Chapter 04: Early Experiences with Administration
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Description
Here Dr. Mendelsohn gives an overview of experiences that helped shape his administrative skills and put him on track to a good fit with MD Anderson. He first recalls watching and learning as a high school friend used interpersonal skills to get elected to president of a fraternity. Dr. Mendelsohn then reflects on administrative lessons gleaned from the Harvard Medical School. He first saw how a “complex arrangement of prima donnas put together a program.” During rotations through four teaching hospitals, he was also exposed to very different ways of organizing clinical care and learned to see through different lenses. He felt most affinity to the arrangement at Beth Israel Hospital, which was very focused on caring, an attitude he found at MD Anderson as well and an important quality that made MD Anderson a good fit for him. At the end of this Chapter, Dr. Mendelsohn recalls his Fulbright year in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1959, when he recorded his personal passion in a diary. He wrote that he wanted to devote his life to science in order to improve medical care.
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_01_20120926_C04
Publication Date
9-26-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, September 26, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational PathThe Administrator The Researcher Institutional Mission and Values Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents Personal Background Professional Path Professional Practice The Professional at Work Professional Values, Ethics, Purpose
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Were there any other significant influences or mentors from that period, before we shift into the period of medical education?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I think those are some of the main mentors. Alan had a wonderful way with people. He was president of our fraternity.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What fraternity were you in?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
It was called Round Towners. Our high school had fraternities. I watched him and learned how to get elected to be president of a fraternity. It involves people skills, and it’s not brilliance. It’s listening and empathizing and caring. There must have been many other people I picked things up from, but some of the main mentors that I incorporated into myself came along later in college and in medical school and in training.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Let’s shift to the period of your professional training. You talked about an awful lot of this with Dr. Olsen, but I did want to pick up on any of the experiences that really struck you during that time that may have had an influence on your administrative career.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
During most of medical school, you’re drinking water out of a fire hose. You don’t have time to think about an administrative career. You’re awash in information about disease, about people, about science, and at least when I went to medical school, every teacher’s goal was to convert you into going into his or her field. You had a chance to dig pretty deep. The anatomy instructor wanted us all to be anatomists, and the immunology teachers wanted us to be immunologists, on and on and on. I think I stood back enough to see how a complex organization of outstanding prima donnas, which Harvard was full of, somehow put together a program that taught me and 125 other kids in my class the science and the humanity of medicine and yet allowed these individuals to excel in their field and hopefully try to reproduce themselves. Somehow it all worked without a book of rules telling everybody what they had to do. A lot of it was spontaneous combustion. I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way until you asked the question. It was a good question. There are 3 major hospitals at Harvard Medical School, but Harvard has no hospitals. The hospitals are all separate. They compete like mad with each other until somebody attacks Harvard, and then they round up the troops, and they’re great. I rotated through 4 of the teaching hospitals and saw many different ways to plan curricula, to take care of patients, and I guess I got a perspective on the many different ways of looking through lenses at a problem and getting solutions.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Do you recall some of those differences that struck you or things that you noticed at some of the hospitals that worked really well or that worked really badly?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I remember there was a hospital called the Beth Israel Hospital. I could tell that caring for the patients in a friendly and supportive and empathetic way was really important to them. It certainly was important at the other hospitals, but at the Boston City Hospital, where you were working on 1/10 the budget of the others, you were treating the walking wounded of the world, and you couldn’t do that in the same way. At the other major teaching, the Mass General and the Peter Bent Brigham, the faculty was a little more oriented toward their intellectual pursuits. Yet the Beth Israel Hospital doctors, who were also quite intellectual, were really conscious of the patient. It’s very interesting, because that’s what MD Anderson is all about. When I was president, I talked a lot about treating the illness and caring for the patient. I was saying that because it was me, and it was also the attitude here. It’s a very unusual place, partly because the doctors here really care about their patients as much as they care about their research. They give out their home phone numbers, don’t work through interns and residents, but work as the primary “hello” person many times when a patient walks in. They enjoy the practice of medicine and that interaction. It reminded me of my experience at Beth Israel Hospital, for example.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
With the Beth Israel situation, caring is not something that is just a matter of structure. It’s a matter of culture.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
That’s right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s so firmly built into the culture of MD Anderson. I read something where you had noticed that when you came here there was a tremendous degree of congruence between your own personal philosophy about the treatment of cancer and what has always gone on at MD Anderson in terms of focus.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
It was a good fit.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. Clearly the Beth Israel situation really jumped out at you because of the caring piece, and you’ve talked a bit so far about empathy and listening and your own interest in people at a very fundamental level. Talk more about your philosophy, as it evolved, in this cancer care and that fit with MD Anderson.
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 04: Early Experiences with Administration" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1420.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1420
Conditions Governing Access
Open
