Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

William H. Muller, MD

112 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery William H. Muller, MD (b. 1919) I arrived in Baltimore in December 1943, and for the first three or four months I literally did not set foot outside the building. The work schedule was so heavy that one outstanding intern rolled the gurney from the operating room back to the ward, and then just walked out of the institution. He later wrote to Dr. Blalock that the work was more than he could tolerate. — On the surgical training program at Johns Hopkins Interviewed October 20, 1998 I was born in 1919 in Dillon, South Carolina , and I grew up there. My father was an attorney and had a fairly successful law firm with his brother-in-law, who was a politician and was speaker of the House of Representatives in South Carolina. My father had married a woman from a large, old family in South Carolina. They had originally traveled from Mississippi through Georgia about the time of the Civil War. Food and places to stay were difficult to come by on the trip, but a family in Marietta , Georgia, took them in and was very kind to them. My grandmother was born while they were there, and they named her Marietta Georgia Buffet. The family moved up near Dillon, South Carolina, and eventually owned a large farm. My grandfather died around 1895, but my grandmother, a rather stately, matriarchal woman, lived until about 1955. She apparently had some means, and lived in a large house. She had five daughters and two sons, and, interestingly enough, all of the daughters went to college, which was a little unusual in the South at that time. Dillon was a town of about seven thousand people, and it was a wonderful place to grow up. My father had a great influence on me, as did my mother, but I think my father had the greater influence. Although I was making good grades, he realized that I was learning very little at Dillon High School, so he sent me to McCallie for one year. I went there in 1935, in the middle of the Depression; he could only scrape together enough tuition money for that one year. I thought it was the best educational year of my life. After McCallie, I thought of what I wanted to do, and I thought of medicine. Times were tough then, so I also thought about the armed services and about going to one of the military academies. My father was a good friend of Senator Burnet Maybank of South Carolina, and he asked the senator if he would give me a principal appointment to West Point, which he did. I had a year to wait, though, so I went to the Citadel in the meantime. During my first year at the Citadel, I decided that instead of majoring in physics and going on to West Point, I would try to study medicine. I had a wonderful experience there. There was not the hazing there then that we hear about today. It was a good educational experience, and one that instilled some discipline in me, which I probably needed and which has served me to this day. When I finished at the Citadel, I applied to Duke University Medical School. The Early Years 113 I only applied to that one school, and they accepted me. I went to Duke in 1940, and it was indeed a wonderful experience. The medical school had only been open for ten years. Most of the faculty had come from Johns Hopkins and were very interested in the students and in teaching. Elizabeth, the wife of the anatomy professor, Dr. Sweat, was sort of the majordomo on the anatomy floor. She recognized every student except two out of my class of sixty-five or seventy as they walked in the door. That gives you some idea of the interest and attention given to medical students at Duke. The teaching was excellent and the environment was simply great. At about that time, in 1941, World War II began, and there was considerable emphasis on tropical medicine, but we had superb instruction in everything else as well. During the last part of my junior year and during all of my senior year, I substituted as an intern, since the number of interns and residents had been significantly reduced because of the war. I performed surgical operations as a senior student , appendectomies and so on, and by the time I started...