Chapter 02: Discovering Burn Surgery
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Here Dr. Pollock talks briefly about his family background and then describes the path that took him to study medicine. He was born in Hyde Park on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. He grew up in a family with five siblings. His father was an M.D. Ph.D. in psychiatry and his mother was a social worker. Dr. Pollock also notes that his father had grown up during the Depression and knew poverty and had selected medicine, in part, because of its guarantee of employment. (Dr. Pollock senior grew up in the same area of Chicago as Dr. Emil J Freireich of MD Anderson, and they were friends.) Dr. Pollock recalls wanting to be a physician when he was a child, but became uncertain as he entered his college years, majoring in history instead. He describes how his father found a clever way to demonstrate the lack of jobs in that profession, prompting Dr. Pollock to go medical school instead.
Dr. Pollock recounts how he became interested in surgery during his third-year rotation at St. Louis City Hospital when he treated a patient burned with lye. He says that this “was the first time he ever felt truly needed by another human being,” and threw himself into the study of surgery with a mind to becoming a plastic surgeon. He was particularly gratified, he says, to discover that there were aspects of surgery that would allow him to use his personality in the therapeutic process –this is a continuing theme in Dr. Pollock’s descriptions of this professional values, and he speculates that this value shows the influence of his father on his life.
Identifier
PollokRE_01_20121008-C02
Publication Date
10-8-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Raphael Pollock, MD, Oral History Interview, October 08, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational Path Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents Personal Background Professional Path Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine Influences from People and Life Experiences Evolution of Career Professional Practice The Professional at Work Formative Experiences Patients Human Stories Offering Care, Compassion, Help
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:
All right. Well, thank you. I’m sure we’ll return to this subject as we talk more about your specialty, but I wanted to get that overview in the beginning. So now I’d like to ask some of the more chronological background questions, if you don’t mind. Let’s just start with where you were born and when.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Sure. I was born on Christmas Day, 1950, in Chicago, on a very cold, wintery day—one of the coldest on record—and grew up in Chicago, on the south side, in a neighborhood called Hyde Park, which is immediately adjacent to the University of Chicago. I went to elementary and high school in that neighborhood and then left Chicago to go to college in Ohio. I went to Oberlin College, where I was a history major.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Was anyone in your family involved in the sciences?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
My father is an MD/PhD, and psychology and neurophysiology were his areas. My mother was a social worker, and I’m one of five children. The first three are physicians.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, really?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And was that, do you think, due to your father’s profession?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
I think my father had profound influence on all of us. He was a child of the Depression and had known extreme poverty in his youth and always thought of medicine as an ideal means by which to not only help people, as the first and foremost consideration, but also as a way of having some sense of financial stability in your life, given that he had experienced the lack of that in a very significant way as a child.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did he also grow up in Chicago?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
He grew up in Chicago. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, and they were under continuous financial pressures as immigrants in the Depression. His father was actually a carpenter—a union carpenter—in Chicago, and when the Depression hit there was just simply no work. They knew starvation, hunger, poverty. My father had therefore a lot of pressure on him to move forward as quickly as possible. He graduated high school at age fifteen and had his MD at age twenty-one.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s amazing.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
He actually—he won a scholarship to Dartmouth for college and had to turn it down because he and his parents couldn’t afford the train fare. So he went to the University of Chicago and did very, very well, completing eight semesters in five semesters and just moved forward from there. Parenthetically, he was classmates with [Emil] J Freireich [Oral History Interview].
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was wondering.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Yeah, they were very close to each other. J’s sister was a very, very good high school girlfriend of my mother’s. They all grew up in the same neighborhood, on the northwest side of Chicago.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, when you mentioned the Chicago and Depression connection, I was wondering about that.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Yeah, they were all in the same circumstances together.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So you felt that that message really came through to you. When did you decide to focus on the sciences and focus on medicine in particular?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, as a child in elementary school, I always thought I wanted to be a physician. When I got to college, I went through a period of uncertainty. I was always avocationally interested in European history and read voraciously as a child and all through high school. It’s still what I read for pleasure, predominantly. But I wasn’t certain there was actually going to be a realistic job opportunity in history, and one of the things that my father did—he was a very shrewd man—he bought me a student membership in the American Historical Association. I think it was sophomore or junior year of college, the AHA met in Chicago, and it was over the time I was there for spring vacation. He said, “Well, why don’t you go down and while you’re there look at the job registry.” I was shocked to find that there literally were two jobs in history in the United States and about 4000 applicants. So that had a big impact on my thinking. But I decided that I really was interested in serving, and that was more where my heart lay than being a historian, although it is something that I’m still fascinated by and continue to read and study.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So you graduated from Oberlin College in 1972.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Yes.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And so then, in ’77, you started medical school at St. Louis—
Raphael Pollock, MD:
