1914 born in Hayden, Arizona
1928-1932 high school education, Grand Junction (Colorado) High
1932-1934 undergraduate education, Mesa Junior College, Grand Junction, Colorado
1934-1936 undergraduate education, University of Colorado, Boulder (B.A., 1936)
1936-1940 medical education, University of Colorado School of Medicine (M.D., 1940)
1940-1941 internship, Allegheny General Hospital, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1941-1942 residency in Surgery, U. S. Marine Hospital, Mobile, Alabama
1942-1944 Medical Officer, U. S. Marine Hospital, Fort Stanton, New Mexico
1944-1975
1975 retirement
Name: ROOD, ALBERT COURTNEY
Profession: PHYSICIAN
Specialty: SURGERY
Date of interview: 5 JANUARY 1987
Date of birth: 1914
Highest degree: M.D.
Abstract:
This interview surveys
the life and career of Dr. Albert C. Rood (1914- ), a general
surgeon of Albuquerque,
New
Mexico. Coming to the state in
1942, Dr. Rood practiced for more than thirty years, almost all of them in Albuquerque. Among
the subjects discussed
in this interview are Dr. Rood's personal and professional backgrounds; the Public
Health Service Hospital
at Ft. Stanton, New Mexico; the mid-century
surgeons of Albuquerque, especially Drs. P. G. Cornish,
Jr., J. W. Hannett, and William H. Woolston;
medical facilities in Albuquerque; the fissure
within the Albuquerque medical community
between the Lovelace Clinic physicians and the
"Downtown docs"; the old-time tuberculosis physicians and sanatoria of Albuquerque; and many
others.
People:
1.
Cornish, P. G., Jr., M.D.
2.
Chouke, Kekar S., Ph.D.
3.
Waring, J. J., M.D.
4.
Peters, LeRoy
S., M.D.
5.
Hanson, K., M.D.
6.
Day, B. H., M.D.
Day, B. H., M.D.
7.
Cornish, P. G., III, M.D.
8.
Cornish, P. G., Sr., M.D.
9.
Wylder, Meldrum K., M.D.
10.
Woolston, William
H., M.D.
11.
Hannett, J. W., M.D.
12.
Cohenour, Leo, M.D.
13.
Connor, Wesley, M.D.
14.
Dodge, Che
15.
Nissen, Wallace E., M.D.
16.
Lovelace, William
Randolph, I, M.D.
17.
Lassetter, Edgar T., M.D.
18.
Rowe, Frank A., M.D.
19.
Sister Celeste
20.
Wittwer, William
F., M.D.
21.
Clayton, E. M., M.D.
22. Burton, Solomon, M.D.
People (cont.):
23.
Van Atta, John R., M.D.
24.
Forbis, Robert
E., M.D.
25.
Mulky, Carl, M.D.
Institutions:
1.
American Medical
Association
2.
University of Colorado School
of Medicine
3.
Allegheny General
Hospital (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
4.
United States Public Health Service
5.
United States Public Health Service Hospital (Ft. Stanton, New Mexico)
6.
Bernalillo County-Indian Hospital (Albuquerque, NM)
7.
St. Mary's Hospital (Gallup, New Mexico)
8.
Lovelace Clinic (Albuquerque, NM)
9.
Presbyterian Hospital
(Albuquerque, NM)
10.
St. Joseph Hospital (Albuquerque, NM)
11.
Women's and Children's Hospital
(Albuquerque, NM)
12.
First National
Bank Building (Albuquerque, NM)
13.
University of New Mexico School of Medicine
14.
Medical Arts Square (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Places:
1.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
2.
Bernalillo County,
New Mexico
3.
Hayden, Arizona
4.
Boulder, Colorado
5.
Ft. Stanton,
New Mexico
6.
Grand Junction,
Colorado
7.
Denver, Colorado
8.
Mobile, Alabama
9.
Gallup, New Mexico
Decades of interest: 1. 1930's
2. 1940's
3. 1950's
4. 1960's
5. 1970's
Mesh subject:
1. Surgery
2.
education, premedical
3.
education, medical
4.
anatomy
5.
family medicine
6.
internship and residency
7.
asthma
8.
tuberculosis
9.
hospitals, federal
Mesh subjects (cont.): I 0. Thoracic surgery
11. gynecology
12. societies, medical
13.
