Arnold G. Diethelm, M.D., RIP

Early this past February I wrote a post about Charles McCallum, D.M.D., M.D.,  who had died on January 16. Dr. McCallum was a very important figure in the history of the UAB and its School of Medicine, eventually serving as President of the university. He also served two terms as Mayor of Vestavia in his "retirement".

I'd like to take note here of the passing of another giant in the history of UAB and medicine in Alabama, Arnold G. Diethelm, M.D., who died on January 28. He was born in Baltimore into a multi-generational line of doctors, graduated from Washington State University in 1953, and Cornell University Medical College in 1958. A fellowship in transplantation at Harvard followed, then study of transplant immunology in England under Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Laureate. In 1967 he was recruited by Dr. John Kirklin to come to Birmingham and begin a transplant program at the University of Alabama School of Medicine.

Dr. Diethelm performed the first organ transplant in the state of Alabama on May 8, 1968; the operation was successful. By 2018 more than 14,000 organs had been transplanted by the program, which expanded to include hearts, livers, lungs, pancreas and multi-organ procedures. Later in life Dr. Diethelm received kidney and liver transplants himself. 

Named a full Professor of Surgery in 1973, he chaired the medical school's Department of Surgery from 1982 until 1999. A football player at Washington State, Dr. Diethelm became a Crimson Tide fan after moving to the state. He even invited former coach Gene Stallings to give a grand rounds lecture at the Department of Surgery in 1998.

You can read more about Dr. Diethelm in his obituary in the Birmingham News and an official remembrance from UAB and one from the Department of Surgery. He was inducted into the Alabama Healthcare Hall of Fame in 2004. 

Dr. Diethelm reviewing a patient chart in 1991 

Dr. Diethelm in a hospital suite ca. 2000. You can see more material related to him here. 

Source: UAB Archives 

This article reprinted Dr. Diethelm's Presidential address at the Southern Surgical Association annual meeting in 1989. The source is Annals of Surgery May 1990. The article is one of 195 he published as indexed in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed database. 

Charles A. McCallum, D.M.D., M.D., RIP

I would like to note the passing on January 16 of Charles A. "Scotty" McCallum, Jr., dentist, physician, UAB's third President from April 1987 until September 1993, two-term Mayor of Vestavia Hills and much more at UAB: professor, vice president for health affairs, dean of the School of Dentistry, and chair of the Department of Oral Surgery. But wait--there's more! See the plaque below. 

For more details on his remarkable life and career, see his entry at the Alabama Academy of Honor and the extensive obituary at AL.com The UAB Archives also has some material about him. 

I had two minor encounters with Dr. McCallum in the late 1980's that were helpful to me and indicated the scholar and gentleman he was. When I first started researching the life and career of Alice McNeal, MD, the first Chair of UAB's Department of Anesthesiology, Dr. McCallum took the time to meet with me and let me pick his brain about her years in the School of Medicine. He didn't know her that well, but gave me some details and names of others to contact. 

In 1988 I served as Vice-President of the Alabama Health Libraries Association and was responsible for organizing the annual meeting to be held in Birmingham. Dr. McCallum graciously agreed to be the luncheon guest speaker and regaled us with a talk on the remarkable history and growth of UAB. I remember vividly that he noted the university then occupied 84 [or close to that!] blocks in the city. I wonder what the number is now?

RIP, Dr. McCallum....

Source for this photo and one below: BhamWiki

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



Birmingham Photos of the Day (37): The Birmingham Infirmary

I recently looked at a couple of old issues of the Southern Medical Journal from  1911 and 1919 and found several advertisements for Alabama health care institutions. I'll cover some more in another post, but the two related ones below jumped up first. Many such issues of the SMJ can be found at the Internet Archive. The journal, a service of the Southern Medical Association, continues publication today from it's office on Lakeshore Drive in Homewood.

The ads below can be found in the November 1919 issue. Dr. W. C. Gewin, "Surgeon in Charge," owned the facility on Tuscaloosa Avenue in West End which consisted of a former residence and an addition. He had also been a Professor of Hygiene at Birmingham Medical College. I've yet to determine when Dr. Gewin opened his clinic. 

