Alabama's Organ Transplant Pioneer

Many of us in Alabama are aware of the organ transplant program at UAB School of Medicine and its success over the years. After all, about 400 organs are transplanted every year and more than 14,000 such operations have been performed since 1968. Some people may not know that one of the world's transplant pioneers was born in a small town in Shelby County. Let's investigate. 

A summary of James D. Hardy, Jr.'s career and accomplishments can be read below in the text from his historical marker in Calera. Luckily for us Dr. Hardy published an autobiography in 2002; the first chapter describes his years growing up in Calera. 

Hardy and twin brother Julian were born on May 14, 1918, at St. Vincent's Hospital in Birmingham. James was named after his paternal grandfather James D. Hardy, a native of Glasgow, Scotland. 

The family lived next to the Newala Lime Plant in Calera, owned by the elder James who had been in Alabama since at least 1882. In 1883 Hardy, his younger brother John and two other lime kiln owners formed the Alabama Lime Company. "Newala" is a pure type of limestone found in Shelby County; lime plants continue to operate there. 

At the time of the twins' birth, mother Julia taught Latin at the Girls' Technical Institute, now the University of Montevallo. A graduate of the University of Alabama and Columbia University in New York City, she eventually married an older widower, Fred Hardy, a University of Tennessee graduate who already had three children. 

Hardy's maternal grandfather Diggs Poyner was a Virginia Military Institute graduate who taught military topics at the University of Alabama during the Civil War. After the war he bought property in Mt Hebron, where Julia was born. 

After marriage the new couple and Fred's sons settled in what Hardy described as their drafty house that nonetheless provided "a home and a solid refuge." The 1930 U.S. Census notes they lived in Montevallo on state highway 25. Hardy claims the house was called "Newala" and reflected his parents' states of origins, New York and Alabama. 

In the first chapter of his memoir, Hardy paints his childhood and teen years with vivid details. His father was a stern disciplinarian with the twins, and his mother was too--with half-hearted switchings and shaming. He recalls his mother's home schooling of Julian and himself, since the family obviously valued education, and she was unhappy with the quality of local public schools. Hardy also mentions berry picking trips with her.

Many other memories are included: his first "ghost" sighting, jobs he had around the house, 4-H Club, Christmas foods and celebrations, his bout with pneumonia, their dogs and cows, and the Great Depression. In high school he played trombone and Julian played sax in a dance orchestra, the Bama Skippers. He includes a long section on the medical lessons he learned at home while growing up. 

The twins graduated from the University of Alabama on May 24, 1938, in a very hot football stadium. In early September James boarded a train in Birmingham for Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Two fellow Alabamians in the school were waiting for him at the station.

Hardy left Alabama for medical training because the state only had a two-year medical program in Tuscaloosa at the time. He would have had to go elsewhere to complete his M.D. anyway. The four-year Medical College of Alabama did not open in Birmingham until September 1946.  

Hardy's historical marker notes he published over 500 articles in medical journals. You can see a list of most of them here. That marker is one of only nine in Shelby County. He was inducted into the Alabama Healthcare Hall of Fame in 1998. Hardy has an extensive Wikipedia page; the University of Mississippi Medical Center also has one 

Hardy's historical marker is in Calera

Source: Historical Marker Database

Side 1
James Daniel Hardy
May 14, 1918 – February 19, 2003


James Hardy and his twin brother, Julian, were born and reared in Newala, Alabama, 3 miles east of Montevallo. He attended the consolidated grammar school nearby which had 3 rooms for the 6 grades, then attended high school in Montevallo. James received his BA from the University of Alabama in 1938, and his MD in 1942 from the University of Pennsylvania, and continued there for his surgical residency and junior faculty experience. In 1951, he became Director of Surgical Research at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. Three years later he became the first chairman of the Department of Surgery at the new University of Mississippi Medical School in Jackson, serving in that capacity until his retirement in 1987.
As a surgeon, researcher, teacher, and author Dr. Hardy made signal contributions to medicine over his long career.


Side 2
James Daniel Hardy
May 14, 1918 – February 19, 2003


In 1963 Dr. Hardy and co-workers did the first human lung transplant. In 1964 he and co-workers excised a living human heart for the first time and performed the first heart transplant in a human utilizing a chimpanzee heart. The procedure emphasized the need for generally accepted criteria for brain death so donor organs could be secured.

