Chapter: 01 Education Leading to Work with J Freireich at the NCI
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Description
Dr. Bodey begins by noting that his father was a minister and he himself originally planned to become a medical missionary. He describes the medical role models he saw around him, including the family physician who suggested that he apply to Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Bodey explains how the draft for the Vietnam War led him to apply for a position as a clinical associate Dr. Emil [J] Freireich at the NCI in Bethesda Maryland (’62 – ’65). He next moved to Seattle, WA for his residency.
Dr. Bodey then gives an overview of how infectious diseases effect cancer patients and traces how his interest in the specialty grew during the sixties. He became interested in the problem while working at the NCI with Dr. Freireich. His interest in cancer dates a little earlier. He notes that during medical school, he worked with Dr. George Gey, who published a book on a patient with endometrial cancer: Dr. Bodey did some of his own research under Dr. Gey and learned about tissue growth.
Identifier
BodeyGP_01_20130619_C01
Publication Date
6-19-2013
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD, Oral History Interview, June 19, 2013
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational PathPersonal Background Professional Path Military Experience Inspirations to Practice Science/Medicine Influences from People and Life Experiences Faith Overview Definitions, Explanations, Translations The Researcher The Clinician Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research The History of Health Care, Patient Care
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
We’re ready to roll.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Okay.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
We are rolling. Okay, I’m Tacey Ann Rosolowski, and today I’m interviewing Dr. Gerald P. Bodey Sr. for the Making Cancer History Voices Oral History project run by the Historical Resources Center at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Bodey was first interviewed on March 2, 2003 by Lesley Brunet. Dr. Bodey came to MD Anderson in 1966 as an associate professor of medicine and associate internist in the department of Developmental Therapeutics. In 1995, he retired as chair of the Department of Medical Specialties. He also served as the chief of section of infectious diseases in the Department of Infectious Diseases, Infection and Control, and Employee Health. He is now an emeritus professor of medicine. This interview is taking place at Dr. Bodey’s home in The Woodlands near Houston. This is the first of two planned interview sessions, and today is June 19, 2013. The time is 1:28. So thank you, Dr. Bodey, for agreeing to participate in this project.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
My pleasure. I hope I have something intelligent to say.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, before we turned on the recorder—first let me ask you kind of the basic oral history questions—you know—can you tell me where you were born and when?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
I think I can.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Good.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
I was born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, in 1934. My father was a minister and had been assigned—had been working there in Hazleton, but he was assigned to go to Bangor, Pennsylvania right at the time I was born. So I was born in Hazleton and he was down in Bangor.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And did you end up moving down to Bangor?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Well, yeah, the family was headed that direction. My birth was just kind of a temporary obstruction. So we lived in Bangor for eight years and then went to Allentown for another eight years, and then to Bethlehem, at which time I graduated from high school and attended Lafayette College.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, I read that you attended Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Yes, I was there from 1952 to 1956.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And why did you attend that particular college?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Well, my older brother had gone there. It had a very good reputation. It was a smaller college, but it had a very good reputation. And if my memory serves me correctly, our physician’s son had gone to Lafayette, and he also had recommended it to us. My brother had a very good experience there, and that sort of encouraged me to go there.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did you live at home or did you live on campus?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Yes, I lived at home. That was another factor. We couldn’t afford for me to go off and stay somewhere. I actually—we had a man in our church who worked in Easton, which is where Lafayette is, and he would take me over there in the morning, and in the afternoon when I was finished, I would walk down Route 22 and hitchhike my way back to Bethlehem.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. And you did that for four years?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
For four years.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s amazing. Now, I’m getting the sense that church was kind of important to you when you were growing up with your father being a minister.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Still is.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. Well, tell me how—did that have any kind of influence on your choice of profession?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Absolutely. As a matter of fact, when I was young—very young—I felt that I ought to become a medical missionary.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, and what does that mean exactly?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Well, it means you go off—you get your medical degree, and then you go off to some foreign country and work there not only doing medical work but also presenting the Christian Gospel to people. My uncle and aunt were actually very famous missionaries in Africa.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, really? What were their names, or are their names?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Becker—Mr. and Mrs. Carl Becker, and he was there for many, many, many years. I think he was in the Belgian Congo, if my memory serves me correctly. So I went to Lafayette College. Our physician had been at Johns Hopkins and worked under Howard Keller, who was one of the four founders of Johns Hopkins Medical School. His son was a friend of ours, as well. He recommended to me that I go to Johns Hopkins, which I did. Both he and his father did. Actually, I graduated from Lafayette College, and my wife had spent two years at—I think it was—at Jefferson in Philadelphia in a nursing program. She finished that requirement, and I finished my college education, so we got married. Two weeks later we were off to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now was this—when did you begin thinking about infectious diseases as a specialty?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
That came much later, really. Let’s see, after I finished medical school—graduated—then I spent a year as an intern and a resident at Johns Hopkins. Then they did not choose me to continue for my second year of residency, and that was at the time when they had a military draft for physicians.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. And explain that just for the recorder so people who listen know—
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
The government was in a position to call physicians, in some age span, to work for the government, and some of them ended up in the camps and things like that. I don’t know how many of them actually went out of the country. My friend there, Charles Mengel, who I mentioned was the son of our doctor, had also gone to Hopkins. He suggested to me that it would be a good idea for me to apply for a position on the Leukemia Service at the National Cancer Institute. He said, “You’ll get to work under a Dr. [Emil J] Freireich, and you’ll learn a whole lot by being with him. Besides that, then you will fulfill your military requirement, because you’ll be in the US Public Health Service during that time.”