Cesarean section
14.
fees, medical
15. neurosurgery
16. group practice
17.
hospitals
18. pregnancy, ectopic
19.
penicillin
20.
endocarditis
21.
libraries, medical
22.
retinitis pigmentosa
Non-Mesh subjects:
I . Great Depression
2.
sanatoria
3.
Navajo Indians
4.
"downtown docs"
UNM MEDICAL CENTER LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY OF MEDICINE
PROJECT
Interview with Albert
C. Rood, M.D. Albuquerque, New Mexico Monday, January
5, 1987
Doctor Rood, a long-time general surgeon in Albuquerque, began his practice
in 1944, working with Dr. P.G. Cornish,
Jr., one of the distinguished older generation New Mexico surgeons.
Doctor Rood then practiced for about three and a half decades,
until eyesight problems
forced his retirement in 1975. The interview was held in Doctor Rood's Northeast Heights
home by Professor Jake Spidle, Ph.D., Department of History, The University of New Mexico.
SPIDLE: I'd like to begin this interview
by asking why you decided
to go into medicine in the first place. Did
you come from a medical family?
ROOD: No. My stepfather, who reared and educated me, was an attorney in Grand Junction, Colorado. I had no interest
whatsoever in studying
law, nor did I have any interest
in history. While
in college I put off taking history
until I was a senior because I didn't think I would enjoy it, and I enjoyed it even less than I thought I would (laughter).
I wasn't very good at it, because there was a balcony in the room where the history lecture
class was held. I sat
under the balcony
and
a football player who sat directly behind me snored
so loud I couldn't hear what the professor was saying.
His lecture
notes were done on yellow
onion skin paper and
every time he turned a page it crinkled and rattled.
I didn't get anything
out of it. I had gone to college long enough by that time to know I was flunking, so I hunted around and found a
housewife who had a Master's degree in history. She knew the professor quite well and knew what he would ask. She spoon-fed me history over one weekend,
and I made a B in the course.
SPIDLE: (laughing)
But you wound up pretty interested in history.
ROOD: I got interested in history as I grew older.
I find that things interest me now that wouldn't
have, at all, years ago.
Anyhow, I was a product of the Great Depression.
My father was a banker and an
attorney and he had quite a financial
struggle when I was ready to go to college. The little junior college there at Grand Junction evolved
into Mesa College, and the county paid my tuition, so it didn't
cost anything. I attended
there for two years, which I never regretted because
I had a grand time.
While there I was gradually introduced to the disciplines necessary for college while still being able to live at home.
That was good for me, because
self -discipline was hard for me
to manage
right away. For example,
I knew I had to take either
French or German
to qualify for medical school. I chose French
and I recall one morning during my second year while I was
translating from a book before
class the teacher
saying to me, "Mr. Rood, did you have a good date last night?" I was embarrassed and said, "No,
Ma'am, I didn't have a date."
"Well," she said,
"obviously, you didn't
study French."
It was a small school with less than twenty students
in the class, and this sort of
embarrassment was good for me, because it made me study. I guess I f elt that somebody cared. Nobody cared when I went to Boulder.
There was always someone
ready to take my place if I
stumbled, and I never had the feeling for Boulder that I had for the junior college
on that account. My counselor
was less than no good. Every time I went to ask him something,
I could tell he was thinking
about his research
problems, his graduate
students or something
else. He wasn't interested in me at all.
I decided I wanted to study medicine
when I was fourteen, because I had the feeling I wanted to do something
that was necessary, to assure that there would be no problem
about my being able to make a living. That attitude, of course, came as a result of growing up in the
Depression. Besides, I was always interested in science.
At about that time I got a job in a research
laboratory at the United States Bureau of Entomology. It was a great experience for me, because
it wasn't long before I realized that I didn't like research at all.
The reason was that ninety per cent of the work involved collecting data and classifying it, which was just as dull as it could be.