Dr. Hardy trained over 200 surgeons. He authored, co-authored, or edited 23 books, including 2 that became standard surgical texts, and 2 autobiographies; published over 500 articles in medical journals; and served on numerous editorial boards and as editor-in-chief of the World Journal of Surgery.  Among numerous other honors James Hardy served as president of the Southern Surgical Association, the American Surgical Association, the American College of Surgeons, the International Surgical Society, and the Society of University Surgeons. [2012: 7444 Hwy. 25 South, Calera]

St. Vincent Hospital, Birmingham in 1908

Source: Alabama Mosaic

Photo of Shelby County Newala limestone taken by Charles Butts in 1924

Source: U.S. Geological Survey

Medical History in Birmingham: The List

I recently worked on a blog item fitting this general topic, and it dawned on me how many such posts I've done since I start this blog in March 2014. I've also published relevant items in other venues. I decided to bring them together in a single posting with links; perhaps I'll be doing something similar in other subjects. I'll try to keep this one updated as well.

So here we go....

Birmingham's "Heaviest" Medical Block

Birmingham Medical College 1894-1915 

Birmingham Photos of the Day (34): Some More Hospitals

Birmingham Photos of the Day (35): Even More Hospitals

Birmingham Photo of the Day (9): McAdory Home & Infirmary in 1910

Birmingham Photo of the Day (18): St. Vincent's Hospital in 1908 

Birmingham Photos of the Day (33): Holy Family Hospital

Dr. John Payne Murdered in Birmingham in 1901 

Medical History Panels in Jefferson Tower at UAB 

Birmingham Photo of the Day (38): Gunn's Pharmacy ca. 1915

Two Early Medical Libraries in Birmingham

Hektoen International series on "Famous Hospitals: Hillman Hospital

Profile of Dr. Lloyd Noland 
Important to public health in Birmingham for many years

Standing Tall at UAB: The Statue of Dr. William E.B. Davis 

Early black physician in Birmingham: Dr. Arthur McKinnon Brown 

Alice McNeal, MD: Alabama's First Female Anesthesiologist

UAB's Anesthesiology Library 1983-2015

A Plaque in UAB's Jefferson Tower

Alabama Medical Ads in 1911

Recently I was perusing the June 1911 issue of the Southern Medical Journal. In the front is a large section of advertisements and up popped several for Alabama institutions among all the others from around the South and a number in New York, Chicago and so forth. Let's take a closer look; some comments are below each ad. 

You can find the entire issue at the Internet Archive. The Southern Medical Association, organized in 1906, still publishes the SMJ in Birmingham. Dr. Seale Harris [1870-1957], a prominent physician in Mobile and Birmingham, was founding editor of the journal. 

According to the advertisement, this clinic and nursing school was operated by the older of two Davis physician brothers who were sons of a doctor. The younger brother, William E.B. Davis, became prominent not only in Alabama, but in the South and beyond. The two brothers were among the founders of the Birmingham Medical College. The BhamWiki entry on William notes they opened the infirmary in 1894. A statue of William stands in front of the Hillman Building on the UAB campus.  

Harry Tutwiler Inge, M.D. [1861-1921]

Source: Alabama Dept. of Archives & History Digital Collections

[

Eugene DuBose Bondurant, M.D. [1863-1950]

Source: Find-A-Grave 

These two men both graduated from medical school in 1883, Inge in New York and Bondurant in Virginia. Both were certified to practice in Alabama in that same year. Inge began practice in Mobile in 1883. Bondurant received his certification in Hale County; when he moved to Mobile is currently unknown. I found them both listed in the 1913 Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama. In addition to "normal" medical and surgical problems, this private hospital also accepted patients with nervous and mental diseases and alcohol and drug addictions. As befits their ad in a medical journal, a detailed listing of the hospital's equipment is given.  

This early twentieth-century postcard showing the sanatorium is taken from the Alabama Dept of Archives & History Digital Collections. 

The Southern Infirmary in Mobile was operated by Drs. T.H. Frazer and W.R. Jackson. This ad touts the facility's modern private rooms, steam heat, ventilation and lighting. Surgical, gynecological and obstetrical cases were welcome, but not the insane or tubercular ones. 

