 1930s, Baltimore psychiatrist Dr. Jacob Conn developed the “play interview” (i.e., the use of dolls to act out scenarios and emotions) for the treatment of phobia in children still widely used today.

25. Identifiying HIV

Dr. Robert Gallo was in an NIH lab researching tumor cell biology when, in 1975, he was the first person to identify a leukemia virus that caused cancer. This was the same era that AIDS was claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and Gallo's NIH work proved fortuitous in the fight against that disease. In 1984, Gallo and French virologist Luc Montagnier co-discovered that AIDS was caused by a virus, which they named human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It was a breakthrough in understanding the disease. In 1996, Gallo co-founded the Institute for Human Virology at UMB and went on to develop the HIV blood test to screen for the virus and therapies that have enabled those infected with HIV to live longer.

—COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

MARY ELIZABETH GARRETT

Mary Elizabeth Garrett, daughter of B & O Railroad tycoon John Work Garrett, was one of the wealthiest women in the U.S. and used her fortune to advance higher education for women. Between fundraising and personal donations, she and her friends (known as the “Friday Evening” group, inspired by their biweekly meetings at each other’s homes) raised nearly all the $500,000 needed for the opening of the financially strapped Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. But there were a few stipulations: They had to accept qualified women and the medical school should be a full graduate school whose applicants had to have a bachelor’s degree in science (which was not the norm at the time). After much consternation, the all-male founders agreed to the terms. When the school opened in 1893, three of the 18 students admitted were women—making it the first major medical school to do so. Thanks to her insistence, Garrett is sometimes called America’s greatest “coercive philanthropist.” William Osler, one of the school’s founding physicians, famously replied, “It was a pleasure to be bought.”

DORTHEA DIX

Dorothea Dix was a pioneering nurse and activist who was dedicated to improving conditions in jailhouses and asylums. Dix’s advocacy helped establish new institutions in the U.S. and Europe and led to widespread reform and changing perceptions at a time when people struggling with mental illness were housed alongside violent prisoners. After documenting the shocking conditions she observed in a Massachusetts prison in 1841, she spent four decades lobbying U.S. and Canadian legislators to establish humane asylums for the mentally ill.

Dix came to Maryland in 1852 to observe the state of affairs in its jails and almshouses, which is when she met Moses Sheppard. Although Sheppard did not take her up on her request that he fund a state asylum, she proved an enormous influence on him and his perception of treatment of the mentally ill, resulting in his ultimate decision to endow Sheppard Pratt. Dix was also instrumental in recruiting nurses for the Union army during the Civil War, appointing more than 3,000—or about 15 percent—of them. She was known for markedly improving care, even insisting that rebel soldiers get the same treatment as other soldiers. When there were shortages, she often obtained medical supplies, linens, and bedclothes through private sources and never took a single day off, working for four years straight through the war.

HORTENSE KAHN ELIASBERG

In the 1920s, rheumatic fever and tuberculosis were significant killers of children. In crowded, dirty cities like Baltimore, opportunities for respite were nil. In a world without antibiotics, ill children were often sent to convalesce somewhere with fresh air, good food, and rest in order to heal. Yet Baltimore had no such home. Enter Hortense Kahn Eliasberg. A resident of Reservoir Hill, Eliasberg graduated from Goucher College and Johns Hopkins University in an era when fewer than 40 percent of college degrees in the nation were awarded to women. While researching her thesis, Standards of Care for Convalescent Children, Eliasberg grew interested in respite care. At just 22 years old, the formidable Eliasberg got Dr. William Welch, chief physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Hygiene and Public Health, onboard and, leveraging her personal connections, funded the creation of Happy Hills Convalescent Home, which opened in 1922. Notably, children were admitted regardless of their family’s ability to pay. Today the home has evolved into Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital, a leader in pediatric care.

MARCIA CROCKER NOYES

When Noyes became the chief medical librarian of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of the State of Maryland (now the Maryland State Medical Society or, simply, MedChi) in 1896, it was at a time of robust growth for medicine and medical literature. Far from being a sleepy librarian stacking books, Noyes’ position was so demanding that she took up residence in the same building as the library, the “Faculty” building. According to MedChi, “At that time, librarians were expected to be on call 24/7. A physician could ring up at any time. . . . The physician would arrive shortly thereafter, consult the medical book, and hurry back to his ailing patient.”

