The Johns Hopkins Hospital – 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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Henrietta Lacks Mural Takes Shape

Gabriella Souza — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 12:31:00 +0000

The story of Henrietta Lacks has resonated with people around the world—through an award-winning book by author Rebecca Skloot and most recently, through a movie produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey that premieres this Sunday on HBO.

Now, that story will be immortalized further through a mural that Lacks’ granddaughter, Jeri Lacks Whye, and a Philadelphia-based art studio are working together to bring to life. They’ve also enlisted The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and see the process of creating the mural as a way to start conversations about the tensions between the storied medical institution and the surrounding community.

“Jeri always says, ‘I just want people to know my grandma,’” says Lizzie Kripke, co-principal artist at Meg Saligman Studio. “Her grandmother is someone who’s a part of all of us now, in a literal way if we’ve had a polio vaccine.”

On January 29, 1951, Hopkins doctors took a biopsy from Henrietta Lacks—wife of a Bethlehem Steel worker—who had an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Though she passed away eight months later, the tissue, used by researchers without her consent, went on to establish the cell line HeLa—the first immortal human cells ever grown in a culture, which have been invaluable to medicine ever since.

“There’s a lot of beauty in the science and in her life and family, along with the darker side,” Kripke says. “If we can cast things in a positive light, and acknowledge what’s gone wrong but also celebrate what’s gone right, I think that’s a different way to present this.”

She and the Lacks family are still deciding the site for the mural, and Kripke expects that the bulk of the work will take place next year.

“We’ll feature Henrietta Lacks, but it’s not going to be just a picture that memorializes her,” she says. “It’s going to pull lots of elements from the area as well as her life and story.”

The process of designing the mural will include getting Henrietta Lacks’ family, community members, and Hopkins doctors and officials in the same room for discussion.

“We can’t overstate what the art will do, as this story touches on so many interconnected issues,” Kripke says. “But I do think art is effective in getting the ball rolling and shifting culture in one way or another.”

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Book Reviews: January 2016

Jess Mayhugh — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 10:08:00 +0000

Showdown
Wil Haygood (Alfred A. Knopf)

You could argue that Martin Luther King Jr. may have been the civil-rights movement’s spiritual compass, but Thurgood Marshall was its driving force. As the attorney behind the epic Brown vs. Board of Education case, which desegregated public schools, and countless other legal victories, Marshall, a Baltimore native, paved the way for more equal standing between blacks and whites. But it was his 1967 Supreme Court nomination, Haygood writes, that shook the country to its core. The ensuing five days of confirmation hearings—the longest of any nominee at that point—forced Congress, and the Americans watching, to admit painful truths about race’s role in our history. Haygood—a Washington, D.C.-based writer who wrote the article that was the basis for the 2013 film The Butler—expertly weaves narrative from the hearings with background details on those influencing the proceedings. Particularly eye-opening—and infuriating—is a chapter that delves into the lynching carried out by then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman James Eastland’s father. Showdown leaves you with a deeper understanding of this titan of American history, and all it took for him to succeed.

See our interview with writer Wil Haygood.

It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful
Lia Purpura (Penguin Poets)

Each of Lia Purpura’s verses reads like a spontaneous gem, almost as if she has been struck with a moment of inspiration during everyday life and has paused to scribble down her thoughts. But don’t think that makes her poems any less profound. In short stanzas that are absent of flowery language and dramatic metaphors, Purpura—writer in residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review—provides poignant insight into our existence, and all its mysteries and uncontrollable circumstances. Take “Regret,” where she envisions the feeling as a place. “It was expensive there / once, very costly, / but not / until now.” In “Desire,” she writes, “It’s not enough, / but it is, because / too much / would topple / all I could hold.” This collection feels as if each verse should be savored, then contemplated, and her words will have you musing on their greater meanings long after reading.

Alpha Docs: The Making of a Cardiologist
Daniel Muñoz, M.D., and James M. Dale (Random House)

We’ve all wondered about the high-stakes environment of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, where talented, young physicians are put through their paces, determining what area of medicine they will pursue—and if they are qualified, talented, and persistent enough to stay the course. We get an intriguing inside view of the pressure, sleepless nights, and beeping pagers through the story of Daniel Muñoz, once a resident in internal medicine and later a cardiology fellow at Hopkins, who is now an attending cardiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN. We journey with him through his rotations and watch him grow, both as a doctor and as a person who is determined, he writes, not to develop an “elitist pride” that can come with the stress of the environment. One of the book’s most compelling passages shows how Muñoz learns to tell a woman that her husband should be taken off life support. This is where his story is most effective—showing the human impact of this challenging work.

