Pulse
Radiologist Finds New Focus
For the last two years, radiologist J. Milo Meland, M.D., has been taking pictures of old medical instruments. Three days a week, he packs up his 12.1 megapixel Nikon D3 (a present he gave to himself upon retiring from Consulting Radiologists Ltd. in 2008) and treks from his south Minneapolis home to the Owen H. Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine on the University of Minnesota campus. Once there, he selects a baby-blue box from a shelf in the back room, takes out a medical instrument, and snaps a picture of it.
It’s a photo assignment Meland stumbled upon while talking to the library’s curator, Elaine Challacombe, about the possibility of donating his own collection of old medical books and instruments. When she discovered Meland had photographic expertise—and a good camera—she asked if he might be interested in helping digitize and catalog the 750 or so old medical instruments that had been donated to the library by the Ramsey Medical Society. “She thought I’d enjoy it,” he says.
Meland does. Not only is he using the camera he loves and skills he’s honed over the years mostly by photographing wild orchids in the marshes near his family’s cabin, he’s also found himself challenged by the task of figuring out what the unfamiliar tools might have been used for. “It’s almost a form of archaeology,” he says. The collection includes such unusual items as an amputation set with carved ivory handles from the Civil War era, an implement that was used to remove something stuck in the throat of an employee of the Buffalo Bill show, and lots of obstetrical tools, which, he says, show how dangerous delivery once was for women and their babies.
To identify the tools, Meland uses the library’s collection of instrument catalogs from the 1800s and 1900s. Once he finds the instrument’s name, which often includes that of its inventor, he searches online for more clues. “With Google and a name, it’s fairly easy to get more information,” he says.
Meland says once he’s done with the medical society’s artifacts, he’ll begin photographing some of the other items in the library’s collection, which includes infant-feeding devices, bloodletting implements, and old pharmacy bottles. He sees the work as a natural extension of his career. “As a radiologist, I really was a digital photographer as well,” Meland says. “A big CT scanner is nothing but a huge digital camera that uses X-ray instead of digital light.”—Carmen Peota
War Stories
Minneapolis surgeon John Linner, M.D., now retired, kept a diary during the two years he spent as a Navy medical officer during the second World War. In the late 1990s, he started turning those writings into a book. The result, Normandy to Okinawa: A Navy Medical Officer’s Diary and Overview of World War Two, provides a thoughtful look at the war through the eyes of a young surgeon. Linner volunteered for the Naval Reserve after finishing his training at the University of Minnesota and Boston City Hospital.
Through his almost-daily entries, readers get a glimpse into the life of a surgeon aboard ship—coping with seasickness, combating a German measles outbreak, treating and educating sailors about venereal disease, enduring oppressive heat: “I never had to worry about hand-to-hand combat, trench-foot, jungle-rot, or a malfunctioning parachute. Aboard ship my fears were mostly psychological—the uncomfortable concern of not being qualified to do the surgery that I was expected to do, the dread of the ship taking a hit by a torpedo, bomb, kamikaze, or mine, or breaking apart in typhoon seas,” he wrote.
Linner also chronicles coming under attack and treating wounds unlike any he had encountered. Of the casualties who were brought to his ship on D-Day, he wrote, “The terrible thing about these injuries was their total randomness with no regard for any part of the human body; not at all like the neat bullet wound to the chest seen in a Hollywood war movie.”
Although the diary is the heart of the book, Linner puts his entries in context by providing a brief history of the war on both fronts, maps of the places where battles were fought, and photographs he took while serving on two ships, the LST-6 during the Normandy invasion and the AKA-103 at Okinawa.
Normandy to Okinawa is a fast read that brings the war home for readers who might only know it from history books and movies.—Kim Kiser
The Lost Tapes
In the late 1970s, while working on a project for the Minnesota Psychiatric Society (MPS), Marvin Sukov, M.D., recorded interviews with 12 prominent Minnesota psychiatrists. His idea was that the tapes would not be listened to until the 21st century. When Sukov died in 1984, the tapes landed in the hands of University of Minnesota Medical School professor Burtrum Schiele, M.D., who intended to write about them. But Schiele never got around to it. The tapes might have been forgotten entirely, except for a chance meeting in the 1990s between two psychiatrists, each with a penchant for medical history.
Minneapolis psychiatrist Deane Manolis, M.D., was at his family’s cabin near Grand Rapids when he happened to meet Frank Kiesler, M.D., a retired psychiatrist who was one of the dozen interviewed by Sukov. Kiesler told Manolis about the tapes. Curious, Manolis tracked them to Schiele, who by the late 1990s was living in a nursing home. Schiele’s wife readily gave Manolis the tapes.
Manolis listened to the 60-minute cassettes, made copies for the subjects who were still living, then set them aside for another decade until “it dawned on me that it was 30 years since those tapes had been made and they might be fragile.” Manolis, who retired following a career that encompassed work at Metropolitan Medical Center and Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis and in rural Minnesota, decided they needed to be preserved. About that time, he learned that the University of Minnesota’s Academic Health Center was embarking on an oral history project. Realizing that the taped subjects all had a connection to the university, Manolis pitched the idea of giving the tapes a permanent home in the university’s archives.
Although Manolis insists there’s nothing “earth-shattering” on the tapes, he says they provide a glimpse into what it was like to practice just before and after the introduction of antidepressants and antipsychotics. For example, Werner Simon, M.D., former chief of psychiatry at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, talks about average stays in state-run mental hospitals being 20 years when he started practice in the 1940s and 30 days in his hospital by the time he retired in 1971. Manolis says a recurring theme in the interviews is hopefulness about new treatments. Simon foresaw new drugs for depression and predicted an influx of “paraprofessionals” trained to do psychotherapy that would allow psychiatrists to concentrate on treating the more seriously ill patients.
Working to save the lost tapes has inspired Manolis to do more to preserve the history of psychiatry in Minnesota. Last year, he and colleague David Cline, M.D., picked up the mantel of Sukov and interviewed eight more psychiatrists. The two also are attempting to gather scattered historical materials and catalog them for the MPS.
Although Manolis has enjoyed tracking down these pieces of the history of his specialty, he wants to ensure that the next generation of Minnesota psychiatrists doesn’t have to do so much sleuthing.—Carmen Peota
Rochester to Host Historians
Medical historians will gather in Rochester the last week of April as Mayo Clinic plays host to the annual meetings of the American Association for the History of Medicine and the American Osler Society, which upholds the memory and spirit of the famous physician.
Minnesota is a logical location for the meetings, given the current contingent of historians leading these organizations. Mayo Clinic cardiologist Bruce Fye, M.D., is the current president of the History of Medicine Association; former director of the University of Minnesota’s history of medicine program John Eyler, Ph.D., is its president-elect; and Mayo Clinic internist Paul S. Mueller, M.D., is secretary of the Osler Society.
So what will transpire at these meetings? Presentations at the History of Medicine meeting will cover topics ranging from dissection to human subjects. At the Osler Society meeting, talks will focus on Osler himself as well as broader ethical issues.
All physicians are welcome at the meetings, which offer CME credit. More information is available on each organization’s website, www.histmed.org and www.americanosler.org, or by emailing cme@mayo.edu.