Although not medically trained, Noyes learned under the tutelage of William Osler (of Johns Hopkins renown) and was by all accounts a dynamic leader. During her 50-year tenure she devised a new system of literature classification, served as the society’s executive secretary, and was the chief museum curator. The library collection grew from a few thousand volumes to 65,000. She also helped establish the Medical Library Association—where she was the first non-medical president—which continues to give an award in her honor. Noyes died the year of her 50th anniversary celebration, which was attended by more than 250 physicians. Her funeral was held in the Faculty building where she lived until her death and where staff and volunteers say her spirit still walks the halls to this day.

NELLIE LOUISE YOUNG

Dr. Nellie Louise Young was Maryland’s first Black female physician. After graduating from Howard University’s School of Medicine in 1930, she soon opened her obstetrics-gynecology practice above her father’s drugstore in West Baltimore. (Her father, Dr. Howard Young, was the state’s first Black pharmacist.) In 1938, Young opened a Planned Parenthood Clinic. In her 52 years of practice, she held numerous posts, including working as chief of obstetrics at Provident Hospital, serving as the women’s physician at the former Morgan State College, the girls’ physician at Frederick Douglass High (from which she had graduated in 1924, when it was known as the Colored High School), and staff physician at the Maryland Training School for Colored Girls. Young once said the “most wonderful thing in the world was to deliver a healthy baby, and to see the expression on the mother’s face and the father’s face.” She delivered thousands of babies before retiring in 1984.

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A Winning Formula

Angeline Leong — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 08:30:00 +0000

At 50, Deb Cohen began feeling constantly bloated and lethargic. A busy law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, the Fells Point resident had delayed her annual visit to the gynecologist. She just figured her body was changing because of menopause.

She was right about that, but didn’t know the half of it: Her symptoms were being caused by a 3.5-pound, 19-centimeter cyst, part of which was cancerous.

“The symptoms were there, I just had no clue,” Cohen says. “No one talks about menopause and what it will be like. My body was changing, and it never dawned on me that it was cancer.”

It was, in fact, Stage III ovarian cancer. So Cohen turned to what she had come to regard as her trusted team of doctors at The Weinberg Center for Women’s Health and Medicine at Mercy Medical Center, where she had been treated multiple times, beginning with the 2009 removal of a lump in her breast. To treat the cyst, she was referred to Neil B. Rosenshein, a nationally renowned ovarian cancer specialist and director emeritus of The Weinberg Center.

“I’ll never forget sitting there pre-surgery listening to him as he read the list of things that can go wrong, tears running down my face, thinking, ‘Okay, I’m signing my life away.’” But there was no one else she would trust more with a scalpel. In June 2014, Rosenshein successfully removed the cyst. “He’s an amazing man,” Cohen says.

Cohen remains close to him to this day, and continues to return to Mercy for her six-month checkups, even after moving to D.C. in 2015.

“I’m the luckiest unlucky person,” she says. “I had great health care, great doctors, and lived within a mile of Mercy—you don’t get any luckier than that.”

Mercy’s center does stand out, however, for blazing the trail.

The Mercy center on which she has relied is part of a historically recent health care trend of dedicated female-focused care—such women’s centers have popped up all over the country, and Baltimore now has more than half a dozen. But they raise the question, why not just go to Marcus Welby General Hospital? Because the need for such targeted care stems from biology.

“We have estrogen receptors on every organ in our body,” says Wen Shen, a gynecologist specializing in menopause medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. “And you’re trying to tell me a man’s body works the same?”

And, as in the case of Cohen at Mercy, Shen says the menopause transition is when a lot of medical conditions start kicking in—issues with heart health, bone health, and brain health.

“These are all related to the lack of ovarian hormones because of menopause,” says Shen. For instance, studies have shown that women suffering from severe hot flashes are more at risk for high blood pressure and heart disease.

“The whole list of every medical specialty you can think of, I can come up with an issue in that specialty that is post-reproductive related,” Shen says.

That’s why, building on the national trend, she’s spearheading the creation of a women’s health center at Hopkins that will focus on post-reproductive years, and looking for funding to make it a reality. “We need to be able to help women specifically. Men have been getting good advice and care, because all the research is based on them. Women have been sort of short-changed when it comes to a lot of their medical care.”

Mercy’s center does stand out, however, for blazing the trail: It’s celebrating its 25th anniversary, making it the oldest dedicated women’s health center in the region. It launched the center in 1994, during a period when hospitals around the country started turning to female patients as a niche in an increasingly competitive and tumultuous market. Mercy polled local women and took cues from the best women’s health centers across the country to develop its own version, eventually investing more than $40 million in the project with the goal of consolidating all the medical services in one location.