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Top Doctors: Beat Generation

Jess Mayhugh — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 10:00:00 +0000

There’s a modest paper sign slapped on a basement door in The Johns Hopkins Hospital’s gleaming Sheikh Zayed Tower that alerts all passers-by: “New Artificial Heart Being Developed Behind These Doors.”

Knock on the door, and Jacopo Biasetti, a bearded 31-year-old postdoctoral student from San Remo, Italy, will likely answer. The room, about the size of a storage closet, holds a table, and, as of early fall, about a dozen tall cylinders of argon and nitrogen gas, remnants from the days when the room served as, well, a storage closet. On a table, there’s a high-speed, high-sensitivity video camera—resembling the size and shape of a small toaster—focused on a vial of plasma and hooked up to a computer. The boxy camera, a bunch of optical filters, and the vial rest on a polished stainless-steel stand that Biasetti and a Ph.D. student fabricated to hold and focus the contraption. It may not look like much, but the device allows him to observe on the computer screen a key blood protein interacting with platelets and other blood-related phenomenon in real time, which researchers have “lit up” with a special fluorescent material in unprecedented, high-definition detail.

“Right now, we have the capabilities to do something that no other group is able to do,” he says in a thick Italian accent, “even though we are in a small room with gas tanks.”

Welcome to the humble yet promising beginnings of the Johns Hopkins Heart Initiative, a 10-year, $100 million-plus program to build the world’s first permanent, totally artificial heart. The multidisciplinary effort involves researchers from across Hopkins’ schools of medicine, engineering, and its Applied Physics Laboratory, all concentrating on a single goal: “It’s our Manhattan Project, our lunar landing project,” says Dr. Duke Cameron, Hopkins’ chief of cardiac surgery and the man behind the idea. “It’s the same kind of model.”

If it seems as if we’ve already cracked this nut, we haven’t. Not by a long shot.

A traditional artificial heart, the kind Hopkins’ docs hope to render irrelevant.

More than 30 years ago, Dr. William DeVries implanted the world’s first artificial heart in a Seattle dentist named Barney Clark, who lived for 112 days on the device, known as the Jarvik 7. Since then, scientists have cloned sheep, invented the Internet, and perfected liposuction, but they still haven’t created an artificial heart that will keep someone alive for more than several months. Currently, only one totally artificial heart is approved by the federal government for use in patients, but it has proven to be effective for only up to 18 months.

So what’s the holdup?

To get an idea of what researchers are up against, try this little exercise: Do a pushup. Now two. Now keep at it for an hour or two. Tough, eh? Your heart essentially does the same thing all day and all night—35 million times a year-—for your entire life. How would you ever power such a thing? Battery technology has come a long way in recent years, but not that long a way.

Now think about how your heart speeds up when you stand up, or share a kiss, or watch a scary movie. How do you tell a mechanical heart to do the same? None of the current crop of artificial hearts or prototypes possess a true brain-heart connection.

Enter Duke Cameron. At 63 years old, he’s the old man of the cardiology department, a renowned specialist in surgically repairing problems with the aorta. In the middle of our interview in his office, he gets a text, excuses himself, and, like Superman, changes out of his shirt and tie into blue hospital scrubs, runs down to the OR, and bolts back 10 minutes later. He also manages to travel to places like Cuba, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to perform life-saving heart surgeries free of charge on kids and adults. In other words, he’s the kind of guy you’d want opening up your chest.

“He probably asks Questions that nobody had ever thought of.”

Cameron says the idea for the heart initiative came to him from DeVries himself, who visited Hopkins in 2007 to give a talk. After the program, the two surgeons started chatting and Cameron asked him why he thought there hadn’t been significant progress in artificial heart technology. “He said to me—tongue-in-cheek—‘I guess we haven’t had the right people working on this project.’ I took it to mean that this was an opportunity for Hopkins.”