I found Tucker Henderson Frazer and William Richard Jackson in the same 1913 issue of the Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama linked above. The two men graduated from the Medical College of Alabama, then located in Mobile, in the same year, 1888. 

Frazer was born in Auburn in 1859 and died in Mobile in 1919. He became the fifth dean of the Medical College of Alabama in 1915. His son Mel Frazer was an attorney and in 1907 published Early History of Steamboats in Alabama. 

Jackson, a Texas native, did further medical study in New York City, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. Such extensive study beyond medical school was common at that time among American students who could afford it. 

The Southern Infirmary also operated a nursing school. A ca. 1900 photograph showing the nursing staff and students posing at the front entrance on St. Stephens Road can be found in the University of South Alabama McCall Library Digital Archives.

This postcard has the same view of the Southern Infirmary, with rows of palms  added. 

The University of Alabama School of Medicine has a long and complicated history. Chartered in Mobile before the Civil War as the Medical College of Alabama, the school became affiliated with the University in 1897 but remained in Mobile. In 1920 the medical department moved to the Tuscaloosa campus and then to its current Birmingham location in the mid-1940's. 

Dr. Rhett Goode, third dean of the medical school, served in that post from 1906 until 1911. 

This laboratory was "conducted" by Drs. J.P. Long and Charles Edward Dowman, Jr. I did not find Long in the 1913 Transactions, but Dowman was listed. He had graduated from the prestigious Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore in 1905. Their lab was located in the Empire Building seen below, which had opened in 1909. 

Empire Building

Source: BhamWiki



Two Early Medical Libraries in Birmingham

In March 2014 I wrote a post on "Alabama Libraries in 1886 and 1897" that described libraries found in the state in surveys done by the U.S. Bureau of Education. That 1886 survey found three medical libraries in Alabama. The largest was at the State Board of Health in Montgomery with 3000 volumes. The Pierson Libary at the Alabama Insane Hospital [later Bryce] had some 1500 books, and the Medical College of Alabama in Mobile had 500.

In this post I want to briefly discuss two medical libraries in Birmingham in the first decade of the 20th century. Comments are below. Today there are a few more medical libraries in the state, primarily at hospitals and academic medical centers. Since 1980 the Alabama Health Libraries Association has served those facilities.

Alabama Medical Journal October 1901 Volume 13 number 11

This item announces the intent to organize a medical library for Birmingham physicians. As items below indicate, efforts quickly began and a library association continued meeting until at least 1908.

George Summers Brown, M.D. [1860-1913]

Source: Holley, History of Medicine in Alabama

According to the article above, Brown was the "prime mover" in the effort to organize a medical library for the county society. As the item below notes, the idea quickly morphed into the impressive-sounding Birmingham Medical Library Association. Brown taught obstetrics at the Birmingham Medical College.

Alabama Medical Journal November 1901 Volume 13 Number 12

Alabama Medical Journal September 1908 Volume 20 Number 10

This 1908 meeting report indicates that the library association meetings were much like the county and state medical society ones--a chance to exchange some clinical information, eat good food and socialize. The Dr. E.M. Prince mentioned was a founder and surgeon for a number of years at South Highlands Infirmary [now UAB Highlands]. Prince published numerous articles before World War I and some indicated the presence of Dr. James Robertson Dawson as the physician giving anesthesia for his cases. 

That 1908 volume of the Alabama Medical Journal contains two letters to the Birmingham Medical Library Association from local physician Dr. H.S. Ward reporting on his visits to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and London, England. The first letter was read at the December 1907 meeting of the Association. In closing his second letter, Dr. Ward expresses the hope that "some day our own medical library association may be in a home of its own." 

I'll have to do some more research to determine how long this association met and if a library ever really developed and what eventually happened to it if it did. The list of names above in the original announcement indicates that a large cross-section of the county society's members at least wanted themselves associated with this project.

The second example is the private library belonging to a physician who practiced for a number of years in Birmingham, Dr. John Clark LeGrande. You'll note that he served as president of the library association organized in 1901. 

LeGrande taught hygiene and medical law at the Birmingham Medical College. He was the founding editor of the Alabama Medical and Surgical Age which was published from 1889 until 1911. LeGrande was also one of the individuals who helped furnish Hillman Hospital when the permanent brick building opened in July 1903; his contributions outfitted the obstetrical ward. 