Other Baltimore-area medical centers pursued similar concepts, spawning more such women’s centers in the past 25 years (see below), but each boasts different strengths. However, a common motivation is to make health care one-stop shopping for women.

At Hopkins, oncologists have often referred patients to Shen to manage symptoms caused by radiation or chemotherapy. “Then I’ll find out that they have high risk for heart disease, that they have osteoporosis, and I refer them to specialists,” she says.

But that can mean a lot of appointments, often at different locations. And one trend doctors are seeing is that working women are developing some of the same attitudes toward wellness that men have always been blamed for—such as ignoring symptoms, procrastinating, and toughing it out because they’re too busy with work and family.

With the average age of menopause’s onset at 51 (and the average women’s lifespan at 81 years), menopause is hitting at a critical time—often at the high point in careers, when women are caring for their own families and sometimes their aging parents as well.

“Today’s woman is so overburdened it’s very hard for her to do all this,” says Shen of the many appointments required to get holistic care. That’s where a women’s center steps in.

“I’m the luckiest unlucky person . . . I lived within a mile of Mercy.”

“A multidisciplinary center is like a one-stop shop. At 9 a.m. you’re going to see the oncologist, at 10 a.m. the rheumatologist, at 11 a.m. the cardiologist,” Shen explains. “The vision is to make it really efficient for the patient to get the care that she needs. Because if she had to make all these appointments with different doctors located on different campuses, across different months, requiring repeated time off from work—that’s a challenge.”

Besides having different strengths, such health centers can also target different markets. As newer hospitals such as Greater Baltimore Medical Center and MedStar Good Samaritan followed their patients to the suburbs, Mercy doubled down on its urban location on St. Paul Place, hoping to capitalize on the hundreds of thousands of nearby commuters, more than half of which are women.

The move attracted Rosenshein from The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Rosenshein opened the center at Mercy and remains its director emeritus.

The Weinberg Center’s offerings, which include breast care, gynecology, plastic and reconstructive surgery, mammography, and radiation oncology, were originally scattered throughout the Mercy campus. In 2003, the hospital finally brought all the services together under one roof as Mercy cut the ribbon on a state-of-the-art, six-floor facility, made possible in part by a $10-million gift from The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation.

Rosenshein echoes that housing all the services together allows The Weinberg Center to provide patients with holistic care. “Most of the issues we have are interrelated,” he says. “People who have ovarian cancer are at more risk for breast cancer. People who have both have genetic issues that need to be addressed.”

The refocusing has been more than a business decision for the hospital: It goes back to the mission of its founders, the Sisters of Mercy, who opened a refuge for homeless and abused women in Dublin in 1827.

This year, The Weinberg Center hit several milestones, including the 5,000th da Vinci robotic surgery performed by gynecologic surgeon Dwight D. Im, medical director of the Neil B. Rosenshein M.D. Institute for Gynecologic Care at Mercy.

By chance, Deb Cohen’s one-year checkup with Rosenshein was scheduled on the exact anniversary of her surgery. So she decided to celebrate. “I stopped to pick up a bottle of champagne for my anniversary, and I picked him up one, too,” she recalls. “I said, ‘We’re going to be celebrating tonight. I don’t care what your family celebrates, but you should, too.’”

Now, she’s sharing her story to encourage other women to listen to their bodies. “I knew three or four women who [also] got this, one who died from this,” Cohen says. “I look around and think, ‘God, I was lucky.’”

Several other hospitals in the metro area have created women-centric health centers. Here’s the short list:

→ LifeBridge Sinai Hospital of Baltimore

2401 W. Belvedere Ave.

Part of LifeBridge Health, Sinai Hospital is home to the Louis and Henrietta Blaustein Women’s Health Center. Opened in 2005, this 24,930-square-foot center consolidated women and infant services and includes 32 labor, delivery, and recovery rooms, two operating rooms, three triage rooms, three post-anesthesia units, and three high-risk/extended stay rooms.

Best known for: Serving the needs of women during labor and after delivery, the women’s health center also houses the Institute for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, which offers prenatal testing and counseling for high-risk pregnancies, diabetes, and genetic problems. The center also houses the Jennifer Gandel Kachura Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, a level III facility for newborns needing specialized care; and nutritional counseling, exercise courses, and other educational resources.