Cameron batted around the idea with colleagues for the next several years, and when he became chief of cardiac surgery in 2010, he made it one of his goals. DeVries came back to campus in February 2014 to officially kick things off.

“We’ve had mechanical hearts for 30 years, but they all have significant liabilities, limitations to how long they can be in place,” says Cameron’s colleague Gordon Tomaselli, chief of cardiology, who has been involved with the project from its start. “What we need is a paradigm-shifting change in technology. We thought this would be an opportunity to bring the best and brightest that Hopkins has from medicine, engineering, and the Applied Physics Lab to attack the problem.”

“Essentially, we’re crowdsourcing it to some of the smartest people in the world,” Cameron says.

In fall of 2013 , as part of his efforts to drum up support, Cameron hosted an educational and exploratory meeting at Hopkins’ Homewood campus. In the room were a dozen researchers from the schools of medicine and engineering. He gave a 10-minute talk about heart failure, and spoke of how hundreds of thousands of people are diagnosed annually with conditions that would benefit from new hearts, but because of a shortage of viable organs, only 2,000 to 2,500 transplants take place each year. (More than 4,200 patients, most suffering from end-stage heart failure, are currently on the national heart-transplant waiting list.) He spoke about Barney Clark, the current state of artificial hearts, and what the challenges were. Then he took questions.

An engineer by the name of Joe Katz spoke up first. “So, if we’re going to design a replacement heart, does it have to be in the center of your chest or can it be many places around the body?”

Huh? The doctors glanced at each other around the room.

“What I mean is, can it be several pumps, distributed around the body, working together, like you’d find on an airplane?”

“I was blown away,” says Cameron. “I thought to myself, ‘Thousands of people have worked on this problem, but I wonder if Joe was the first to ask that question.’ I thought, ‘This is a guy we’re really going to enjoy working with because he probably asks questions that nobody had ever thought of.’”

Joe Katz, 62, is a native of Tel Aviv and a veteran of the Israeli army. He has spent nearly 28 years at Hopkins studying fluid mechanics, testing flows within turbines, propellers, and parts of jet engines for government agencies and industry, becoming one of the world’s top authorities on pumps in the process. When it came time to choose the engineering lead for the project, Katz was the obvious choice: After all, what is the heart but a complex pump?

With his receding hairline and bushy mustache, he’s a dead ringer for Bill Macy, the actor who played Bea Arthur’s husband on Maude. But Katz is way smarter.

“I’ve met a lot of intelligent people, but he’s one of a kind,” says Biasetti. “He drains your energy, your entire body. He never stops. You give him a problem and he keeps going until he either hits the wall or finds a possible solution. The conversation can go on for hours and hours. He goes on thinking and thinking until he finds something that satisfies him, and you’re there trying to keep up. It’s painful, but it’s a beautiful thing talking to him.”

In the fall of 2013, Katz knew nothing about the cardiovascular system. So he set out on a journey to gather as much information as he could, picking the brains of colleagues in engineering, and meeting with cardiologists at the hospital. He sat in on open-heart surgeries and spoke with patients who use heart-assist devices, the “bridge” therapy that helps keep patients alive while they wait for a transplant heart. Dick Cheney was hooked up to one briefly in 2010, while waiting for his own transplant. As Katz discovered, the devices, called left-ventricle assist devices, or LVADs, are awkward affairs. They require bulky external power sources and infection is common where tubes enter the body. Even cardiologists aren’t fans.

“They are crude devices,” admits Cameron. “Many are kind of big, noisy, ugly things. If Apple were designing an artificial heart or an LVAD, they would look a lot different.”

Most significantly, they tend to cause thrombosis when blood clots form in the pump as well as the rupture of red blood cells, thanks to the device’s manmade materials and the rapid speeds at which the pumps must run. These failings result in strokes and other complications—big problems in artificial hearts, too.

Dr. Duke Cameron, Johns Hopkins’ chief of cardiac surgery and leader of the Hopkins Heart Initiative.