LeGrande died in March 1906 and his personal medical library was offered for sale. The John Daniel Sinkler Davis named in the notice below had also practiced medicine in Birmingham for many years. An 1879 graduate of the Medical College of Georgia, Davis was the older brother of William Elias B. Davis, one of Alabama's most prominent physicians of his time period. LeGrande's "magnificent" personal library must have been impressive for its day.

Alabama Medical Journal April 1907 Volume 19, number 5 page 252

John Clark LeGrande, M.D.

Source: Holley, History of Medicine in Alabama

This page is from Jefferson County Probate records pertaining to Dr. John Clark LeGrande and dated April 7, 1906, just over two weeks after his death. As noted, he died without a will and the list of his "real and personal estate" included a "medical library." Family members probably asked Dr. J.D.S. Davis to handle the sale of the collection.





Birmingham's "Heaviest" Medical Block

Between 1902 and 1912 four of the tallest buildings in the Southeast at that time were constructed at the corner of 20th Street and 1st Avenue North in Birmingham. The Woodward, Brown Mark, Empire and American Trust and Savings Bank buildings were anointed as the “Heaviest Corner in the South” by Jemison Magazine and over the years the word “South” has often been replaced by “World” or “Earth.” In 1985 the location was recognized by installation of a historical marker and listing in the National Register of Historic Places. 

The heaviest corner on “earth” in 2005

Source: BhamWiki

The UAB Medical Center has what might be called “Birmingham’s Heaviest Medical Block” bounded by 19th and 20th Streets and 6th and 7th Avenues South. Buildings once and now at this spot have been the sites of much of the city’s medical history.

The oldest of these structures and one still standing is now known as “Old Hillman”. The four-story stone and brick Hillman Hospital was dedicated in July, 1903 and named after local benefactor Thomas Hillman, President of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. The hospital was constructed on lots 1-6 of the block, purchased from John S. Cox. He had bought the land from the Elyton Land Company in 1877 for $250. A Victorian house on the property was used as the hospital’s first nursing dormitory. 

The Hillman Hospital complex, ca. 1929. The original structure on the right was erected in 1902 and the annex, in the middle, was added in 1913. On the left is the 1928 addition, or “new” Hillman.

Source: Birmingham Public Library

Hillman Hospital 
 From the book Views of Birmingham, Alabama published in 1908

Thomas T. Hillman

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama  

Efforts to organize a charity hospital for the city had begun in 1884, and Hillman’s donations had helped fund several locations, including a 100-bed facility that burned in 1894. Hillman required that his support pay for wards for both white and black patients. Hillman Hospital was chartered by the state legislature in 1897 and operated by a Board of Lady Managers—wives of local businessmen, a group involved from the beginning as the Daughters of United Charity.

The four floors and basement were crowded with various facilities, including offices, reception rooms, a laundry, store rooms, and boiler and fuel room for the steam heat. Twelve private rooms and four adult and one child wards occupied most of the first and second floors. The third floor held a surgical amphitheater that could hold up to 80 students, sterilizing and ether rooms, two private operating rooms and more private rooms. The fourth floor held the kitchen (with dumb waiter access to other floors), nurses’ dormitory rooms, a dining hall and additional private rooms.

By 1924 over 4600 patients a year were treated at Hillman. Financial difficulties had continued, and in 1907 the land and building were sold to the Jefferson County Board of Revenue. An annex built in 1913 failed to relieve the overcrowding of the 90 beds Dr. Will Mayo had noted on his visit in 1911. Finally the “new” Hillman Building opened in 1928, followed eleven years later by a five story outpatient clinic.

Hillman Outpatients Clinics building, demolished in 1964

Source: Holmes, History of the University of Alabama Hospitals [1974]

Those seats in the main surgical amphitheater of Hillman Hospital were filled by faculty and students from the Birmingham Medical College. The school was a proprietary college owned by nine prominent Birmingham physicians and opened in October 1894. The college and the Birmingham Dental College were first located in a five-story building on 21st Street North originally occupied by the Lunsford Hotel. The school had electric lighting, lecture rooms, several laboratories and operated a free dispensary. Students were also exposed to patients at the city charity hospital, infirmaries owned by faculty members and clinics in nearby towns.