→ LifeBridge Northwest Hospital

5401 Old Court Rd., Randallstown

Equipped with the most up-to-date technology, Northwest Hospital’s Herman & Walter Samuelson Breast Care Center provides women with advanced screening and treatment options for holistic breast health in a spa-like atmosphere. Launched in 2010, the hospital’s Women’s Wellness Center offers obstetric and gynecological services to women alongside general health and wellness resources.

Best known for: One of Northwest Hospital’s centers of excellence, the Samuelson Breast Care Center employs dedicated breast-specialized experts including a radiologist, surgeon, and mammography technicians.

→ The Johns Hopkins Hospital

600 N. Wolfe St. and other locations

Obstetric and gynecological care at Johns Hopkins dates back to 1889, when Howard Kelly founded the department. Today, the center is well-respected in a wide range of areas, from family planning to fetal therapy and gynecologic cancers.

Best known for: Today, The Johns Hopkins Hospital is known for its Endometriosis Center, providing women with cutting-edge solutions for individualized endometriosis care, including minimally invasive and robotic surgery techniques to remove endometrial lesions while maintaining fertility. To treat heart disease, which is the No. 1 killer of women, and which often has different symptoms than those found in men, Hopkins is home to the Women’s Cardiovascular Health Center at the Bayview campus and at Johns Hopkins Cardiology in Columbia. It combines advanced medical treatment with a whole-body approach to preventing and managing heart disease, using a multidisciplinary team of experienced cardiologists with fitness, nutrition, and mental health experts.

→ MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center

9000 Franklin Square Dr.

Women’s Health Services at Franklin Square Medical Center offers a full range of obstetric and gynecologic care, staffed with attending and resident obstetrician/gynecologists, sub-specialists in maternal-fetal medicine, nurse midwives, women’s health nurse practitioners, ultrasound technologists, gene counselors, social workers, and registered nurses specializing in women’s health.

Best known for: Delivering more than 700 babies each year, the center specializes in high-risk pregnancy care for mothers and babies with medical problems and other complications. The center offers patients the latest technology and treatment options for regularly scheduled well-women appointments, as well as acute care, contraception, management of Pap smear abnormalities, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, medical and surgical management of abnormal bleeding, including minimally invasive options, and mid-life and menopausal symptom management.

→ University of Maryland Baltimore Washington Medical Center

301 Hospital Dr., Glen Burnie

Women’s Services at the Baltimore Washington Medical Center include pediatric care, treatment for a wide range of women’s health issues, and labor and delivery. Its state-of-the-art surgical suite offers da Vinci Robot-assisted, laparoscopic procedures for abdominal or vaginal hysterectomies.

Best known for: The Pascal Women’s Center offers spacious labor, delivery, and recovery rooms with whirlpool tubs, private postpartum patient rooms, and dedicated operating rooms for Cesarean births. The on-site Center for Advanced Fetal Care office, Neonatal Special Care Unit, and childbirth education classes round out resources for growing families.

→ Greater Baltimore Medical Center

6701 N. Charles St., Towson

GBMC provides a full spectrum of women’s health services, including labor and delivery, obstetrics, and gynecology, on the main campus as well as throughout the community, and a level III-B Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Best known for: For women needing close monitoring during pregnancy, the 12-bed Mangione High Risk OB unit, adjacent to the delivery suite, provides specialized maternal-fetal care. It’s one of the only in the region that consolidates all prenatal services, inpatient care, and antepartum testing in one location to promote a seamless continuum of care. Its Division of Urogynecology and Reconstructive Pelvic Surgery includes doctors who are specially trained to diagnose and treat disorders of the pelvic floor. The Uterine Fibroid Center at GBMC is one of only a few centers in Maryland that provides a comprehensive approach to treating fibroids, a condition that affects 77 percent of women.

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Virtual Reality Used in Area Hospitals, Nonprofits

Michelle Evans — Mon, 22 May 2017 08:30:00 +0000

Judging from Back to the Future and The Jetsons, the year 2017 would be filled with flying cars, hover boards, and teleportation docks. Much to our disappointment, we’re not quite there yet. But tech companies like Mindgrub Technologies are working towards making those dreams a reality—virtual reality to be exact.

The Locust Point company, under the leadership of president and CEO Todd Marks, has made it possible for local organizations like Mercy Medical Center, Peabody Conservatory, and Ulman Cancer Fund to revolutionize experiences for both consumers and employees. Using augmented reality, mobile gaming, and wearable technology, Mindgrub has been able to bring intangible ideas to life.

