The Quest for Cortisone

Chapter 5. Nice Guys, Saints, Eccentrics, and Geniuses

43 Chapter 5 nice Guys, saints, eccentrics, and Geniuses My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don’t you see that the converse is equally valid? I have frequently gained my first real insight into the characters of parents by studying their children. —sherLoCK hoLMes, “The ADVenTure of The CoPPer BeeChes” There are people connecting the dots between cortisone, the Mayo Clinic, and the nobel Prize without whom this story cannot be told. These characters weave in and out of the tale in a manner that initially seems erratic and perhaps even superfluous, but they are ultimately as important to the outcome as any of the main players. some of these “supporting actors,” like Percy Julian, russell Marker, and Tadeus reichstein, play obvious, high-profile roles. others, like Leonard rowntree, Albert szent-Györgyi, and the Alvarez family, contributed to these stories in ways that were much more subtle but nonetheless important. The start of the roaring Twenties saw the Mayo Clinic moving up a steep growth curve. Armed with Kendall’s thyroid extracts, the clinic was becoming a major center for thyroid treatment, including the now-successful thyroid operations that the Mayo brothers were routinely performing. Dr. Charlie took a special interest in thyroid surgery and research, and he was constantly searching for ways to improve the practice. his older brother, 44| Chapter 5 Dr. Will, was now at the peak of his career and was widely recognized as a great general surgeon, although he spent increasingly large amounts of time doing administrative work. There was no misunderstanding in rochester— even before his father’s death in 1911, Dr. William Mayo was the brother who ran the business that bore his family’s name. Buildings were sprouting up around the campus like spring corn, and there were plans for a massive new state-of-the-art clinic building. This magnificent edifice-to-be was largely the brainchild of Dr. henry Plummer, physician extraordinaire and right-hand man to the Mayo brothers. The new structure would eventually bear his name—the Plummer Building. But buildings don’t make a medical practice. People make a medical practice. And the clinic was accumulating new people at a record pace. A key recruitment occurred in 1920, when Dr. Leonard rowntree came to Mayo and became head of the section of Medicine.1 rowntree and Will Mayo were already well acquainted with one another: two years earlier gastric acid had eaten a hole through the wall of rowntree’s stomach, causing a perforated ulcer. Mayo had saved his future partner’s life by operating on him when the condition became life-threatening. Lesser men might have died from a toxic combination of food, enzymes, and bacteria pouring out through a hole in their stomach and poisoning the contents of their belly. rowntree survived. Perhaps he was simply too tough to be put in the ground by a mere gastric perforation—rowntree was, after all, a product of Johns hopkins, the prestigious, dogmatic, and intellectually demanding Baltimore medical institution that may have been “born” at the same time as the Mayo Clinic, but now had a hospital and reputation far exceeding that of the upstart facility in Minnesota.2 once established in rochester, rowntree began recruiting the best physicians from various disciplines to join his new section. Philip hench, one of his earliest acquisitions, arrived in 1921; he typifies the outstanding type of candidate that rowntree was attracting to Mayo. An equally impressive recruitment was Dr. Walter Alvarez, who joined the clinic in 1926.3 Walter Alvarez was a high-energy clinician and a specialist in the obscure (at that time) field of gastrointestinal motility. he had trained at harvard, where he’d worked with the legendary gastrointestinal physiologist Walter B. Canon.4 instead of going into research after his studies, Alvarez returned to his native California and became a practitioner in san francisco. he was an extremely popular physician, and his medical practice flourished. But Alvarez was bothered by certain elements of the California medical Nice Guys, Saints, Eccentrics, and Geniuses| 45 infrastructure. not one to hold his tongue when comment was called for, Alvarez publicly condemned certain aspects of the California health care system, and in doing so impugned some of his colleagues.5 his attitudes predictably alienated many of those in the...