Chapter 07: Publishing the First Book on Pain Management
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Description
In this segment (which begins when the Interviewer switches on the recorder during an informal discussion) Dr. Hill talks about his efforts to publish the first book on his work in pain management, Drug Treatment of Cancer Pain in a Drug-Oriented Society. He explains that pain management is a complex societal and medical issue that is “like trying to pick up a greased watermelon out of a swimming pool.”
Identifier
HillCS_02_20120217_C07
Publication Date
2-17-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
C. Stratton Hill, MD, Oral History Interview, February 17, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - The Researcher; Discovery and Success; MD Anderson Impact; The Researcher; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; The History of Health Care, Patient Care
Transcript
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
—all the major players. There were just a couple that in retrospect didn’t turn out very well, but what we tried to do was get a lot of different viewpoints, so to speak. This was the first attempt at bringing in all the players, like this guy, Charles Schuster. He was head of the division of—oh, I mean the National Institute on Drug Abuse. A lot of people called it the National Institute of Drug Abuse, but he didn’t like that. And then Kathy Foley, I mentioned her before. Her talk was the decriminalization of cancer pain. Then I had an ethicist on moral values, healing pain and suffering. Then I had this anthropologist, “Contradictions in the Cultural Construct of Pain in America: A Pharmacologist’s Concept of Narcotics and Physicians’ Attitudes Toward Narcotics.” He was a psychiatrist. He still is a psychiatrist at Yale, and he wrote sort of the history of how controls on drugs came about in this country. It’s called American Disease. I don’t know why he called it that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s his name?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
David Musto, and I don’t know; I think the second edition came out about the same time as this conference.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, did you know all of these people personally?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
No, I just called them up. Well, I knew Kathy. I knew Roy Martin. I called up people to see, who can I get to do this? And I remember I called a guy at Harvard, and he said, “There’s a guy at SMU that you ought to get, Thomas Johnson,” so I got him.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Let’s see, when was the book published again?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
In 1988 or ’89.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And when was the date that you said that you should have published it?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Well, we had another conference in 1984 that we should have published, but we didn’t. This is—the date is here somewhere—1988. This was— Yeah, we—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And the title of this book is Advances in—
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
No, that’s the series. Drug Treatment of Cancer Pain in a Drug-Oriented Society, and Louis Lasagna—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That poor guy must have gotten terrible teasing when he was in high school. (laughter)
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
He’s brilliant. I got him to do the foreword.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay, and what was his specialty?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Let’s see. He presented here—well—oh, yeah, “Regulations from the Perspective of a Researcher and Clinician.” He was just a pain researcher, but he was Dean of Tufts—I think—Medical School at the time. Here are all their credentials.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Were these all individuals who took part in that conference, and then you gathered their papers?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Yeah, exactly. At Tufts University Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences. The Sacklers are a very interesting family. They own a lot of— They’re very rich. There’s the Sackler Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Tufts. There’s the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv. There’s a Sackler wing in the Metropolitan Museum.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, yeah. I was wondering if it was the same family.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
And the Sackler’s wing at the one in Washington.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
The Smithsonian.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
The Smithsonian. I think that’s on Pre-Columbian stuff there. But this was a very heavyweight faculty that we had for this, and this was the first time we really tried to put everything together in terms of what impacted the treatment of pain. For instance, Eric Cassell, he’s an ethicist at Hastings Center for Ethics, I think it’s called, or something like that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Was there any other publication like this at the time?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
No, absolutely not. “Pain, Suffering, Addiction and Cancer,” H. Tristram Engelhardt. That’s some patrician name, isn’t it? He’s over at Baylor. And then I had Charlie Cleeland, and he wasn’t here at that time. He was at Wisconsin. This was another guy, “Pain Management and the Values of Healthcare Providers.” He wrote a fantastic article. He’s a philosophy professor.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was the process by which the conference was established? I mean, was this the standard thing? Did everybody submit their papers, and you balanced it out?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
No, I put the whole thing together, and I called up these specific people and said, “This is what I want you to talk about.” I remember this guy, John Morgan. When I told him about what the conference was all about he said, “You mean I get to participate in a conference like that?” I mean, he is the one that’s coined the term “opiophobia.” He’s a clinical pharmacologist in New York. I think he was at the City—used to be CCNY, but I guess it’s CUNY now.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was he so excited about? You said he said, “I get to participate in a conference.”
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
We were addressing issues that he thought were pertinent. In other words, everybody was saying, oh, we’ve got to teach our—education is what we’ve got to do, and we were saying lots more than just education. You can’t do it without education, but education alone won’t do it. That’s proven to be absolutely correct because it’s increased the education. But even right now, the Institute of Medicine has just published a monumental book basically on the problems with pain management in the United States—or maybe just all over, but mainly in the United States. Since I’ve been retired, what I’ve tried to do is to try to get my arms around the whole problem, and I’ve written tons of stuff on it but have never gotten anything that satisfies me. It’s because we haven’t really identified all the— Well, it’s almost like trying to pick up a greased watermelon out of a swimming pool. There’s just so much of it that is so subjective. What I’ve tried to do is— What I’ve always said is it’s a societal problem. It’s not education, and this Institute of Medicine thing— Just today, I was looking on something and saw where in the New England Journal of Medicine there’s an article written by the guy that was the head editor of that Institute of Medicine talking about how education—we’ve got to do the education. We’ve got the education. It’s just the doctors won’t do it because of the cultural attitude towards pain and its treatment.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Can I interrupt you just for a sec? I want to pause this. (audio pauses )
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I turned on the recorder a little bit earlier because Dr. Hill was talking about the book that he and others published in 1989, but I just wanted to record the identifier a little bit late. This is Tacey Ann Rosolowski interviewing Dr. C. Stratton Hill. This is our second interview session, and we began at about five minutes after 2:00. The date is the 17th of February, 2012.
Recommended Citation
Hill, C. Stratton Jr. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 07: Publishing the First Book on Pain Management" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1046.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1046
Conditions Governing Access
Open