“A lot of the things we are working on are real world experiences,” Marks says. “Virtual and augmented reality can simulate anything.”

So when Mercy was looking for new ways to train its nurses, it was only natural that the hospital turned to Mindgrub for help. With teaching tools and content from the nursing department and the gaming software, the two organizations were able to create an educational game called Epic Quest.

Trainees have to travel through the World of Salus—healthcare in Latin—to complete a series of questions that test their knowledge on various aspects of medicine, like infection control and pain management.

“Using the game cut down on the length of the orientation,” says Stacey Brull Sr., director of research, education, and informatics at Mercy. “What used to take three days, now only takes one.”

Mercy discovered the nurses that completed the training using Epic Quest game retained more information than those completing traditional training, like PowerPoint presentations and classroom instruction.

In addition, Mindgrub helped improve Mercy’s 3D crash-cart computer training. In the newest version, virtual reality simulates a crisis, forcing trainees to react in real time.

“You’re actually immersed in the emergency room, so that as the crisis is happening, you are able to react and use the cart in real time,” Marks says. “It creates muscle memory.”

The program is still in the testing phase, but Brull hopes that it will be at Mercy very soon.

“I’ve never experienced anything like it. You have to physically reach for the drawer and pull it open,” she says. “Not only will this elevate our training, but it’s just very cool.”

When Mindgrub works with a client like Mercy to develop virtual or augmented reality programming, the entire process—from discovery to deployment—can range anywhere from six weeks to a year depending on the scope.

Recently, the company has also worked with the Ulman Cancer Fund, known for its fundraising runs and bike rides. Mindgrub developed a virtual reality headset attached to a stationary bike that simulates a cycle ride through the city, encouraging people to participate.

And prospective students of the Peabody Conservatory can now see a 3D video of the orchestra to simulate what it would be like to sit in the middle of a real rehearsal.

“Since its inception, VR has been commonly seen as an outlet for leisure and exploring new gaming terrains,” Marks says. “But now it’s becoming more than entertainment; it is an asset to companies, boosting productivity, education, and research and development.”

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Baby on Board

Jess Mayhugh — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 08:30:00 +0000

When I discovered I was pregnant, I assumed that my body would suffer, but certainly not my mind. Not this brain, that averages a book a week and can solve an easy crossword puzzle, and has never lost to my husband in Scattergories. (He doesn’t think that’s worth bragging about, either.) But then, there I was, three months pregnant, blinking at baristas when I couldn’t remember “decaf iced Americano, please” and dreading deadlines because whatever part of me used to write with ease had rededicated itself to the creation of life.

Finding out that the brain starts to jam up even before the kid is out was . . . alarming. And responsible, in part, for why it took me so long to figure out how to navigate being a pregnant lady in this city. My millenial sensibilities assumed some fecund hipster enclave would spot my bump at a coffee shop and welcome me into their group. They’d know all the best studios for pregnancy yoga and have a shared Google doc with thoughts on doulas vs.midwives, Lamaze vs. All the Drugs, and which organic vitamin shops carried prenatal vitamins with DHA.

If they’re out there, they never found me.

And so I had to create my own little network to figure things out. I even had to pick up the phone and call a few places. It turns out that most people love pregnant ladies, and were happy to help. This came as a surprise to me because I generally don’t like people—much less two people in one—but, fortunately, I’m the minority.

Here are a few things I’ve learned in my 21 weeks of gestation, either from asking people who know better, or from assuming I know best and then being shocked when I’m proved wrong.

Some yoga studios have pregnancy yoga, and some say they do on their sites, but actually do not. For us city gals, Charm City Yoga has it on Wednesday nights and Sunday afternoons in Midtown, and Thursdays after work in Fells Point. Classes are also offered in the Towson, Pikesville, and Severna Park studios, but I’m not sure I love my kid enough yet to fight 97 traffic to make it down there.

I learned from the gal at Whole Foods and from my mother-in-law that you want to look for vitamins with the least extra ingredients, and that DHA is a supplement not often found in traditional prenatals, so you have to take it separately. Try Rainbow Light brand from the Vitamin Shoppe in Canton, and Spectrum DHA from Whole Foods. I also learned from my own gag reflex that I was not built to swallow pills the size of June bugs, so I crush mine up and eat it with low fat Greek yogurt. Except I really eat them with ice cream.