So Katz realized his first order of business was to discover a way for the Hopkins Heart not to damage the blood. He and Biasetti teamed up with radiologist Assaf Gilad and hematologist Thomas Kickler, an expert in coagulation, to figure out a way to adapt the tools Katz had been using to analyze pumps for submarines and jet engines to something a fraction the size—which is exactly what Biasetti has done with his experiment. The plan was for researchers to replace the vial of plasma with a transparent LVAD so they would be able to observe blood as it flows through it and witness, on a cellular level, where the damage is occurring within. It’s basic research that the heart-assist pump manufacturers have not yet been able to perform.

For now, these experiments are being funded in part by $1 million raised so far in private donations—sourced from Cameron’s appreciative patients and some alumni from the School of Engineering. From this pot, the university has handed out “seed grants” to other Hopkins researchers, who are working on everything from attempting to grow heart muscles from stem cells to running computer simulations of various potential pump designs.

“If Apple were designing an artificial heart, they would look a lot different.”

But the Hopkins team knows they’re already playing catch-up. Similar programs at Penn State University, Yale University, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, among others, have been at it for years, with varying degrees of success. In private industry, the most sophisticated on the market is Carmat, a French company that has already implanted three permanent artificial hearts derived from man-made materials and heart tissue from a cow. Its first two patients didn’t live longer than nine months. The company says its third patient, who received a new heart in April, returned home from the hospital in September.

Still, Katz says all of these devices are basically variations of the same, improved, but not radically different from what DeVries implanted in Barney Clark so many years ago. “The [Carmat heart] is not a breakthrough compared to what came before,” he says. “I’m not trying to downplay their efforts; in many ways, it’s the leading device in the world and until somebody like me comes up with a better product, this is it. But if you look at the overall device, it is not fundamentally different than where we were 10, 15 years ago. I’m talking about ingenuity, new concepts, and fundamentally new ideas that will make you believe that a person could live 10 years or more with this thing inside of them.”

On the road to creating a permanent artificial heart, Tomaselli says the team will likely create many other advances in cardiovascular medicine. “Along the way, like the space program, we will develop new technologies and gain an understanding of how the cardiovascular system works, and there will be a number of spinoffs that will have an impact on public health.”

An improved LVAD could be the first such technology. The Hopkins team has applied for a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to further the work, and has inked a deal to collaborate on research with at least one LVAD manufacturer.

But money needs to be raised first. A lot of money. Cameron says that while the university could seek a commercial partner or investment group, he’d much prefer the project be funded by philanthropy and grants so Hopkins can keep its autonomy. “Look, there are people who write checks for $100 million these days, and we only need one of those,” he says. “What we’d like is a humanitarian, not an investor. Somebody who really wants to see lives saved.”

Potential donors not only need to buy into the idea, but so do researchers at the university. Until more funds come in, Biasetti is the initiative’s only full-time employee; faculty members are basically volunteering their time to help out.

“Kennedy threw down the gauntlet, but there were a lot of people who had to be sold on the idea,” says Cameron, who, after one early brainstorming session gave everyone in the room a copy of Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program, the 2014 account of one of the best public relations/marketing campaigns in U.S. history. “It’s not enough for us to be excited about it, we have to instill the excitement in everybody else.”

And like the space race between the United States and the former Soviet Union, there’s a lot of pride at stake for Johns Hopkins researchers. “Oh, it’s a race. Absolutely,” says Cameron. “But it’s not a race that will only have one winner. The winners are the patients who get the device. Whether we cross the finish line first or sixth doesn’t matter as long as something comes of this that improves lives. In the end, that’s what matters.”

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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.

Source

Top Docs 2014: Media Matters

Jess Mayhugh — Sat, 01 Nov 2014 14:00:00 +0000

Jennifer Aparicio and Maria Dennis in front of The Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center.

At 5 p.m. on Thursday, March 20, Jennifer Aparicio was told she had leukemia. Between 5 and 6 p.m., she and her husband, sports-talk-radio host and WNST founder “Nasty” Nestor Aparicio, focused on telling their family and some close friends and business associates. Then, in individual Facebook posts announcing the diagnosis, they told everyone.

Nestor published his first, a little after 6 p.m.

“My wife, the most beautiful girl in the world, was diagnosed with leukemia tonight. She’ll be in Johns Hopkins for the next month battling. She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. Please keep her in your thoughts and spirit. #JennStrong,” he wrote above a picture of his smiling wife taken on the island of Moorea during their recent vacation.