In November 1921 the Birmingham Baptist Association purchased the Infirmary and the following month Birmingham Baptist Hospital was incorporated. Baptist Hospital Princeton currently occupies the site. You can read more about its history at BhamWiki. Howard Holley's A History of Medicine in Alabama has more history on page 69.

Alabama Medical Journal 1906: What the People & the Doctors Should Know

One of the early posts on this blog was an overview of the Alabama Medical Journal in the year 1907. I wanted to continue looking at that publication and year with comments on the first item in the volume. Oddly, the first issue of Volume 19 was published in December 1906. That's the kind of publishing practice that has driven librarians crazy for decades.

That first article was a talk by Dr. Joseph Nathaniel McCormack [1847-1922] of Bowling Green, Kentucky, who at that time was Chairman of the American Medical Association's Committee on Organization. Some years later he edited Some of the Medical Pioneers of Kentucky.

His speech was given in Birmingham to the December 1906 meeting of the Jefferson County Medical Society. His title: "What the People Should Know About the Doctors and What the Doctors Should Know About Themselves."



McCormack's talk is a long, meandering one, but does have its funny moments; audience laughter is even indicated in this printed version. He opens by noting that he has given frequent talks around the country to doctors and others, many of them no doubt in his role as Chairman of an important AMA committee. He also describes his long career in Kentucky, where he spent more than 25 years on the state's board of health. All of this work and travel put him in contact with many important individuals outside medicine during which he learned something interesting about his own profession.

"Now I started out in life with the impression that I joined a great and dignified and highly respected profession, but when I came in contact with that first legislature twenty-seven years ago, I very soon found that it occupied such a low place in the public estimation that for it to support any bill pending before that legislature lessened the chances for passing that bill; that the endorsement of doctors did more harm than good."

McCormack discovered that many people, including state legislators, had confidence in their own family physicians, who often warned them about the incompetence of other doctors in the area. Thus people thought their own doctors were wonderful and all the others quacks. One of the main points McCormack makes as he closes his talk is to urge doctors not to speak ill of their colleagues.

Another problem he outlines is the sad state of health care during the recent Spanish-American War; many U.S. troops died from preventable diseases due to unhealthy camps. "...in regard to medical and health affairs, the men who have the training of the work have no authority, and the men who have the authority have no training." He is critical of political and military authorities who did not listen to physician calls for changes in the camps and and did not provide better funding.

"This is a bad record for the United States," McCormack declares, "but I am going to show you that the record for Alabama is worse than that." True to his word, he describes the 15,000 cases of "consumption" [tuberculosis] in the state, "with, of course, a very large death rate." The disease could be wiped out if care were taken to prevent bodily discharges from those already sick.

He moves on to typhoid fever in Alabama: 10,000 cases in the state in 1905 with 900 deaths. If water and milk supplies could be kept clean from the flies that often carry it, typhoid too would disappear. "In this State, in the capital of your State, I fanned the flies off of my meal in one fo the best hotels in your State, and tonight in one of the best hotels in this town I did a good deal of the same thing."

McCormack spends a great deal of time describing the method of transmission of typhoid from military camp latrines and urban horse stables that attract flies. Then he reveals racial prejudice no doubt common at the time. "In a city like this it is possible to banish the flies, although I am not positive but what you would have to banish the negroes with them, because they seem to follow darkies very closely." Ahem.

In discussing diptheria in the state, he makes a similar argument about attacking it with milk sterilization and then pinpoints the problem:



Distrust of doctors' motives is hampering many public health efforts that would prevent several terrible diseases from being so widespread.

This transcript of McCormack's talk takes up 23 pages of the journal issue. In the remainder he offers several ways doctors can begin to confront the distrust issue, primarily by meeting with such influential groups as druggists, lawyers and journalists. He also spends several pages [15-17] detailing the fact that most physicians make much less money than the public generally believes.