I’ve learned that 99-percent of hospitals offer birth classes where you and your partner can go sit in horror in the name of education and self-advocacy. Given its proximity to our home and its en-suite hot tub situation, we’re going to Mercy for the blessed event, so it made sense to also take our birth classes there. If you’re planning a home birth or want a more alternative option, check out Informed Birth Choices in Catonsville. Apparently these living nightmares are super popular, so ask your doctor early on when and where you should sign up and if the instructors provide fainting couches or if you should bring your own.

These classes are also a good opportunity to meet other expectant parents. This is important, because you need pregnant friends. Non-pregnants quickly grow weary of talking stretch-mark cream and exhaustion, but pregnant people will be delighted to hear, again, about how hormonal you felt yesterday. I assumed I’d make friends at yoga, but it turns out it’s more about fishtail-braided top knots and concentrating on goddess pose and less about forming a sisterhood of traveling yoga pants. So get to know your hospital, find out what’s going to come out of you, and then make some buddies.

And finally, so far, I’ve learned that a pregnant lady without a snack is like a Real Housewives reunion episode: Someone is getting slapped. Always, always have something within arm’s reach to eat. I’ve found that apples and bananas fit nicely in my purse, and bananas get bonus points for coming in their own adorably speckled case. The day will come when you leave the house without a snack, and that will be the day you run out of gas in a field or get stuck in a meeting with your boss that won’t end. Your blood sugar levels will plummet, and you’ll shrivel up to conserve energy while relying on your memory of food to float you until your next meal.

Just pack a damn snack. It’s good practice for when that person you’re growing becomes a toddler, anyway.

Megan Isennock is a freelance writer and content producer for Shine Creative. Her baby boy is due in October.

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They’re Heart Smart Now

Jess Mayhugh — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 09:00:00 +0000

Ask a cardiologist about preventing and treating heart disease, and chances are, within the first few seconds, he or she will hit you with this key fact: Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women in the United States, more deadly than all cancers combined.

And while men experience heart disease at a higher rate than women, they’re also more likely to survive a heart attack or sudden cardiac arrest. Why? Because women develop microvascular heart disease more frequently than men, which is often not picked up by diagnostic procedures. As a result, the disease process often is further along when they finally get treatment.

“Maybe there is enough delay from diagnosis to treatment that it leads to poorer outcomes,” says Mercy Medical Center cardiologist Monica Aggarwal.

There is good news, though, especially when it comes to coronary artery disease (CAD), the most common cause of heart attack and sudden cardiac arrest. CAD can be detected with proper testing and often does produce symptoms, which, if accurately diagnosed, can lead to effective interventions, from lifestyle changes and medicines to surgical procedures.

Though genetics are one risk factor for CAD, reducing other risk factors like obesity, diabetes, inactivity, smoking, high blood-pressure, and high cholesterol can help.

Whatever the cause, when heart problems do arise, knowing the symptoms—and ensuring they’re taken seriously—is crucial, as is having access to life-saving techniques, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and devices such as an automated external defibrillator (AED).

To mark American Heart Month, we tracked down four Baltimore women who suffered heart disease at relatively young ages, and talked to them about how they survived it—and how it changed their lives.

Heart Smarts For Women

If you think heart disease confines itself to men, the overweight, smokers, or the elderly, think again. Those may be risk factors for heart disease, but even young women especially those who combine smoking and birth-control-pill use—and the seemingly fit may be at risk, warns the American Heart Association. In fact, some 90 percent of women have at least one heart disease risk factor, the AHA estimates.

“It was Saturday before the doctors said they were confident I was going to live.”

Ginnie Gick

Ginnie Gick thought she was in reasonably good health before the May 2010 morning when she collapsed with a sudden cardiac arrest. Though she’d been diagnosed with a cardiac arrhythmia years earlier and prescribed a low-dose beta blocker, it had rarely caused her problems and was far from her mind that Thursday morning as she prepared breakfast for her two boys, then ages 5 and 9.

“I literally dropped dead in my kitchen,” says Gick, now 48. Her then 11-year-old daughter had already left for school but her sons raced upstairs to summon their dad, who called 911 and began chest compressions. Gick can recall nothing of the day, but she knows that by the time an ambulance crew got her to Howard County General Hospital, they’d shocked her heart back into “some semblance of a rhythm,” and that she was then quickly flown to The Johns Hopkins Hospital. There, doctors put her in a medically induced coma and began therapeutic hypothermia, lowing her core body temperature in an attempt to prevent damage to her brain. “It was Saturday before the doctors said they were confident I was going to live,” says Gick.

