Chapter: 09 MD Anderson Presidents
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Description
Dr. Bodey begins this segment on the MD Anderson presidents by recalling the late Dr. R. Lee Clark was “like a general” and a very wise man. He recalls Dr. Charles LeMaistre was a “Fine Christian gentleman” who projected a good image for the institution. ;
[The recorder is paused briefly.] ;
Dr. Bodey addresses the issue of MD Anderson’s explosive growth, asking How big do you want to be and Does it fit in with our objectives? He makes some observations about changes to the institution’s culture that have come with growth.
Identifier
BodeyGP_02_20130626_C09
Publication Date
6-26-2013
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD, Oral History Interview, June 26, 2013
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Key MD Anderson FiguresPortraits Growth and/or Change Controversy Critical Perspectives on MD Anderson MD Anderson History MD Anderson Culture
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I also wanted to ask you about the leaders that you worked with over the course of your career. And I wondered if you could talk to me about the various MD Anderson presidents, to the degree that you worked with them.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
I didn’t really have much interaction with them. Dr. Clark, I did. He was a remarkable man. He was—how would I want to describe him? No fooling around. I mean, he was sort of like the general of the army. If he said something was going to be done, it was going to be done. I can remember we had initial discussions about the medical—heads of the departments committee meeting about whether or not we were going to put in a laminar air filter room. There was a lot of talk back and forth and if this wasn’t such a good idea and so on. Finally, he had enough on it. He said, “Okay, we’re going to do it.” That was it, end of discussion. But I—when I first came I was scared of him. But as I got to know him over the years, I had a high regard for him. He was a very wise man. He basically started MD Anderson and recruited some of his old cronies from the army and that sort of thing, initially. He was a very wise man, and he did a good job. As I say, I was scared of him in the beginning, but after I got to know him, I had a great deal of respect for him, and we had a good relationship. Now, Dr. [Charles] LeMaistre, I guess, came after him. Dr. LeMaistre was a fine Christian gentleman. We went to the same church. He was a very, very fine man. Well, I don’t know. I have to be careful because I wasn’t in the inner circle at the top. He was just trying to do what was right. He was completely different from Dr. Clark, but a fine man. Nobody always did everything right. He tried to do well, and I think he put on a good image for the institution. He was a very dignified and cultured person and so on. Sometimes some of his selections of lesser individuals in the institution were not the way I would have chosen, but I’d say overall he did a reasonable job. I last saw him about two years ago. He’s still going strong. He lost his first wife and remarried. He was interested in cigarette smoking and cancer. He did a lot of work in that field. As I say, he was very different from Dr. Clark. I think he did a reasonably good job, overall. Dr. [John] Mendelsohn came right around the time I sort of was slowing down and semi-retired, so I really didn’t have many interactions with him. He obviously did a lot of good for the institution, and it has expanded tremendously. Sometimes I think too much, but now we’re in the newspaper every week for doing something dishonest. I don’t’ know. I probably shouldn’t say this. Do you have this on?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It is on. Would you like me to turn it off?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Yes. (End of Audio 5 Session 2)
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I think we’ll turn it on for this. You said part of the problem is how big do you want to be?
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Yes, how big do you want to be? I think you want to have some idea as to where the fence is going to be, and we’re not going beyond this. And if we are going to expand and we’re going to have the resources and the area to have the facility and so on, is it going to fit in well with what our objectives are and so on? Just getting bigger isn’t necessarily better. I don’t know what the limit is, but there is a limit. When you exceed that, then you begin having problems. I think Anderson may well have exceeded that at this point. I mean, it’s just incredible how the building extended under Dr. Mendelsohn, just incredible.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, I was going to ask you if you had observed any changes to the culture of MD Anderson, to patient care, any of that, with all of the expansion, because it has to create a change.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
I’m not in a position to say anything about patient care. I wasn’t heavily involved at that point. But the one thing you do notice is the intimacy of the staff. There’s no—you can know pretty well thirty or forty people. Three hundred, you aren’t going to know. I saw an obituary in the newspaper a couple of days ago of somebody who worked at MD Anderson that I’d never heard of. So I think that it depends on what it is you want to accomplish. I’m not sure that—well, I’m not being totally fair, because there’s been an incredible explosion of knowledge in recent years. So are you going to follow all of it, or are you going to be selective? And the same applies to patient care. You know, if you have too many doctors involved, they don’t get to know each other very well, and things might—the one who’s in charge may not know very well some of the people working for him and how they’re doing and so on. I don’t know what the magic numbers are, but I do know that there is a limit to how large you can get and still provide the services at the excellent level that you have been. So I think as far as Anderson is concerned, with my perspective, they’ve kind of gone beyond that. But I’m not an expert in that area.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I was wondering if you wanted to comment at all on education. To what degree were you involved in education in your department? You said you had—
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
We had conferences on a regular basis, and of course, I always attended them. Sometimes I presented something, but there were a variety of people. Some of them were just discussion sessions or presenting patients and discussing and that sort of thing, but I was always in attendance at those sorts of things. They were quite educational. Of course, Dr. Freireich attended and so on. They were informational to the staff. Also, the staff interacted, so you got to—you knew all the other staff members. That was possible because the department wasn’t huge when I was there. As they get larger, the intimacy between people is diminished. But again, it’s not appropriate for me to be commenting about what it’s like now because I haven’t been involved at the clinical level for, I guess, it must be eight years or something like that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Right. Yeah, and things changed really fast at the institution.
Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:
Things—in the beginning it was very easy. If I wanted to do more antibiotic studies, I had to write a protocol, have it reviewed, and initially just approved by Dr. Freireich. Later on we had a committee that examined protocols for the institution. You had to get approval, but it was still pretty simple to get something going if it was legitimate. Now it’s much more complicated.
Recommended Citation
Bodey, Gerald P. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter: 09 MD Anderson Presidents" (2013). Interview Chapters. 993.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/993
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