Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

William C. Sealy, MD

Arrhythmia Surgery 489 William C. Sealy, MD (b. 1912) In my lifetime, the control of tuberculosis was the greatest benefit to humanity that has happened. You can’t imagine what a terrible and devastating disease it was. — On the early operations for tuberculosis Interviewed April 18, 1998 I grew up in Reynolds, Georgia, which is in Taylor County about forty miles west of Macon. My father was a small-town country banker. My mother was from a large family in Coweta County, which is close to Newnan, Georgia, now on the outskirts of Atlanta. They both came up in the post– Civil War depression in the South, and only had the education that was given in their local communities. My father went off to Atlanta at some time or other and took a business course. From that he became a bank officer and he finally ran the bank in Reynolds, a town of about twelve hundred people. Its entire economy was tied up with agriculture. We were relatively prosperous for a small town in the South because it was a good agricultural area. We had good schools, and everyone who finished high school was expected to try to go to college. Most of us made it, and it was from this background that I went to Emory in 1929. Very shortly thereafter the Depression started. I actually entered medical school in 1933, which was pretty much the bottom of the Great Depression , and finally finished in 1936 about the time that recovery from the Depression was beginning. Since that time, Reynolds has changed from poverty-stricken Depression to a relatively prosperous area. Our family doctor was well educated for a doctor of that period. He graduated from Vanderbilt Medical School and started family practice the same year. He was a very smart gentleman, and he kept up with changes in medicine. I admired him very much and used to stay around his office even before I went to medical school. I cannot say that he was the one that influenced me to go to medical school, but he was one of the people in my little community that I admired very much. Medical school at that time was probably different from today’s schools. In 1933, instead of students looking for medical schools, I think medical schools were looking for students, so they admitted a large number to the freshman class. We had eighty students, but by the time we were sophomores, there were only fifty left. Freshman medical students had almost a 40 percent mortality rate, so to speak, and gross anatomy was a big stumbling block. We had a very tough man that taught anatomy. We had one cadaver for every two students and we dissected all nine months of the school year, every afternoon. Biochemistry and histology were given in the mornings. Those that failed usually failed anatomy. The anatomy professor was very strenuous in weeding out the people that he did not think had the necessary equipment to become good doctors. We called him Blinco. It was quite tough, and we worked hard to show that we could finish. It seemed that the philosophy of the faculty was to 490 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery identify those, as early as possible, that were not going to finish , so they would not have to spend time and money on them. That was the way the unfit were eliminated. Of course, they were not all unfit, but Blinco thought so anyway. Our clinical work was done at Grady Hospital, which was segregated. On one side of the street were black patients and on the other side of the street were white patients. The teaching service was almost entirely in the hospital for black patients. As it turned out, the faculty was made up of several very interesting people, and the medical care given on that side of the street was infinitely better than care given on the side for the white people. The chief of surgery was Dr. Elkin, who had trained at the Brigham, and the chief of medicine was from Hopkins. They were very diligent and received practically no pay for running the service at Grady Hospital. They were all in private practice. We had one gentleman who ran the obstetrical service who got a public health salary. It was a very, very good hospital and we received a lot of good clinical training, but not as much academic training as students get now. It was a...