I say it was a great experience
because, without it, I may well have gone into something like that, not knowing any better.
This helped to solidify my idea about studying medicine, so I wrote to the AMA because I had no one to advise me about what high school courses to take for pre-medicine, and they were tremendously helpful. They wrote repeatedly, sent me all kinds of literature, and guided me infinitely better than any time after I joined AMA. They
offered detailed instructions on what to take and all about it, so that worked out pretty
well.
I went to Boulder and then to the University of Colorado School of Medicine
in Denver. I was consumed
with an interest in medicine,
as were all of my 62 classmates. The dean figured on flunking
ten or twelve of us and winding
up with a class of 50
for the remaining years, but none of us ever flunked.
One guy was asked to leave because they didn't like his personality.
They simply said, "We don't think you are
suitable material so maybe you ought to do something else," and they let him go. The main reason was that he was always volunteering information and they didn't like that idea in those days. If they wanted you to say something, they called on you.
As a means of disciplining this fellow I recall once they asked him to conduct
the class in
gross
anatomy. We really didn't have classes in gross anatomy, just question and answer sessions that were conducted rather
informally. The course was mainly taught
by an East Indian, a brilliant man who looked more like a Black than an Indian. He could quote word-for-word from three or four anatomy
textbooks.
After
two of us had worked together dissecting and reached a point where we just didn't know any more, he would come round to visit us and say, "Rood, look on page 1476 in Morris' Anatomy, where it says..." and he would quote the paragraph.
Of course, medical students
are very critical and suspicious and we thought,
"Bull. This
old guy has just memorized
some of this stuff to impress
us." But he did that every day --
all
the time. His name was Kekar S.
Chouke.
I kept in touch with him after I graduated
from medical school. I never knew for sure why he
came
to this country. He had a family in India and I think he completely separated himself from them.
As I went on in school I had a professor of medicine, a man of means who had come to Denver early in his life.
He had a tremendous
personal library, and his name was J.J. Waring. During lectures
he waved his hands to emphasize things and he wore a nice, crisp bow tie and a striped shirt
-- was always very neatly dressed
-- and we didn't want to miss a word that he said. He was a great teacher, and I recall once he came into the amphitheatre where he lectured and said, "The great Russell Wylder from Rochester is coming to visit next week and I don't want you boys to embarrass
me. So this week I'm going to spoon-feed you some diabetes."
When Dr. Wylder came, we got involved
in counting how many times he took his
pince-nez glasses off during his lecture, but he didn't tell us a single thing the old man hadn't told us the week before.
Waring was a great teacher.
SPIDLE: I didn't know he was teaching
in the 1930s. Did you know his biography just appeared last year?
ROOD: No.
SPIDLE: It was written by Helen Clapesattle, who wrote the Mayo Clinic story.
It's a
large
book, perhaps 450 pages.
So you're his direct protégé?
ROOD: Yes, he was my professor.
SPIDLE: Isn't there a Waring
Institute there?
ROOD: The Webb-Waring Institute.
They were both great TB doctors. Dr. Peters was
the
great TB doctor in Albuquerque, and he used more four-letter words in one sentence than, I guess, anybody else in his period of time. Yet he was greatly respected
by his colleagues and was internationally known.
SPIDLE: I'll sketch a rough chronology, if I may. Then
I would like your comments
as an eye-witness to Albuquerque medicine
in the late 1940s. First, when you graduated from Colorado in 1940, did you intend to be a general practitioner?
ROOD: Yes. I decided on doing a lot of things early in life. One was to practice in a small town of about I 0,000 population, and be able to do my own surgery as well as general practice.
We had a doctor like that in Grand Junction
whose name was K. Hanson.
He was an excellent surgeon and I never heard anything
derogatory about him.
He was full of tuberculosis, had very little energy,
and he never married. He lived at the La Court Hotel.
He taught the nurses and did surgery
and conducted his office, and that's
about all. He wouldn't speak to you if you met him on the street because he didn't
have the energy
to stand and visit with anybody. He just moved ahead,
never acknowledging you with a how-do-you-do
or
anything. But if you were a patient
in his office, you were the only person on earth.