Jenn’s post came a few hours later and was even more specific:

“Tonight I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia [Ed note: Her diagnosis was later changed to acute bilineal leukemia, or ABL]. I actually feel and look fine, but had some pain under my arm. Bloodwork [sic] done last Friday showed cells are low and the doctors wanted me to check myself into Johns Hopkins ER last night. So, here I now sit for 3-4 weeks. I will begin chemo tomorrow or the next day, I have a great chance for remission and I’m in the best hospital possible. If anyone wants to reach out to me, I’ll be here— feeling optimistic.”

Combined, the two posts were read by thousands and generated 540 comments, 739 likes, and 17 shares. Additionally, each interaction—message, “like”, share, what have you—was noted on the timeline of each respondent, which, in turn, reached the respondent’s friends, and then, potentially, their friends’ friends, and on and on until, if you were a Baltimorean with an Internet connection, you were likely no more than one or two degrees removed from the news.

“Within an hour, it was completely batshit electric,” says Nestor, a Dundalk native who made his name as a sports writer and music critic at The Evening Sun before switching to radio in the early ’90s.

Amazingly, Jenn and Nestor were not the only high-profile Baltimore media personalities to announce such grave news that day. That same morning, Mix 106.5 FM DJ Maria Dennis had called into her own radio show to explain her recent absence.

“We gotta come clean. We gotta let everybody know what’s going on. It’s important,” she said, speaking to her co-hosts Reagan Warfield and Jon Boesche from her hospital bed at The Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, where both she and Jenn were to receive treatment and forge a new friendship.

“I have been just diagnosed with leukemia. It’s a mind-blower,” she admitted, sounding subdued and dazed in the wake of her official diagnosis with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL.

“People were so nice, But it was a lot.”

Within minutes, Mix 106.5 had a page up on its website recapping the conversation with an embedded audio clip and a message from Warfield and Boesche directing well-wishers to the show’s Facebook page. The very next day, Warfield and Boesche posted a photo on Facebook of 40 printed pages worth of texts, Facebook messages, e-mails, and tweets they had received in support of Maria.

And while you would expect people to be interested in disclosures from high-profile figures, it’s not just the famous that command attention. For every Angelina Jolie revealing her preventative double mastectomy in The New York Times, there is a Zachary Lederer, the Ellicott City-raised, University of Maryland College Park men’s basketball team student manager whose unflaggingly positive outlook in the face of terminal brain cancer made him an Internet phenomenon and whose death this March at the age of 20 was marked with obituaries in The Washington Post and USA Today.

This is illness in the age of social media. Whereas disease was once a closely held private matter, a reason to draw the curtains and cancel all engagements, it is now, like so many other life events, a public act, documented in sometimes startlingly intimate detail on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, personal blogs, and even good-old-fashioned media like print, television, and radio. And while the benefits of such an approach are real and manifold, so too are the potential complications.

“With the changing of the times, it’s definitely something we see a lot of,” says Elissa Bantug, a two-time breast cancer survivor and the program manager of breast cancer communication, education, and survivorship at The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. “But there’s a privacy or anonymity part to that that can be a challenge.”

Clockwise from left: Jenn Aparicio with Kitty; picking tomatoes in Dundalk; with Maria Dennis at Hopkins; sending a message to followers; at Ravens training camp in July.

To hear the Aparicios and Dennis tell it though, there was no intricate calculus to be done in weighing the pros and cons. The decision to go public was essentially a foregone conclusion, necessitated by their already public lives. (Although Jenn actually works for Verizon, she is heavily involved in Nestor’s world and travels with him to most professional events.)

For the Aparicios, the timing demanded especially swift and decisive action. Nestor had retired from daily radio in 2004, but he and Jenn had decided the time was right for him to return with a daily show. He announced his comeback the morning Jenn was diagnosed, a declaration that was sure to garner press coverage. “So I said, ‘Look, I’m trying to go back on the radio, I don’t know how we’re going to do this,’” Nestor recalls. “She said, ‘You can tell anyone you want because I’m not going to die.’”

Jenn, admittedly the steadier of the two throughout the ordeal, figured she had bigger concerns than media attention. If being public simplified things, then so be it.

“I was on board from the get-go. It didn’t make sense to try and hide it, you know?” she says with a shrug.