Today, Gick has some memory issues and a mild tremor in her hand, “but if that’s the worst, I’ll take it,” she says.

The cause of Glick’s cardiac arrest wasn’t clear until another tragedy struck: Her brother died of a sudden cardiac arrest in 2012. Researchers at Hopkins looking at both siblings’ DNA found that they share a genetic mutation that may be to blame.

Further testing has revealed several family members—including two of her children—with the mutation, information that will help them take preventive measures. The experience “has kind of led me on this major life quest to make sure everybody knows CPR, and that there are as many AEDs as possible in the world,” says Gick, who worked with the American Heart Association in 2014 to help pass Breanna’s Law, which requires high-school students to learn CPR.

“I think I’ve adjusted well to the few changes I needed to make. I’m in control now.”

Linda Hamper

Linda Hamper was well aware of her family’s history of heart disease, so in 2008, when her primary-care physician recommended a test to determine her coronary calcium score, she obeyed. “It came back positive, but not a high positive,” says 62-year-old Hamper, who wasn’t quite as good about following her GP’s recommendation to see a cardiologist.

“I wasn’t having symptoms,” she says. “So I really didn’t think it was, like, all that important.” Two years later, a second primary-care physician nudged her toward a cardiologist once again, but Hamper, a bookkeeper and office manager, was exercising several times a week and felt mostly healthy. After exercise, “I was a little winded but I thought, ‘Who wouldn’t be winded?’” she says, recalling that she pinned her symptoms on a recurrence of asthma, even though her asthma had been in check for 15 years.

It wasn’t until 2014 that Hamper finally took her doctor’s advice and sought out a cardiologist—Monica Aggarwal of Mercy Medical Center. “She advised a stress test, and the stress test was not good,” says Hamper. A nuclear stress test was inconclusive, but Aggarwal had lingering concerns and wanted to dig deeper. The next test, a CT angiogram, showed the cause of the symptoms: A greater than 75 percent blockage in the left anterior descending artery.

With a stent in place and a cardiac rehabilitation program under her belt, Hamper says she no longer feels winded when exercising. Always a fairly healthy eater, Hamper has eliminated dairy, red meat, and boosted her intake of fruits and vegetables, with an eye toward reducing inflammation.

“This is the diet Dr. Aggarwal believes is going to lessen the chances of anything happening again,” she says. “I think I’ve adjusted well to the few changes I needed to make. I’m in control now.”

“We tend to be a lot more open about health issues now.”

Tonya Mason

When then-29-year-old nurse Tonya Mason woke up with a sore left arm one morning in 2012, she didn’t think much of it. It could be the sign of a heart attack, she knew, but as she went about her day, running errands and gardening, Mason pushed aside the idea, dismissing it as unlikely at her age.

“I was thinking, ‘There’s no way that’s what’s going on with me,’” says Mason, who had suffered from diabetes since age 7 but was otherwise healthy, including normal cholesterol and blood-pressure levels. When she began to feel pain just beneath her ribs, “I chalked it up to maybe gallbladder or maybe I was coming down with something,” she says. She took an aspirin, “just for good measure,” but it wasn’t until bedtime, when she laid down and felt short of breath, that Mason realized she might have a serious problem.

At Upper Chesapeake Medical Center, a normal EKG and vital signs seem to point away from heart attack, but when her blood work returned, things quickly took a scary turn. “They put me in a glass room with sliding doors, and usually that’s a bad sign,” says Mason, whose cardiac enzymes were elevated. A cardiac ultrasound soon confirmed Mason was in the midst of a heart attack and she was whisked to LifeBridge Health Cardiovascular Institute, where interventional cardiologist Ali Trabrizchi found a 100 percent blockage in one artery and an 80 percent blockage in another.

With two stents in place, Mason has fully recovered. Her diabetes and genetics—Mason’s family has a strong history of heart disease—likely contributed to her heart problems. And while her family hadn’t talked much about their risk for heart disease in the past, “We do talk about it now,” says Mason. “We tend to be a lot more open about health issues now.”

“I thought, ‘I’m just really out of shape.’”

Denise McDonnell

Fifty-nine-year-old Denise McDonnell never had a problem climbing the three flights of stairs in her townhome. That is until 2012, when she began to feel short of breath tackling the stairs, a nuisance she brushed aside as a normal part of aging. On a trip to Colorado, when she found herself so breathless and fatigued that she had to cut short a hike, she wondered if the cause could be smoke from nearby wildfires or the few extra pounds she was carrying. “I thought, ‘I’m just really out of shape,’” she recalls.