You were the center
of his attention completely, and you felt comforted
by the attention he gave you.
Another
old doctor there, a nose and throat specialist named B.H.
Day, also was one of my giants when I was a child. He influenced my life a lot.
One time when I was in grade school I was running
after a truck going down the street, trying to climb on the back for a free ride. I couldn't quite make it, and I stumbled and fell into a vacant
lot where I slit open the palm of my
hand
on a broken bottle. I went to the school nurse, who put some salve on it and wrapped it up.
In a few days I went to the old doctor, and you never
saw air turn so blue in your life.
"That god
dammed nurse doesn't know what she's doing. She shouldn't have put any ointment in that wound, because it interferes with the healing."
He cleaned it all out, put some Merthiolate or something on it, wrapped
it up, and I got along fine. They
were my childhood giants who influenced my study of medicine because
I admired what they were doing in the community.
I interned at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as far away from
Denver as I could get and yet be in a good hospital. I drove all over the United States
while I was a medical student,
looking at hospitals,
talking to doctors and hospital administrators.
In
fact, the people at Milwaukee
County Hospital sent me for a psychiatric evaluation because I was
applying for an internship.
Of all the hospitals
I visited, it was the only place where they did that.
SPIDLE: That was probably a good idea.
ROOD: Yes. I applied at four hospitals that I thought were about on a par so that,
if
one of them accepted
me, I wouldn't sweat about whether I could get a better
acceptance later on like
I had seen some of my upperclassmen do. I applied
to Anchor Hospital
in St. Paul, to
Harper Hospital
in Detroit, Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh and I don't recall where the other one was.
I think Pittsburgh accepted
me right away as a sort of curiosity because
they had never had an applicant
from that far west.
I had a great year there, though it was a serfdom. You have no idea how hard they worked us. Many nights
I didn't get more than two hours' sleep and once I never left the hospital
for three weeks.
I was determined to do it the way the other twelve interns were doing it.
They had those guys by the neck, because
they couldn't get their M.D. degree until they finished
a satisfactory rotating internship. I already had my M.D. degree and had passed my state board examination from Colorado before I came, so I had that out of the way.
But
I worked just like the rest of them, and it was a great experience -- I learned
a lot.
The
only redeeming feature was that H.J. Hines, who was chairman of the board, lived just down the street from the hospital.
He arranged
a special dining room for the interns with a waitress
and
a menu with our choice of three different types of meats,
and we ate four meals a day. That made up a lot for lack of sleep, because we really enjoyed
it.
SPIDLE:
energy to do it.
Sure, knowing
that, if they were going to work you so hard, you at least had the
ROOD: Yes. And one of the peculiar
things about that place was that all the doctors chewed tobacco. The people who ran a store next to the hospital where they made Pittsburgh
stogies put up little sacks of tobacco
leaves for chewing
and the doctors always carried
these sacks in their pocket.
I've even seen doctors
there operate and chew tobacco at the same time (laughter).
Their surgery wasn't as good as what I had seen in Denver, and I was surprised because it was a much bigger
city. But
their orthopedics department was superior. If you wanted to be
anybody in orthopedics, that was the place to go, because
they had so many industrial
accidents there. That
wasn't something I was interested in, so I got out of there.
Some
of my colleagues were being taken into the service
right and left, and I figured I
wouldn't be able to get a satisfactory residency
without going in also, so I went to the Marine hospital in Pittsburgh and signed up with the Public Health
Service. I was sent to a Marine hospital in Mobile, Alabama,
which was the most beautiful
city I had ever seen. I loved it but it
didn't love me. I developed
a severe case of bronchial asthma there. I would go home at noon and
take intravenous medications to control it so I could work. I finally wound up in an oxygen tent and they gave me a month's leave
to convalesce in Colorado.
Afterwards, I asked for a transfer
to Fort Stanton, New Mexico,
which was the only inland Marine hospital I could find on the map because I thought it had the same climate
as that in
Colorado, where I didn't have any asthma.
I went to Fort Stanton which was in the mountains, and I loved it.