No, in ’72 I started.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, ’72. I’m sorry. You got your MD in ’77. So how did your interests evolve during that time? I mean, I’m interested in when you became interested in cancer, of course.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, the cancer component, or story, came much later, when I was a resident in surgery. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do in medicine during my first two years, and frankly it was something of a shock going from Oberlin College, which was, at the time, an ultraliberal institution—this was during the whole Vietnam War protests and Kent State—going from there to St. Louis University, which was a strict Jesuit school. And my first year I felt, in many ways, kind of out of my element until I found some other likeminded friends in the class. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I, at the time, was not particularly interested in anatomy, as a freshman medical student. I was much more interested in physiology actually. So as my interests progressed, I thought at one point I would be an endocrinologist or do something in internal medicine. When it came time to select where I was going to do my junior year clerkships, most of the people in my class were not interested in going to the St. Louis City Hospital, which was a large municipal, indigent-oriented, city hospital. I thought it would be kind of fun to try my hand at something like that. So I signed up for surgery as my first rotation, thinking that I would get very proficient in the routine management of patients so that when I was on the medicine service, given that I wanted to do a medical subspecialty, I would be able to really sparkle. What I found out very quickly is that the surgery residents were much more competent, by and large, than the medicine residents. That may be for off the record, but—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why do you think that was the case?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Because they had to do everything. And with the medicine residents it was much more of a time and task-denominated activity. The surgeons were extremely competent. They had many more patients to run. It being a city hospital, there were lots of complicated trauma patients, and this made a tremendous impression on me. The first day that I was on call, in the summer of 1975—this was a large building that looked like literally something out of a Charles Dickens novel. It’s sort of an antebellum type of big monolithic building with pillars in front—sort of the archetypical what one might think of a city hospital. I remember I was there with my new starched, white coat, and I had my little black bag. They didn’t have pagers, and the overhead speaker said, “Dr. Pollock—Dr. Pollock—there’s an emergency in the emergency room. Come immediately.” I remember my first thought was, “What is my father doing here?” Because he was Dr. Pollock. I was not. I was a junior medical student. Then I realized that they were talking about me, so I figured, wow, appendectomy, appendicitis, or something. I went down and a nurse said, “In there,” and pointed me towards a gurney. They pulled back the drapes and there was a man sitting upright that had gotten into an argument with his wife, taken a nap, and she had boiled a can of lye, poured it on his face, and his entire face was missing. And that was my introduction to surgery and medicine, and it was extremely dramatic, to say the least. I was very fortunate in the experience because the plastic surgery resident who was the one who managed the burns saw that I was interested. Not that I was interested in surgery, that I was interested in this patient’s problem. He brought me along. The entire twelve-week rotation that I was there I took care of this man. We would go to the operating room together. This resident taught me how to do skin grafting, how to change dressings, how to suture, how to tie knots—the basic skills. And I felt, for the first time in my life, that I truly was needed by another human being. He was very shrewd. The plastic surgery certification exam requires you to have 10 cases that you present, and this was going to be one of his cases, so the deal was if I would stay down at the hospital at night and roll out the seromas underneath the skin grafts so the skin grafts would take—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s a seroma?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Little fluid collections that would come up underneath grafted skin. If you don’t roll them out, it’s like a blister. It prevents the skin from adhering to the underlying tissues. So the deal was if I stayed down and rolled out the seromas because the nurses wouldn’t, that he would let me do the skin graft. So we’d go to the operating room. I was seduced into the whole process. At the end of the rotation, he gave me this beautiful German atlas about facial reconstruction, which I still have somewhere in this office, once I get out of the boxes. That plus just the overall competence of the general surgery residents, I was so impressed that I just gave up any thoughts of wanting to be someone in general internal medicine and became very linear in my thinking about surgery. I’m a little OCD, so that then triggered a tremendous focus on reading and studying this. I actually was very interested in burn surgery, and that’s what I thought I would do for about three or four years. That carried me through the rest of my time in medical school and the early parts of my residency.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I wanted to ask you about the hand skills too, because clearly one of the reasons you were so successful is that you had the maybe three-dimensional visualizing skills and the hand skills. Oh, that’s nice. Dr. Pollock is showing me a little boat that you made?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
When I was six years old.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
When you were six years old. And this is something you carved, and then you made the mast with tying these tiny knots?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So this was something you were aware of from the time—?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
And always interested in.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Very detailed motor coordination and 3D visualizing skills.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
In addition to reading, my other hobby is I’m sort of a frustrated electrical engineer. I was never good enough in math, but I do a lot of things with electronics and circuit boards and soldering and making things—things electronic. So that’s always been part of what I do. When I was in high school, I was very involved in bicycle racing and at one point could take apart and reassemble a ten-speed bike without any trouble at all. So these sort of manual activities have always been something that I really enjoy. They give me a lot of personal gratification. At the end of the project, you’ve got something tangible to show.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And also, of course, you’ve had that lifetime of honing those skills, so when the opportunity for surgery came about, you were ready to step in and the hand skills were there to allow you to do it. That’s such an amazing story about the opportunity that came out of this disaster with this man with the lye.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
And he was, incidentally, a very, very interesting man, which was part of what I really enjoyed in my time at City Hospital in St Louis. It was a slice of humanity that I absolutely would have had no contact with coming out of basically an upper-middle class urban Jewish background. This fellow, Jumping Joe Galloway was his name. I don’t know if HIPPA—I don’t think he’s still alive. But Joe Galloway had been in the Merchant Marine during World War II. He had worked in the docks in Lisbon. He had fathered over 50 children with 13 different women. He had played in the Negro Major Leagues, was a pool hustler, and had had time in jail as a dope addict—just unbelievable stories in this man’s life. It was fascinating to me, staying down at night, rolling out the seromas, talking with him, and getting a sense of who he was as a person. And that also broadened my understanding that there were aspects of surgery that enabled you to use your own personality as part of the therapeutic process, and that was part of the appeal of burn surgery at that point. I didn’t realize that later on surgical oncology would speak to that even more so, but that was a part of me, and maybe that came from the fact that my father was a psychiatrist. We spent time, as children, learning about human behavior at the hands of a real expert. So those types of foci spoke to me inside as things I wanted to be able to do.
Recommended Citation
Pollock, Raphael E. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 02: Discovering Burn Surgery" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1314.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1314
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