Chapter 07: Entering Medicine at a Key Time in Research and Finding a Great Fit at MD Anderson
Files
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_01_20050103_C07
Publication Date
1-3-2005
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, January 03, 2005
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Overview; Overview; MD Anderson Culture; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; Discovery and Success; On Research and Researchers; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; The History of Health Care, Patient Care; Technology and R&D; Patients; Patients, Treatment, Survivors; Personal Background; Faith, Values, Beliefs; 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
James Olson:
: Did you ever meet Dr. Bowen, who used to be academic vice president here? He told me when I interviewed him that his wife died of Hodgkin’s disease when he was in graduate school. But it wasn’t to assume that that’s why he ended up in medical school and kind of in virology or cancer research or at a cancer hospital. Do you remember any personal experiences with cancer, in terms of the first person you knew who got sick?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: In fact, I came at it from the point of view of being interested in science, and learning that I liked people, and making this – having a feeling that I wanted to contribute something important to the world, and I could do it in this bridge between science and medicine. It was becoming apparent – you have to remember this was late 1959 when I wrote that in my diary. The idea that science was going to transform medicine was just percolating. It was very exciting to me. Medicine was not just learning from what experience of others was that this drug works on this disease and that. But that there were experiments that could be done to help you move medicine forward. And that period, the late 1950s, was the beginning of this huge transformation in medicine that has occurred. And I look back on it and I say I started working in a laboratory two years after DNA had been discovered. The term molecular biology was not in use at that time. The Journal of Molecular Biology – the first issue came out the year after I graduated from college. Now there are journals on molecular genetics and molecular biology, hundreds of them. So that I came at it rationally and then found that my research just fit in with the clinical. I didn’t know I was going to be a cancer specialist. In fact, when I got out of my training, I was planning to be a hematologist because hematology, leukemia … I’ve treated a lot more leukemia than anything else, probably. Leukemia was the disease you could sample the blood, and you could do a lot of research on leukemia and lymphocytes. I was studying their proliferation in the normal and in the malignant situation. But around 1980, this is driven by a desire to merge science into my profession, rather than any one patient that turned me on. But then my father-in-law died of cancer of the lung. He was a smoker. And my mother-in-law died of cancer of the breast. And my mother developed breast cancer. And my aunt, the wife of the rabbi got breast cancer, and also just taking care of the patients at UCSD with cancer. I – looking back on it, I think – there’s one other little fact. At one point in my life, I thought I might want to be a rabbi. And I think the fact of serving people was exciting and when you’re dealing with a patient with cancer, a lot of the posturing and the wordplay that fills your life in your normal social environment goes away and you can drill right down to basics very quickly. I found it interesting and exciting and worthwhile as a cancer doctor to empathize – to figure out what made that patient tick. To probe so that I could try to understand how to best explain their disease to them and still keep hope without scaring them. To probe how much did they really want to know, because my belief is that you should tell the patient everything they want to know about their disease, and there are some things the patient doesn’t want to know. It’s harmful and could be counterproductive if you tell them more than they need to know. Some patients do not want to know a statistic that they only have a 50 percent chance of living; some patients need to know that they have 50 percent chance of living because they’re quantitative in their approach. Part of a doctor’s job is to tell the one patient,’you’ve got a 50 percent chance of living’, and to the other patient you say, ‘the majority of patients do fine’ and leave it at that and don’t give hard numbers. I think some of the skills and interests of the people in the clergy overlap with someone who is working with cancer because that means they’re facing death. What does clergy deal with? They’re dealing with – Forrest Church, who was the pastor at the Unitarian Church that my wife and I went to in New York. She’s Quaker and Episcopalian in background, so we brought up our kids in a Unitarian Church. He used to say that religion is about the fact that we’re alive and we know we have to die. That’s what religion has to deal with. And that’s what a cancer doctor has to deal with. Hopefully, they don’t have to die of that particular tumor, but facing death comes up. I found that rewarding to deal with people with that issue. So, in the long run, the initial stimulus for my career was science and patient care. But I’d say by the mid-1970s, once I was in the career, there was an equal stimulus because of the personal rewards and personal interests I had in dealing with people in dealing with the cancer in addition to treating the cancer. Even today, I talk here a lot about treating the cancer and caring for the patient, and we talk a lot about that at MD Anderson and how both are equally as important, more so than the other institutions that deal with cancer do --the idea that caring for the patient and the patient’s family, we have more support services than many places do. We invest in that with people and money. So in the long run, yes, dealing with the cancer patient is the main driving force in my life, but it isn’t because of someone I remember as a child dealing with that kind of thing.
James Olson:
: I remember Richard Martin, my surgeon, talked about that a lot with me. He approached that line, that point where you wonder, how much more do I tell this patient. How much more does he want to know? He seemed to express it in kind of the same way that you did.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Yeah, I think I moved into a place where there was a great fit. From the point of view of caring for the patient and treating the patient and from the point of view of moving from the science and taking it to the bedside, more so than anywhere I’ve ever been. I mean it’s just amazing how my interest and approach is so congruent to the philosophy and culture that was already here. I think that’s why we’ve succeeded in the amazing growth that’s occurred and the strength of the programs because the vision I had in the back of my mind was supported, nurtured, and expanded by the people I met and found here who clearly were interested in the same thing. It was a very nice fit.
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD, "Chapter 07: Entering Medicine at a Key Time in Research and Finding a Great Fit at MD Anderson" (2005). Interview Chapters. 1449.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1449
Conditions Governing Access
Open