I
had a wonderful two years there.
I was a country
boy. They had all the things
I enjoyed
--
lots of horses to ride and beautiful country
to ride in. They
had a lot of places
to hunt
turkeys and deer. I had a big garden and had a glorious
time at Fort Stanton. Strangely, some of my colleagues
there were from large cities like Philadelphia and Boston, and they were completely out of place. They didn't enjoy it at all like I did.
My commanding officer
at Fort Stanton understood it quite well, and he let everybody assume as much responsibility as they could manage, and he went around to make suggestions once in a while. He didn't have his foot into everything like so many commanding officers
do. People from the surrounding countryside were brought in with acute conditions that required
immediate attention. I'd had some surgical
training in Mobile
so I did all the surgery at Fort Stanton except chest surgery. I recall once asking the commanding officer whether it was all right for me to operate on a
woman from the Capitan Mountains, a woman who had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. He said, "Rood, you can do anything you want to around here as long as you
don't
tell me about it." I knew he didn't mean that, but it was very comforting.
SPIDLE: That surprises me. I thought it was exclusively a tuberculosis hospital.
ROOD: No, we had about a thousand
German prisoners there, most of whom were taken off a German luxury liner bound for Central
America, along with a smaller
camp which held American-born saboteurs. We had to keep them separate from the German prisoners
because they were a bad influence. All the Germans were excellent physical
specimens. They
played a lot of soccer.
They were allowed to irrigate about sixty acres of adjacent
land to raise their own beans, potatoes, squash and so on, that they could eat during the year, so every morning
about three truckloads of produce workers
would be sent to the fields.
Every
so of ten one of them would hide in a dry irrigation ditch or something, and he would be missing when they started
home. One escaped and we believe he traveled to Mexico because he was never caught, though they usually
had no trouble rounding them up.
The border patrol at this camp didn't bother to send out a posse when men were missing -- they simply borrowed a couple of Apache trackers
from Mescalero, who easily captured
the escapees.
Apparently those Germans had seen some wild
west movies in their homeland
and were afraid of being scalped, so they surrendered with no trouble
at all. That worked pretty well. It of ten makes me think it's a shame they waste so much money operating
an expensive penitentiary in Santa Fe.
If they set up a facility similar
to that at Fort Stanton,
it could be operated very economically. These fellows lived in simple buildings, they played soccer on a large playing
field each Sunday, and two German
doctors were interned
along with them. SPIDLE: Were you responsible for the medical
care of those internees?
ROOD: Yes, along with several
other duties. I did all the surgery and also did some outpatient work which was tricky, because
the Germans would falsify symptoms. Many of
them were homesick and they came in complaining of an ulcer and it was up to me to decide whether they were really sick or simply
trying to get repatriated, so that was always a kind of guessing game. But we got along all right,
and I enjoyed it down there.
However, I didn't have any training in chest surgery,
so Dr. Cornish came down from Albuquerque to operate whenever
we needed him. He visited about once a month to do either
thoracoplasty or lobectomy
or something like that.
He figured that was his contribution to the war effort. They paid him $125 for that service
each month, and it was always a kind of joke because it was worth so much more than that, even in those days, than what the government paid him. He would come down, stay overnight,
and we began operating at 7:30 the next morning.
We usually finished whatever
we were doing before noon, and he would be off on his way back to Albuquerque. We got to know each other pretty well that way, because
I always assisted him in surgery. He told me how to care for the patient
post-operatively and so on.
I saw an opportunity to get out of the service a little earlier
than the other fellows, because I wasn't being advanced
the way I felt I should be with all the responsibility I had. I had the same rank when I went out as when I came in, so I asked to be discharged.
They let me go
probably because they figured
I was a liability due to my poor health record.
I came to Albuquerque and asked Dr. Cornish for a job as his assistant because
I wanted to learn more about surgery on women than I knew.
I hadn't had gynecology experience and that's a large part
of general surgery. I worked with him for several years figuring that, after following him around a while, I would go to some small town, set up an office and start practicing.
But he and I got along so well, we formed a partnership.
