Chapter 02: Role Models
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Description
Here Dr. Mendelsohn talks about his believe that an individual can actively create his/her personality through contact with role models. He begins the Chapter talking about his gift for taking a vision and putting it into action. After a brief description of his high school and family, he talks about important role models, beginning with his parents, his father modeling a gentlemanly demeanor and a passion for books, his mother demonstrating how to organize activities for the benefit of others. Through friends he discovered families organized differently from his own, and discovered that he enjoyed lingering around the dinner table, “solving the world’s problems” (a lifestyle he created in his own marriage). He also mentions his uncle, who was a frustrated doctor, and built heart valves for the University at Cincinnati.
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_01_20120926_C02
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 - Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Personal Background; Professional Path; Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine; Influences from People and Life Experiences; The Researcher; The Clinician; Discovery, Creativity and Innovation
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:
I’d like to ask you about where you think that particular approach came from and what experiences. First, when and where were you born?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I was born in 1936 in Cincinnati. I went to public school for 12 years, but the high school I went to was more like a prep school. We had to pass a test to get into it, and it took in students from all over Cincinnati. I think 97% of the graduates of that high school went to college. It was a wonderful education, like you’d get at an eastern prep school. I grew up in a relatively normal environment. My dad ran a company and was what’s called a middle man, selling menswear. My mother was the head of the PTA and active in the Sunday school. We had many friends. I had 9 cousins who all lived within a mile and a half away, and both grandmas within a mile away. It was a very warm, friendly environment among family and friends in Cincinnati.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
0:15:45. I read in the interview that you did with Dr. Olsen, how you look at people and then you try to absorb some of their characteristics and build your own personality. As you look back on those early years, who are the role models that were really formative for you in your family life and your educational experience?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I did discuss that with Mr. Olsen, and it’s true. I figured out at a relatively young age, maybe in high school, that you can mold yourself; one’s personality and one’s interests are not just a passive accumulation of sentiments, but rather you can look at different opportunities and see what fits. The fit is very important. As I grew up in Cincinnati and in college, there were people that helped me mold into what I would be. One example is my father’s approach to his relationships. He was born in Baton Rouge. I remember at his funeral, the rabbi said, “You know, Joe Mendelsohn was a real southern gentleman.” I thought about that, and I’d never put it that way. He was caring. I watched him at work with the people that work for him. He was a very friendly, polite, and thoughtful human being about others, and I incorporated some of that, I think. My mother was very active in community affairs. I mentioned she was head of the PTA and the sisterhood at our temple. I could see that she got a lot of pleasure out of organizing things in the community for the benefit of the community and her family and her children, and I thought that made sense too, so I think I was ready for that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did you help her at all? Did you get involved with that kind of thing when you were younger?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
No, not very much. I could see the feedback it gave her that made life meaningful for her, and I was proud of it. I was proud of both of those attributes, just for example. Now, my girlfriend Judy’s father and mother had a little different lifestyle than I had in my home; they loved to have people over for dinner and talk. I used to be invited to sit in, and they’d solve all the world’s problems. I found it really interesting. I found that it stimulated me to read the newspapers and think and that it was fun to see how divergent opinions could be about things like politics and whether it was right or wrong for the country to do this or that and whether this recent bestselling book was a good book or not, and my wife and I have that lifestyle. We enjoy book clubs. We enjoy evenings where there’s just no agenda, just a few couples sitting around and talking. I go to movies twice a year. I don’t watch any television. That’s another thing from my dad. My dad should have been a professor, but he needed to go to work because the family needed money. He never finished college, and his library was incredible. You talk about picking up things. I remember getting advice from him about what to read. Now, when I got to college, pretty soon I was heavily involved in laboratory research, and I didn’t get to take the course on Proust, Joyce, and Mann that I wanted to take. When I was 40, partly because of what I’d learned from my father and partly because it was built into me, I made a point of beginning to read the things that I wanted to read. I did read A Remembrance of Things Past by Proust and I read Ulysses by Joyce and I read the Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann over a period of 3 or 4 years. I think I was lucky in a way, because when you read them when you’re 40, you enjoy them in a different way than when you’re 19 trying to do it at college. My dad gave me advice on what to read, and I still do that with my book club. So he thought that Conrad’s best book was Nostromo, and not many people knew about Nostromo. They knew about Lord Jim and other books. We read Nostromo. It’s a fabulous book. Jane Austen’s best book he thought was Emma, so we read Emma in our book club. I picked up that and it fit and that’s what I did, in part, because of my dad. The other influence was probably my best male friend, Alan, and his parents had that same lifestyle. Alan’s dad was a member of the World Federation. It was pro-UN and pro-international corporation. They used to have great political discussions at his house; again, I sat in on those.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
This is really all about the excitement of new ideas, broadening horizons and vistas and then having conversations about how individuals might have an impact.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
Right. Then I had an uncle who manufactured gloves, and he had run an imaging company during the World War and did a lot of important work for the military. He was a frustrated doctor, and he was an engineer. He went to MIT. He had a metal machine shop in his house. He moved out in the country and built a telescope, and he built heart valves. I remember visiting his workshop and meeting the head of cardiology from the University of Cincinnati, and they were putting heart valves into sheep. His heart valve was not the one finally accepted, but he was designing heart valves at the same time that Mike DeBakey and Denton Cooley were doing that kind of work here. I could see he really enjoyed applied scientific research, but he was sort of reclusive. He was very different from these other people that I’m talking about. I decided that was exciting, too, so I learned something from him.
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 02: Role Models" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1418.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1418
Conditions Governing Access
Open
