The Johns Hopkins: The Blalock-Taussig Era

THEJOHNS HOPKINS: THE BLALOCK-TAUSSIG ERA RICHARD J. BING* To remain involved with the past, one must relive the emotions about things and people. I could, for example, never write of my early school years or the years preceding medical school. These were merely roads leading to medicine and music, my chosen profession and avocation. But the writing about special parcels of time spent in medicine does involve me emotionally, particularly when these times possess the patina of youth. Therefore it is a pleasure to write, as my friend Mark Ravitch has suggested, about the time when I was closely associated with both Alfred Blalock and Helen Taussig in the early days of cardiac surgery at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. My relationship with Hopkins started earlier, with Warfield Longcope , Chairman of the Department of Medicine who brought me to Baltimore from New York. This was in 1943, when I felt the army breathing down my neck and when, as an M.D. without a medical license, I worked with Homer W. Smith at New York University on renal physiology. As a matter of fact, it was not just the prospect of being drafted into the army as a private that made me go back into clinical medicine; the M.D. degree imprinted on me an obligation to be concerned with the treatment of patients. Thus when Warfield Longcope offered me a position as an instructor in medicine at TheJohns Hopkins Hospital with a research grant from the Commonwealth Fund, I accepted . In reality it was not quite that simple. Longcope asked me to visit him in Baltimore before committing himself. During dinner on the garden porch, he asked me to identify bird calls. Dr. Longcope was apparently an expert in this field, while I just enjoyed the musical offerings coming from the garden. But he did offer me the job anyway. I spent a splendid year in the laboratory and on the medical wards with patients, ?Director of Experimental Cardiology, Huntington Medical Research Institutes, Pasadena, California 91105.© 1988 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 003 1-5982/89/320 1-06 1 6$01 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 32, 1 ¦ Autumn 1988 \ 85 doubling as an assistant resident. The younger physicians who had remained at The Johns Hopkins Hospital during the war years were a closely knit, social group. We often got together, children and parents alike, with colleagues like Richard Riley, Mark Ravitch, Elliot Newman, Jerry Frank, Donald Proctor, and many others. When I passed my national board examination in Baltimore I entered the army as a lieutenant , because at that time this was the usual rank for new medical officers. I was stationed mostly at Edgewood, Maryland, and time passed like molasses. I had terrible forebodings about having to spend 2 more years in the Medical Corps, when, in 1945, while eating lunch in the mess hall, I received a call from Alfred Blalock, Chairman of the Department of Surgery at The Hopkins, asking me tojoin him in setting up a laboratory for the physiological and diagnostic study of congenital heart disease. Now I must admit that, until that moment, I had little interest in congenital heart disease, but the idea of returning to Hopkins was irresistible . The army let me go and we moved to Baltimore. I had a premonition of what was to come when, on the drive from New York to Baltimore, we crossed the Chesapeake Bay on the ferry. I encountered at least six cyanotic subjects, not just children but also adults, on the short boat ride. Obviously Blalock and Taussig's work was well enough known to attract patients to a pilgrimage to Baltimore. At The Hopkins I was entrusted with setting up a research laboratory. I had never met either Blalock or Taussig on a personal basis, but I had heard Blalock's Harvey lecture on congenital heart disease in New York. Here I was at Hopkins, a Daniel in the lion's den, between two powerful personalities. Like most successful people both had a considerable dose of ego. But in Blalock's case it did not prevent him from furthering my efforts to build a laboratory for...