We were among the original
group who built the Medical Arts Square and it was such an innovative building
design that doctors
came from all over the country to see it. Charlie Mayo came to
look at my office once because he had never seen a medical facility
built like it anywhere else. It wasn't the prettiest place in the world, but patients could
drive right up to the
front
door and walk into any office without
worrying about having
to take an elevator. We originally planned
a multi-storied building
with elevators and so on, but the union began dictating to us about what kind of elevator
operators we had to have and how many operators
we had to have, so we just junked the whole thing and built a different
kind of building. We practiced there together until he passed away.
Dr. Cornish
was very athletic. He played a lot of
football and baseball in his youth, and he took to dragging me to baseball
games. I usually got behind a post somewhere
so I wouldn't get hit and went to sleep, because
I didn't care anything about baseball. Af ter about three sessions of that, he gave up on me.
SPIDLE:
the
state level.
I think it was P.G. Cornish
III, who told me his father was a champion golfer on
ROOD: Most likely. When
P.G., III, was about fourteen
years old, he would come to Fort Stanton
and stand on a box in the operating room so he could watch his father
operate.
SPIDLE:
Cornish, Senior.
Someone told me he used to go on house calls with his grandfather, old P.G.
ROOD: I wouldn't be surprised. His grandfather was the first man to practice surgery as a specialty in either Arizona
or New Mexico. He practiced in Flagstaff for a long time, and I remember Dr. Cornish telling
stories about traveling in a buggy
with his father
occasionally to see patients
who lived out of town. I recall going on a call down on South
Walter to a home once owned by old Dr. Cornish.
It was a brick house a block or two off Central. The people
who owned the house
showed me an old textbook
written by Sir William Osler they had found down in the basement, and I've kicked myself
ever since for not asking
whether I could buy it from them. I should have, because
the book was over a hundred years old.
SPIDLE: (chuckling) And you wonder how something like that gets into a basement on South Walter in Albuquerque. In line with that, I'd like to ask you to walk into Albuquerque one
more time, because
I am interested in your comments about the town's medical community
in 1944. I know P.G. Cornish
was one of the lions in the Medical Society here.
ROOD: Meldrum K. Wylder was one of the leading
figures here in those days, and a very brilliant man then.
He was very active politically as well as medically.
He was probably the best-known pediatrician in the state in his day, even though he did more obstetrics than anyone else. He drove all over the middle Rio Grande Valley and the Estancia
Valley
delivering babies night and day.
They tell a story about Meldrum Wylder,
and I wish I had been there to see it.
He was in court one time when Joe Smith, a capable but rather unscrupulous corporation lawyer, was one
of the attorneys. He asked Dr. Wylder, "Would you please tell the court how the Bernalillo County Medical Society feels about Dr. Lovelace?"
Dr.
Wylder responded by saying, "The
Bernalillo County Medical Society feels about Dr.
Lovelace the way the Bar Association feels about you."
It created havoc, and they had to recess the court as a result.
SPIDLE: (laughing)
Yes, I've heard about Dr. Wylder.
But I'm particularly interested in the surgeons.
There was Cornish. What about Hannett
and Woolston?
ROOD: Dr.
Woolston was a former professor
at the University of Chicago School of
Medicine. He kept pretty much to himself,
was quite active at Presbyterian Hospital, and I knew him quite well.
But he wasn't the kind of man you could sit down and visit with. He didn't have too much to say. Dr. Royer used to help Dr. Leo Cohenour
with his surgery.
Old Dr. Cohenour
was not a very likable
person. He was Chairman of the County Procurement and Assignment Service,
and after I had been here two years he 'declared me
Eligible for re-enlistment. I called his office to make an appointment with him, but there was no way to talk to him.
He wouldn't
see me, yet I had medical discharges and summaries that would have excluded
me from military service any longer.
I couldn't
get to him so, after throwing
some of the notices
I received from the Armed Services in the wastebasket a few times, I finally decided I had to answer. I had to get my high school grades, college
grades, medical school grades and all this stuff
together, and it was a chore to re-apply for a position.