Dennis, who has been on the air at Mix 106.5 since 1997, felt similarly. “I was always the person to just lay it all out. I’ve always done that. So I just laid it all out,” she says.

For Dennis, this meant calling into the station periodically for status updates that touched on everything from hair loss to her curiosity about the bone marrow donor who provided the new, healthy tissue for her June 26 transplant. (HRSA mandates that bone marrow donations be kept anonymous for a period of time, though some contact may be permitted.) It also meant occasional missives posted by her or her sister-in-law on CaringBridge.org, a micro-blogging site with approximately 500,000 daily users that allows those experiencing illness to communicate en masse with loved ones. Dennis says the page, which has received over 4,000 views, relieved her of the burden of having to retell her story ad nauseam.

“It didn’t make sense to try and hidE it, you know?”

“When people ask you how you’re doing, you feel sick,” she says, “So it’s a great way to have people get information without having to either text or e-mail. I mean, how many times can I tell the same thing?”

At the same time, Dennis says she has been careful not to over-share for her own sake, as well as the sake of her audience.

“If you post that you’re doing well and something happens that day, you don’t want to disappoint, so you’ve got to kind of be careful,” she says, noting that after her successful transplant, she has battled graft-versus-host disease, a condition in which the newly transplanted cells war with the patient’s native cells.

And perhaps unsurprisingly for someone whose job it is to engage listeners, Dennis also worries about alienating
her audience.

“I don’t want to be one of those people that comes on every other day and people get sick of it, you know what I mean? Because that happens. ‘Okay, she’s got cancer, whatever.’”

Though Dennis isn’t referencing any specific criticism, it is not an irrational fear. People can and do have unsympathetic reactions to any number of tragic phenomena. And there does seem to be something about cancer that inspires particularly strong opinions and harsh judgments. Witness Melissa Etheridge calling Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a preventative double mastectomy “fearful.” Or Google The New York Times’ January op-ed about Lisa Bonchek Adams, a Connecticut woman who tweets and blogs regularly about her stage IV metastatic breast cancer. The op-ed, written by former Times executive editor Bill Keller, criticized Adams’s treatment choices and seemed to deride her social-media presence as undignified. Its condescending tone spurred a torrent of responses both for and against the piece. The only thing the controversy settled was that nobody can expect cancer to inoculate them from criticism. In fact, the shield of anonymity provided by the Internet often breeds intensely virulent strains of it.

“You get people who get really aggressive about how they feel in any type of online program,” acknowledges Bantug. “I know it sounds crazy, but you actually see some—for lack of a better term—cyberbullying.”

That hasn’t been Jenn Aparicio’s experience, though. Through her own CaringBridge page, her Facebook profile, and Nestor’s frequent, lengthy updates via WNST’s website and his own Facebook and Twitter accounts, she has been embraced in a cyberhug.

“The pros [are] all the support we’ve gotten,” she says, “not just from family and friends, but people who are fans of Nestor’s, who have now become fans of mine. It has been nice to have that support.” Asked if she thinks she would have received the same amount of support without going public, she replies matter-of-factly: “I don’t think so. I mean, people would have found out, but it’s not like people would have reached out to me directly, whereas, now, I have a following, too.”

And that following has been there with her every step of the way. Indeed, in between the many pictures of her beloved calico rescue cat, Kitty, and the requisite funny viral videos, a look back through her Facebook timeline provides a detailed, well-rounded account of her experience. In March, she has a full head of long dirty-blonde hair. She looks healthy and tan from her recent vacation, and the statuses are often lighthearted and funny such as one from March 27 in which she chides, “I got to stop eating in bed, darned crumbs are everywhere! #JennStrong #BmorePositive”

By April 29, her hair is gone and she is gaunt, but the couple celebrates her release from the hospital after 41 days with a picture of Jenn reuniting with Kitty. On May 30, the day before her birthday, she receives word that a bone marrow donor match has been found. And then, on June 26—the same day as Maria Dennis—she celebrates her “re-birthday” by posting a picture of her in-progress bone marrow transplant, the caption noting that she listened to Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” during the procedure.