And she chalked up the fatigue and feeling of tightness across her back to an intense work project and the heavy bag she lugged to the train every day. Though McDonnell’s mother had a history of angina, McDonnell symptoms were nothing like having “an elephant on the chest.”

Still, McDonnell was concerned enough to check in with her primary-care physician, who ordered an electrocardiogram (EKG) and, suspecting asthma, referred her to a pulmonologist. But it was nearly six weeks after the symptoms first started—and a trip to Ireland—before McDonnell finally saw a cardiologist. By then, she’d been feeling increasingly exhausted and unwell. And while her resting EKG had been normal, five minutes into a stress test, “They stopped me and said it’s irregular,” says McDonnell, who underwent cardiac catheterization that showed two 90-plus percent blockages requiring two stents in the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD).

Her experience was, not surprisingly, a wake-up call. Two years later, she’s committed to eating well and exercising and is more alert to potential signs of heart problems. Looking back, McDonnell, a pharmacist who works in management at a health-insurance company, says dismissing symptoms, as she knows she did, isn’t uncommon among women. “You think it’s something else,” she says.

“I’m a very hyperactive person. I never sit still.”

Helen Robinson

“I’m a very hyperactive person. I never sit still,” says 60-year-old Helen Robinson, who, in the fall of 2014, suddenly found something was slowing her down.

Five years earlier, sharp chest pains had sent Robinson to the emergency room, where she was diagnosed with acid reflux disease and sent home. This time, though, Robinson had no such pain, but was increasingly finding herself short of breath. It could be the sign of a heart attack, she knew, but “I pushed it off to the side and said, ‘This is just my acid acting up.’”

Even when her left arm began to ache, Robinson dulled the pain with over-the-counter medicine and continued to work the night shift at H&S Bakery. Then one night, still short of breath and nursing a sore arm, “I felt like someone’s hand was around my heart and was squeezing,” she recalls. Robinson finished her shift, “popped an aspirin” and headed to bed. It wasn’t until the next day that she realized she was fooling herself. “I knew it wasn’t acid,” she says. Even though she wasn’t in terrible pain, “I knew it was a probably a heart attack.”

Although active and not overweight, Robinson had high cholesterol, a less-than-stellar diet, and a medical history in her family—her mother had died of a heart attack at age 52.

At Mercy Medical Center, she was admitted and told her blood work showed elevated cardiac enzyme levels, suggesting heart damage. With that, she was off to Medstar Union Memorial Hospital, where cardiac catheterization showed a 99 percent blockage in her coronary artery. Once a stent was in place, “They took me back to my room and I’ve been up and running ever since.”

Some tips from the experts on how to ensure
early treatment and prevention of heart disease:

Know the risk factors: For heart disease, they include age, and genetics (men also have greater risk), tobacco use, high cholesterol, high blood-pressure, inactivity, obesity and being overweight, and diabetes. Everyone should work to reduce controllable risk factors, starting from a young age.

Know the symptoms: Chest pain, squeezing or fullness in the chest; pain in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw, or stomach; shortness of breath; fatigue; palpitations; dizziness or lightheadedness.

Heed the symptoms: Women in particular sometimes put off seeking help if their symptoms aren’t debilitating or don’t present as classic chest pain. But anyone waiting to see a cardiologist “strictly based on having or not having chest pain . . . will miss diagnosing heart disease early in its course,” says Ali Tabrizchi, an interventional cardiologist at LifeBridge Health Cardiovascular Institute.

Get screened: Since the hallmarks of heart disease can start accruing in childhood, everyone should have at least one physical in their early 20s to help assess their risk. Also, high blood-pressure and high cholesterol are asymptomatic, so it’s important to have regular checkups.

Get your score: University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center cardiologist Stephen Pollock strongly recommends a cardiac calcium score for women over the age of 50, women and men over the age of 45, or anyone with multiple risk factors. The inexpensive test involves a CT scan that identifies the early presence of coronary heart disease (CHD) and can lead to early treatment.

Change your life: Regular exercise and a healthy diet are vital for good heart health (all the better if you start early in life). Exercise five to seven days a week, if possible, and eat a diet high in fresh fruits, beans, and vegetables and low in red meat and processed foods.

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