Suspicians about doctors' motives and skill levels have existed since ancient times. McCormack spoke at a time when anesthesia, knowledge about the real causes of many diseases, operating room cleanliness and increasingly complicated surgeries were combining to create the foundations of the medical care we have today. What should the people know about the doctors? That they are not mostly quacks out for a buck but professionals who can offer knowledge and skills about disease treatment and prevention. What should the doctors know about themselves? That they need to work together, not against one another.

At the close of his talk McCormack was greeted with (Loud applause).

Alabama Medical Journal for 1907

Over the years several medical journals have been published in the state. One of those was the Alabama Medical and Surgical Age which in May 1900, in the midst of volume 12, changed its name to the Alabama Medical Journal. Under that title it lasted until June 1911. The change in name signaled the arrival of a new owner and editor, Dr. W.H. Bell.  In his book A History of Medicine in Alabama published in 1982 Howard L. Holley devotes a chapter to the history of Alabama's medical journals.

I recently came across volume 19, which begins in December 1906, on Google Books and will be exploring its contents in this and future posts. This copy of the journal volume digitized by Google has a bookplate noting "Boston Medical Library 8 The Fenway." In 1901 the BML had moved into its new location at that address. Their collections are now part of the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School.

Let's begin with the very first page of the volume. We see a masthead of the journal, telling us it's published in Birmingham, Alabama, with an office on North 20th Street. But before that information we are greeted by an advertisement for Phillips' Phospho-Muriate of Quinine. This product was manufactured by the Charles H. Phillips' Chemical Company, founded in 1819. Phillips invented his milk of magnesia formula in 1873. The company continued after his 1882 death under the leadership of his four sons. Sterling Products bought the company in 1923 and sold it in 1995 to Bayer HealthCare which maintains the brand today.

In its October 19, 1918, issue the Journal of the American Medical Association condemned this patent medicine's claims to treat physical and nervous exhaustion as "sheer nonsense". Phospho-Muriate of Quinine was a "complex and irrational mixture." But the fees the company paid medical journals to advertise the product no doubt helped the publications stay in business.

The next page of this journal contains two more advertisements from E. Fougera & Co., also of New York City. In 1849 Edmond Fougera opened a pharmacy in Brooklyn and from that start grew the company that still exists today. Salicylates originated from the bark of the willow tree and the pain relieving property has been known since ancient times. Aspirin is one modern product. Thus sufferers from gout and related conditions who took either of these two exotic-sounding preparations probably benefited from their use.

Here we are on the third page and confronted with yet another advertisement. [Don't worry--modern day medical journals often look like this as well!] What's up this time? Oh, Angier's' Petroleum Emulsion. Sounds like something that might be available after the BP oil spill. A photo of a bottle of the stuff from Antique-Bottles.net can be seen below the ad.

This cough medicine made from petroleum and hypophosphates went on the market around 1892. In its issue for September 12, 1914, the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that the company had been advertising this product as a "food-medicine" and an "ideal substitute for cod-liver oil." The journal noted that petroleum has no food value and gives a detailed analysis of the product's ingredients but seems not to condemn it too strongly.

Finally! We get to the first article in the first issue of this volume. The representative of a no-doubt important committee of the American Medical Association takes pages 1-23 of the issue to explain what people and doctors should know about each other. I wonder if anyone picked up on the irony of such a piece after the bombardment of patent medicine ads. Perhaps one day I'll explore this particular article in detail to see just what was going on in this time period according to this doctor. His piece was published in an Alabama medical journal because it was "an address delivered" to the Jefferson County Medical Society in Birmingham in December, 1906. I hope they ate dinner after the talk.

At random points in the future I'll be coming back to this volume of the Alabama Medical Journal to explore its contents in greater detail. They provide an interesting snapshot of American and Alabama medical practice just after 1900. After all, this volume alone has exciting articles like "The Ethical Physician," "Intubation," "Stovaine Spinal Anaesthesia" and one that's bound to be fascinating, "Degeneracy" by William D. Partlow, Assistant Physician, Bryce Insane Hospital.

Until next time!