Accompanying each of those statuses—and the many in between—are thousands of messages of support from family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and total strangers. Some even ask how they can send gifts or offer to help in other ways, ranging from fundraising to shaving their heads in solidarity.

Only a few times did the couple feel like their boundaries had been crossed.

“People were so nice, but it was a lot,” remembers Nestor. “People started showing up in the hospital unannounced.”

Jenn is able to laugh it off now but was rattled at the time. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on?!’ Because at that time it was still flu season, so anyone who came in my room had to wear a mask. It didn’t help that [Nestor] slipped [on the radio] saying, ‘Yeah, she’s on the fifth floor at Hopkins!’ We won’t be doing that part again,” she declares.

Maria Dennis experienced similar levels of generosity and awkwardness when her sister set up a fundraising page to help Dennis pay her hefty medical bills.

“She didn’t tell me. I was so pissed. I was like, ‘What are you doing? You can’t do that!’” Dennis recalls.

Though she was initially angry, she now admits that the almost $3,000 the page raised was incredibly helpful.

“It really, really helped,” allows Dennis, who lives in Pikesville with her husband, Eddie, and their two sons, Noah, 10, and Ben, 8. “I wasn’t even thinking about that, and I was uncomfortable asking for it.”

Overall, though, both the Aparicios and Dennis feel going public was the right decision for them, especially when they were able to use the spotlight to raise awareness for blood cancer charities like There Goes My Hero, which was founded by Bel Air’s Erik Sauer in the wake of his own battle with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). The Aparicios have organized several bone marrow drives for the nonprofit, which have attracted the support of several Ravens, including Joe Flacco and Dennis Pitta. Nestor also has provided a weekly platform for Sauer on his show.

“We do it every week at this point, but the fact that we are talking about it, we get tons of exposure. It’s hugely important,” Sauer says.

More than seven months removed from their diagnoses, both Jenn Aparicio and Maria Dennis are officially in remission. Their hair and appetites are returning and they are starting to think about going back to work. “I just want to not push it,” Dennis says. “I get tired real easy. I’ve got to make sure I’m clear of the graft-versus-host, and I also have one more chemotherapy treatment that I have to go through before I go back.”

Ever the even-tempered optimist, Jenn says she appreciates that her illness further strengthened her relationship with her husband and helped her make new friends.

“There’s always good that comes out of bad,” she says. “You may not see it in the beginning, but everything has a silver lining.”

Even cancer?

“It’s one hell of a way to make new friends, but it never hurts to have too many friends,”—Facebook or otherwise.

Source

The Johns Hopkins Hospital – Baltimore Magazine

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

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

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

—COURTESY OF SHEPPARD PRATT

2. The Blue Baby Operation Saves Lives

—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

5. What Is...Sinai Hospital?

6. William Halsted Invents, Well, Everything

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

7. An Historical Heart Transplant

Planes, Trains, Automobiles, Spaceships

Organs Take Flight

Tooting Their Own Horn

A Hospital for Everyone

8. Facing the Future

—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

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

11. Rounds and Residencies

12. Safety Cap Changes Baseball

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

GEORGE BENNETT

JOHN SHAW BILLINGS

RUDIGER BREITENECKER

ANGELA BRODIE

CAROL GREIDER

ALAN GUTTMACHER

JANET HARDY

WILLIAM ALEXANDER HAMMOND

LEO KANNER

THEODORE WOODWARD

13. The Modern Birthing Room Is Born

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.

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

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

A Golden Idea

A Strong Vision

Lending a Hand

17. America’s First Teaching Hospital

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

18. Cutting-Edge Treatment for Depression

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

21. Better Fracture Care

—COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

22. World’s First Medical Illustration School

—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

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

—COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

MARY ELIZABETH GARRETT

DORTHEA DIX

HORTENSE KAHN ELIASBERG

MARCIA CROCKER NOYES

NELLIE LOUISE YOUNG

Henrietta Lacks Mural Takes Shape

Book Reviews: January 2016

Top Doctors: Beat Generation

“He probably asks Questions that nobody had ever thought of.”

“If Apple were designing an artificial heart, they would look a lot different.”

They’re Heart Smart Now

Heart Smarts For Women

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

Top Docs 2014: Media Matters

“People were so nice, But it was a lot.”

“It didn’t make sense to try and hidE it, you know?”

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