Chapter 03: An Evolving Specialty and Coming to Texas

Chapter 03: An Evolving Specialty and Coming to Texas

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Description

Dr. Hill begins this chapter by describing how the politics of building a new medical school in Jersey City influenced his career path. He talks about meeting Dr. Ray Houde, who studied analgesics and spurred his early interest in pain medications. He also met Roulon Rawson who had treated thyroid cancer and radioactive iodine and “that rubbed off on everyone who worked with him.” He rotated through the general endocrine service at Bellevue Hospital, which helped convince him to focus on that specialty. He talks about the professional connections that alerted him to a position at MD Anderson.

Identifier

HillCS_01_20120214_C03

Publication Date

2-14-2012

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - Joining MD Anderson/Coming to Texas; Professional Path; Influences from People and Life Experiences; The History of Health Care, Patient Care; Personal Background; The Researcher; Evolution of Career

Transcript

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

It sounds like you had a lot of experiences that really exposed you to just an unusual range of disease and conditions and trauma. How did you end up going from there to coming to MD Anderson? How did that all happen?

C. Stratton Hill, MD:

Okay, well, when I finished my residency, after I finished residency and I went over to Seton Hall, then— I could tell you a story from Seton Hall, in New Jersey, that would make the hair stand up on your head. I decided that— I made a lot of good friends over there, too. One cardiologist was just a prince of a guy. The political boss of New Jersey was Frank Hague, and he built the Jersey City Medical Center. I learned that in New Jersey you’re not just Catholic. You’re either Polish Catholic or you’re Irish Catholic or you’re Italian Catholic or Ukrainian Catholic or something. You’re not— It’s a double name. When I went there, the hospital—as a chief resident—the hospital was about to lose accreditation because we weren’t getting any autopsies, and I said, “Come on, we’re right here on the piers of New York.” This is where all the ships came in from Europe and all over the world, and there were huge railroad yards there, but that had all changed. What had happened was that Frank Hague, he had delivered New Jersey for Franklin Roosevelt—the first time that New Jersey had ever gone Democratic—and so he had a lot of political capital with Franklin Roosevelt. And when Frank Hague wanted to do something for his own sake, the Catholic Church says, “No schools. We take care of that,” so he built this huge medical center. You’ve probably seen Columbia Presbyterian up on the west side, huge complex. He built the same thing over in Jersey City, and the question was, when Seton Hall was going to have a medical school and a hospital, whether to use the Jersey City Medical Center as a warehouse or the medical school, because it was 10 times too big for what Jersey City needed. The medical school moved into it. Well, politics were unbelievable. To make a long story short, the local doctors would not let the medical school doctors be on the staff of the Jersey City Medical Center and the Bishop of Newark had planned to have just the—they were going to have a full-time faculty, and they were going to have a geographical full-time practice, and then they would generate their own income. Well, if they couldn’t get on the staff of a hospital, they couldn’t have the practice, so that shot that down. That was a big, big problem, and so at the end of— When I finished the residency, the mayor of Jersey City had appointed one of his—his name was Tom Gangemi, a good Irish name.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

What was his name again? Tom—?

C. Stratton Hill, MD:

Gangemi, very Italian, and he appointed a guy that was head of the medical center. His name was Crisanino. Then Dr. Jeghers got this Dr. (???) Crisanino to appoint me as the Assistant Director of the Jersey City Medical Center. That didn’t sit too well with some of the local politicians because they had my picture in the paper of me giving some kind of an immunization that they were going to do for the whole city. I remember there were several things that got back to me about this guy from Tennessee. What’s he doing up here? And then, too, I realized that the Mafia was infiltrating all through Jersey City Medical Center and over in Secaucus and Hoboken and Bayonne. Boy, those guys took me over there to some of those places that I wouldn’t have been there if the Mafia hadn’t been in control, but the food was fantastic. (laughs) Anyway, after about six months, I decided I better get out of this, so I went over to Dr. Rawson. I said, “Hey, you got anything for me to do here in these six months? I want to see what I can do.” And he said, “Yeah, you can help Ray Houde.” He’s the guy that was doing the clinical—he runs what’s called T-17. That was the Tower Clinic. Memorial had an outpatient clinic for walk-ins. People from the street could walk in, and you only took people with cancer, so what this clinic did was to sort of screen to see if you were suitable. The people who actually did the work were board certified surgeons, because Memorial is mostly a surgical hospital. I worked with him, and we supervised this, and we would check these guys out and so forth. So during that time— You’ve heard of the Kelsey-Seybold Clinic here? Well, Mavis Kelsey was a good friend of Rulon Rawson, and so he came to New York and got with Dr. Rawson and said, “I need somebody to come to my clinic.” And so Dr. Rawson, since I’d left Jersey City, recommended me. I met with Dr. Kelsey. It was right before Christmas, about in November. We were coming here to visit Charlotte’s parents in Galveston, so we came over and visited with Dr. Kelsey, and I realized then that what he wanted was a chemotherapist. He wasn’t looking— He’s an endocrinologist, and so he really didn’t have a— But then I had some friends that were attendings in Memorial that said, “Oh, I’ve got a guy over at MD Anderson. I want you to go by over there and see him.” I went over. My contact there was Dr. Clifton Howe. You’ve probably heard of him. So I went over there. The guy that was my attending at Memorial, his name was Felix Wroblewski. He must have been Polish.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

I think that’s probably true.

C. Stratton Hill, MD:

He was a fabulous guy, and he and— Let’s see, what was that guy’s name? John LaDue. They did the first studies on enzymes, elevation in the blood for heart attacks, SGOT, SGPT, things like that. You see, that’s what I was talking about, serendipity, coming out of a cancer institution. Here these guys, they were doing all kinds of work with enzymes for cancer, and these guys said, “Well, let’s study these people who have heart attacks while they’re in the hospital.” They’re the ones who started that, so it was LaDue and Wroblewski. Their original article is one that first put enzyme studies for heart problems on the map. It was Felix that knew Cliff Howe, and that’s why I went over and talked to Cliff. Cliff said, “Come on. We want you to come over here.” Then I thought, well—

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

What attracted you to the institution?

C. Stratton Hill, MD:

Well, it was more of what I had been doing and what I looked at as a continuation of this, and I thought, well, if it’s— And then he told me a lot of the things they were doing, and Mavis had a lot to do with Anderson. Have you ever read his books?

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

No.

C. Stratton Hill, MD:

You ought to read that because he and Dr. [R. Lee] Clark were at the Mayo Clinic together, so they’ve known each other from way back, and he’s got that in his book. Dr. Clark enlisted Mavis to help get things going, and Mavis worked at the clinic over at MD Anderson until—oh, up until the ‘70s and ‘80s. He came over every week to the thyroid clinic.

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Chapter 03: An Evolving Specialty and Coming to Texas

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