However, when I sent them a copy of my discharge summary
after I had spent a month in the hospital
in Mobile as
a patient,
they wrote to thank me, saying they wouldn't need me.
Many of us had rather unsatisfactory relationships with the older doctors in Albuquerque,
so we formed a club that included
doctors from the Lovelace Clinic as well as other young doctors. About forty of us belonged to what was called the Rio Grande Social and Across the River Hatchet Burial Society,
and we met in the back room of Johnny's
Inn. It was a great meeting. We had no officers,
no rules or regulations, and the purpose
of the organization was to
remove from political office a lot of the overbearing old doctors who were controlling medicine in New Mexico. It was a very effective
organization.
They took up what was important at the beginning of the meeting, then we had dinner. Wes Connor would get up and tell a few risqué stories, which he was good at, and some doctors stayed around
playing poker until the wee hours.
I attended
three or four of those meetings,
and it was probably the most effective medical
society I ever belonged
to (both men laugh).
SPIDLE: And certainly the most enjoyable. I always thought P.G. Cornish was one of the establishment figures at whom such a group aimed.
ROOD: I don't think anyone had any bone to pick with Dr. Cornish at all. He was pretty much liked by everybody.
He was the first president of BCMC when the hospital
opened. I worked there for a while, doing five or six tonsillectomies at a time for Ben Roberts, who was
in charge of nose and throat, to try to help clear up their tonsillectomy backlog.
Dr. Cornish was not cut out to be the leader of a large group; he was well liked by most everybody on an individual basis.
On the other hand, Dr. Hannett was more poised
and more capable of conducting large meetings, and he had a limerick on the tip of his tongue for everything.
He was very literary, and wrote the most interesting, funny letters you ever read in your life.
He once wrote home about his experiences as a patient while he was on the west coast.
He was full of all kinds of stories about his practice
in Gallup. He was a
surgeon in Buffalo, New York, when he was younger. He was heartbroken when he lost his wife, who died of an illness that I don't recall now, so he traveled
to Gallup to visit his brother.
There is one story he told me himself.
One sparkling, sunshiny morning he got up and went for a walk around the block.
He was stimulated by it all so he walked along until he came to what was the front of St. Mary's Hospital.
He thought
he might find someone there to visit with, so he entered
the lobby where the Sister Superior greeted
him.
"Dr. Hannett,
I'm so glad you came to visit. I have a couple of young staff doctors I'd like you to meet."
The fellows soon arrived, looking
sort of serious and sober and they, too, said they were glad he came, and added, "Providence must have had something to do with it," because
we have a difficult confinement
case that has been in labor
for two days.
We're about to apply instruments, and we would like you to look at her."
He said, "Oh, I don't want to do that, boys. I'm just here on vacation
and I don't want to do any work."
They said they needed his help, "and
we would sure appreciate it if you would look at her." Finally he said, "All
right. If you feel that way, I'll be happy to do what I can."
Dr.
Hannett was the kind of man who would say anything, no matter how shocking it was.
When he finished with the examination he said, "Boys, when you deliver
that baby, I'd like to
have
one of his ears for a
souvenir."
Of course they were upset and asked what he meant by it.
"Well, the mother is too small; she'll never deliver from below and must have a Cesarean."
They said they didn't know anything about the procedure, and asked whether
he could do it. "Oh, sure," he said. And that was the first Cesarean ever done in a McKinley
County Catholic hospital.
Another
time they brought
in Che Dodge, an old Navajo
Chief. The story goes that he was
stolen by the Navajos when he was a baby and reared as one of them. Anyway, he was considered probably
the best chief the Navajos ever had, at least up to that time. He got sick with jaundice and one day they brought him in to the hospital.
Dr. Hannett took X-rays, found gallstones, and told Che they needed to be removed.
The chief consented to the operation
and got along fine afterward,
with no complications whatsoever. He left the hospital
after a week and returned
to the reservation, and a week later came to have his sutures removed.
Dr. Hannett
said he didn't see Che again for a month, when he came in
once
more and said, "Dr. Hannett,
what do I owe you for your help?"
This was back in the 1930s when times were really tough and Dr. Hannett didn't want to
overcharge him, so he said, "Well, I could use a load of wood."