In 1902 the college constructed its new home next to Hillman Hospital and a two-story autopsy house behind it. By that time the school had 94 students who were required to study four terms instead of the original two. In 1910 the medical and dental schools merged to become the Birmingham Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical College. One of the school’s achievements was the 1899 graduation of Elizabeth White. She was the second female to graduate from an Alabama medical school, following Louisa Shepard who had graduated from the Graefenberg Medical Institute in Dadeville in the 1850s. 

Birmingham Medical College in 1912

Source: BhamWiki

Despite improvements in facilities, funding and graduation requirements, the school closed in May, 1915. Six years earlier Abraham Flexner had inspected the Birmingham school and the Medical College of Alabama in Mobile. He and his team were touring the country gathering information on all the nation’s medical schools for the American Medical Association. His 1910 report was very critical of most of those schools, including those two and others in Alabama; many schools, especially proprietary ones, closed in the next few years. The Birmingham school’s owners sold it to the University of Alabama, which operated it until the final students graduated. After a move to Tuscaloosa, the University’s Medical College of Alabama opened in Birmingham in September, 1945, using Jefferson Hospital as its base of operations.

Before that major change another building was constructed on the block in addition to the outpatient clinic already mentioned . In 1929 Hillman Hospital opened a nursing dormitory. The structure was renovated and reopened in July 1965 as the Roy R. Kracke Clinical Services Building. Dr. Kracke was the first dean of the Medical College of Alabama when it opened in Birmingham in September 1945. 

Constructed in 1928 as a student nursing dormitory for Hillman Hospital, the building was renovated and opened as the Roy R. Kracke Clinical Services Building in 1965.

Source: Holmes, History of the University of Alabama Hospitals [1974]

Roy R. Kracke, M.D. [1887-1950]

Source: National Library of Medicine/Images in the History of Medicine

By the 1930s another expansion of Hillman Hospital was desperately needed. The County Commission hired prominent local architect Charles H. McCauley to design a seven-story annex to cost $1.5 million in U.S. Public Works Administration funds. By the time the building was dedicated in December 1940, nine more floors were added at a final cost of $2.25 million.

The new hospital was state-of-the-art and known as the finest hospital in the South. Two banks of high-speed elevators carried doctors, nurses, patients and others from floor to floor. The fifth floor was a maternity ward; the seventh floor featured eleven operating rooms. Both of those floors were air conditioned. The top two floors had living space for 150 nurses and 25 interns and resident physicians. From March 1942 until April 1944 two of the floors were used for secret work by the U.S. Army Replacement and School Command. Responsible for personnel training, the unit’s headquarters had been relocated to Birmingham from Washington, D.C., to protect it from possible enemy attack.

1939 architect's rendering of Jefferson Hospital

Source: BhamWiki

Four years later the facility became the Jefferson-Hillman Hospital where the new Medical College of Alabama would soon be located. The UA Board of Trustees renamed it University Hospital in 1955 and finally Jefferson Tower in 1979. By September 2010 all inpatient activities had been relocated to the new North Pavilion hospital complex and other areas.

Since 1940 four other buildings have appeared on our particular block. Dedicated in February 1958, the Reynolds Library held the magnificent rare book collection donated by Alabama native and radiologist Lawrence Reynolds. In October 1975 the collection was moved to the new Lister Hill Library two blocks away. The Reynolds building was demolished in July 1979 to permit construction of the Center for Advanced Medical Studies. That building is now the Pittman Center, renamed to honor longtime medical school dean Dr. James A. Pittman who died earlier this year.

In December 1960 the Health Sciences Research Building opened next to what is now the Kracke Building. Six years later this facility was renamed the Lyons-Harrison Research Building to honor Drs. Champ Lyons and Tinsley Harrison, the medical school’s first chairs of the surgery and medicine departments.

The Monday Morning Quarterback Tower was dedicated on July 18, 1977, as Phase I of the Alabama Heart Hospital. Funding from the Monday Morning Quarterback Club helped with construction. The Tower was built on the site of the Birmingham Medical College and Hillman Outpatient Clinics buildings.

My guess would be that this particular block holds as much medical history as just about any similar area in the Southeast. Certainly, a significant portion of Alabama’s medical history is represented by the patients, doctors, nurses and many others who spent so much of their lives in these particular buildings.

A version of this piece appeared in the Birmingham Medical News November 2012.