Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

Harris B. Shumacker Jr., MD

The Early Years 125 Harris B. Shumacker Jr., MD (b. 1908) I have no doubt that the best elective operation we ever did was the coronary artery bypass graft. — On cardiac surgery of the 1970s and 1980s Interviewed December 3, 1996 I was born in 1908 in Laurel, Mississippi. I was not supposed to be born there, because all of the Shumackers lived in the northern part of Mississippi in Holly Springs, and that is where Shumackers are supposed to be born. My father was buying cotton and managing the cotton compress down in Laurel when I was born. Laurel is in Jones County, which has an interesting history. It was covered with pine woods, and the soil was not good for cotton. Most of the gentlemen in the South were only interested in growing cotton, so people from the upper Midwest came down, cut down the trees and built lumber mills, and made fortunes. That is how the town evolved and really got going . It was a nice place, I think, but I really do not remember it because I was only three years old when we left. I went back for the first time in 1975, and it was just the way my father had described it. We then moved to the northern part of Mississippi, to Holly Springs, for a few years, and I started public school there. When I was seven, we moved over to the delta region of Arkansas, which was about like Mississippi. We lived in a small country town called Marianna , where I thoroughly enjoyed my years as a child and teenager. There was not a thing in town, no tennis courts, golf course, nor swimming pools, and yet we never lacked in the way of fun. One really good but perhaps a little unusual thing that we did in the hot summer months was to listen to our neighbor , Miss Effie, read aloud to all the children in the neighborhood from Dickens and Thackeray and all the great novelists of that period. Miss Effie was the wife of a country doctor whom I admired very much. We sat there starry-eyed, listening to every word that Miss Effie read. I think it probably instilled the love of good literature in all of us; certainly it helped in my case. In those days books were really the only entertainment in a little town of that sort, except for the things that boys would do, like digging caves in the hills and scrounging around, making boats and putting them in the river. We had a good time. I do not regret the lack of anything, because our days were full. I was a good student, and I enjoyed studying and learning. I was accepted at Harvard for college, and that is where I had planned to go, but then I got a letter from a cousin and a close friend in Chattanooga, who asked me if I would give up my plans to go to Harvard and come to school at the University of Chattanooga instead. His father was having such bad financial problems that if he went to college at all, he would have to go there, so I did. I had a very good education, but I think if I were living my life over again, I would have said, “I am sorry, but I am going to Harvard.” However, I have never felt handicapped from attending the University of Chattanooga. 126 Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery I do not know why children aim in certain directions, but even as a small boy I did not want to be a fireman, a horseback rider, a circus performer, or anything else. I just wanted to be a doctor, but I have no idea why. One of my father’s brothers was a physician, a very good one, but that was certainly not the reason I was interested in medicine. I just never wanted to be anything except a doctor. The role models in Marianna were country doctors. They did a wonderful job with scanty preparation. I had great admiration, and as the years passed and I could assess what they were really doing, my admiration of them grew more and more. I finished college very early, in two years instead of four. The reason I finished early was that a wonderful person, the head of the schools in Marianna, said to me, “When you go off to college, you must promise me that you...