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now how did Charles know about this?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
I’m not sure how he knew, but he did it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, he did it himself? Okay.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Yes, he did it himself. So I followed his advice and they accepted me, and we moved off to the Washington, DC, area. Actually, we were in the outside of the city. For some reason I’m balking the name of the little town we were in. Anyway, I spent my two-year requirement there, and I found it to be so useful that I spent another year there. Then I decided that I had to complete my residency, but I didn’t know what I was going to do after that, except that I sort of had the idea that I would be a medical missionary. That didn’t quite work out.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did you change your thinking, or was there something else going on?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
No, it was just that things didn’t quite work out as I had anticipated. It wasn’t that I lost interest. It was just that it didn’t work out. So I elected to go the University of Washington to finish my residency training and was accepted there.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why did you choose that particular program?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Well, I was familiar with some of the work that had been done there in infectious disease; in particular, Dr. William Kirby was very famous.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
At what point did you decide infectious diseases were the direction you wanted to go?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Around that time, in 1960 I guess or thereabouts.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was it that attracted you to that particular field?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
My experience at the National Cancer Institute in the Leukemia Service. All these patients with leukemia didn’t have any normal host defenses against infection. They got not only the usual kinds of infections that people get but also other unusual infections, particularly fungal infections that normal people just don’t generally get.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Maybe now’s a good time for me to ask you—because I have a feeling that this infectious disease in cancer is not like somebody getting a really bad cold. Why are infections such a serious thing in cancer patients? And what can they do to the patient?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
In the first place, with some patients who have diseases like leukemia, their normal white blood cells don’t exist or they have abnormal ones, so they’re not able to fight an infection for that reason. Then on top of that, in order to treat them successfully you have to give medicines that not only will kill the leukemic cell but they also decrease the normal cells for a while. Then if a patient—if you are successful in treating the leukemia, then they’ll recover again. So during that time, they may have only 100 normal white blood cells and they’re at a very high risk of developing a very serious infection. If they have a serious infection, their likelihood of responding to antibiotics that were available at that time was pretty low.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now what happens to the patient? I mean, is it a fever? What other kinds of things can happen to a patient who has these very serious infections?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Well, they have low blood counts, so they can bleed. There are a whole host of things that can happen to them. And the mortality rate at that time for patients with leukemia was very high.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I think I read when I was doing the background that the infection was actually the biggest killer of people with leukemia.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Yeah, I was just going to say that the major cause of death in patients with acute leukemia was infection, and secondly would have been hemorrhage. So unless they went into remission, they obviously didn’t survive. When I went to the National Cancer Institute and worked on the Leukemia Service, I began to get interested in this problem of infection. At that time, there were very few antibiotics available, but we did a study. Dr. Freireich was very involved in giving some guidance on that. We looked at the relationship between the normal white blood cell count and infection in leukemic patients. That was one of the first papers I wrote. Actually, something unique happened to me when I was at Johns Hopkins. While a fourth year student I wrote a clinical paper on disease in the chest, which was an unusual disease called medical mediastinal emphysema, and I was allowed to publish that in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which was a major journal. I was the only author. I expected that one of my professors was going to loan his name for this, and the chairman of the Department of Medicine told me I could go ahead and publish it on my own.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, why do you think he said that? That seems like it’s pretty unusual and generous.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
I thought it was pretty unusual, too. I can’t explain it. I don’t think it was because he thought it was worthless, because he had to sign some papers saying that he agreed that I was going to do this. Then I had—another thing that was important in my life in medical school was that I worked for Dr. George Gey. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No, I haven’t.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
That book about the black woman who had endometrial cancer and they took her cancer out—he was the one. And I thought the book was unfair to him. He developed the means whereby you could make tissue—what’s the word?—grow the tissue in test tubes, and he had published extensively on that. There are some implications—at least what I interpreted as implications—that he was making a lot of money. But that wasn’t true. He was a professor there at Hopkins, and I worked with him for three and a half years. I did some of my own research; it wasn’t very important, but I did it. He allowed me to publish that as a senior author.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, what did you learn from Dr. Gey? Was he a mentor of yours, really?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Sort of. He was very kind and he helped me get some scholarship funding and things like that. I had a salary when I worked with him. I learned a good bit about growing human cells in test tubes and that sort of thing, just general principles about how to go about doing research. So, now where are we?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
We were—
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
We got waylaid there somewhere.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s okay. I mean, that’s the nature of a conversation, right?—digression.
Recommended Citation
Bodey, Gerald P. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter: 01 Education Leading to Work with J Freireich at the NCI" (2013). Interview Chapters. 985.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/985
Conditions Governing Access
Open
