Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery

Acknowledgments

ix This began as a project to interview some of the first-generation cardiac surgeons and to record the interviews on videotape for the Special Collections of the Eskind Medical School Library at Vanderbilt. It was supported by a grant from the Department of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgery of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Dr. Harvey Bender was the department chairman and made a number of suggestions as to participants and management of the grant. After his retirement, the grant was administrated by his successor, Dr. John Byrne. This grant made it possible to use professional video photographers for recording and editing the various interviews. Additional support was provided by Cardiovascular Surgery Associates at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, who supplied office space and a variety of other services during the preparation of the manuscript, and for their generous support I am grateful. Eventually it became apparent that these interviews would be more accessible if published as a book. In the beginning I was somewhat intimidated by the time and commitment necessary to convert interviews with thirty-eight cardiac surgeons into a manuscript . Without the enthusiasm, encouragement , and support of my wife, Marian, it would not have happened. She talked me into starting and inspired me to finish. Early in the process of editing the audiotapes into a more readable narrative format, I enlisted the assistance of my daughter, Elizabeth Shannon Stoney, BA, MFA. She worked an entire summer editing and retyping the interviews and at the same time preserving the conversational style of the original recordings. She is the major editor of this book. Robert D. Collins, MD, the John L. Shapiro Professor of Pathology at Vanderbilt, is one of the most senior and most revered faculty members at Vanderbilt Medical School. He has published several scientific books and also a biography of Dr. Ernest Goodpasture, plus a history of the origins of Vanderbilt University. He has helped me with valuable advice about the process of writing and publishing through what became an almost weekly telephone conference. He was the first person to review and evaluate the manuscript, and his help and cheerful encouragement has led to the completion of the project. I asked several of my colleagues and fishing companions to read the manuscript and to make suggestions. They each took this seriously and added a number of suggestions as to format, facts, style, and some stories from the past that were better kept in oral form rather than in print. Those readers were: William C. Alford, MD; Harvey W. Bender, Acknowledgments x Pioneers of Cardiac Surgery MD; John N. Hammon, MD; Robert K. Brawley, MD; R. Darryl Fisher, MD; and Jackson Harris, MD. They each knew the surgeons interviewed in one way or another and their suggestions helped the manuscript reach its present form. William T. Cocke III, BA, PhD, is a former classmate from our undergraduate days. He is now an emeritus professor at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. He edited the final version of the manuscript and made numerous corrections of faulty punctuation plus many useful suggestions about word usage and style. It was his advice to try to preserve, as much as possible, the individual voice of each of the speakers. During the last month of preparation, William E. Walker, MD, went through the entire manuscript checking facts, dates, spelling , and redundancies. He added additional insights from his years as a cardiac surgeon at Vanderbilt and later in Houston. For this, I will always be in his debt. I extend heartfelt gratitude to my loyal secretary, Ann K. Smith, who came to work on a promise that this would only take three or four months and has remained for the two years that it actually required. She cheerfully typed the manuscript several times over, gathered photographs, kept files and notes, wrote letters, and made countless helpful suggestions, a job well done. A final acknowledgment must go to the surgeons themselves for agreeing to be interviewed , and to them and their families for generously allowing those interviews to be published. ...