And he told me, "You
know, I never had to buy another
stick of firewood
as long as I lived in Gallup. Every
now and then some Indian
would look over the wall into my back yard and if
my woodpile was getting low, I had a new load of wood."
(end tape one, side one)
(begin tape one, side two)
ROOD: Dr. Cornish
and Dr. Hannett worked together
and they were the most coordinated pair of surgeons
I ever saw. They didn't help each other; they both operated at once, yet they never got into each other's way. Dr. Nissen was Dr. Hannett's
assistant, I was Dr.
Cornish's assistant, and we both watched them operate together. On really serious
cases, one would ask the other to assist rather than using either of us younger guys, because they had worked together
for a long time before we came there.
Every so often while I was helping Dr. Cornish, he would say, "I would have to enlarge this incision if Jim was here because
he wouldn't like it this way," referring to Dr. Hannett.
SPIDLE: I learned
a great deal about him when I interviewed Dr. Hannett's daughter, who lives out on Juan Tabo.
ROOD: He has another
daughter named Patty Hueter, who lives in the old homestead
on Lomas. I used to call her when I wanted permission to write something
about Dr. Hannett.
A lot of things
I have written could very well be the source of
a lawsuit, because I don't have permission
for
some of it. Some
of it was gathered from previously written
sources, and so on.
I've
never done too much with it, and when my eyesight went bad, I couldn't read or write
any more. Dr. Hannett was an excellent surgeon.
I saw him do several
cerebral decompressions for subdural hematomas that general
surgeons rarely did.
Of course, today,
with CAT scans, it's no
problem anymore, but to make a diagnosis in the early days was sometimes more complicated than was realized. Dr.
Hannett practiced in an era before there
were X-rays, and he told me how they would set an arm or a leg.
They measured
the uninjured leg, then measured the other to establish whether it was properly
set.
He once told me about helping one of the neurosurgeons who moved to town.
Many neurosurgeons are kind of nervous and high-strung, and they say things in the operating
room that they wouldn't
say socially at all.
In this instance they had a sucker there which was pretty close to the brain. Brain
tissue is like mush with no substance
at all. It's easily injured, and this young surgeon said to Dr. Hannett, "Don't suck the brain."
Dr. Hannett was kind of stressed and he shouted,
"Sonny, I was doing these when you were in diapers." The nurses never forgot
that; they laughed
about it for weeks afterwards (laughter).
SPIDLE: You've alluded to another Albuquerque surgeon,
Uncle Doc Lovelace. When you came in 1944, I know full well that a pronounced split existed within this medical community between
Dr. Lovelace and his clinic, and the downtown doctors. I'm interested in your reflections on that.
ROOD: I really
ought not to comment on that, because
I had no first-hand experiences. I only knew about things from hearsay.
I stayed strictly away from the Lovelace Clinic, just as I would stay away from a chiropractor. I've known some of the men who worked
out there and they were fine, excellent
men. But from the stories I heard, I wasn't interested in old Dr.
Lassetteror old Dr. Lovelace. I think they were very capable businessmen, because they created quite an institution.
I never was interested in group or clinic medicine.
I preferred
solo
practice. When Dr. Cornish passed away, I never got a partner.
I did solo practice
and found it very gratifying because I had a lot of wonderful colleagues. They took excellent care of my patients when I wanted to leave town.
Dr.
Frank Rowe, who has now passed away, often covered for me, and he
was very capable. I never worked
with him very much, but I often visited
with him. We drank coffee together
at the hospital, and he had an excellent reputation.
SPIDLE: We didn't get to interview him. He was low on our priority list because we had no idea he was ill. We just don't anticipate
that kind of thing.
ROOD: Bataan Hospital
was off my beaten path. In fact, I didn't like to practice
at Anna Kaseman Hospital
either because, even if I had only one patient,
it meant spending at least an hour a day to go there, take care of that person,
then get back to the office. It wasn't geographically convenient. I practiced mainly at Presbyterian and St. Joseph's. I let my patients decide where they wanted to go, and ninety per cent of them chose to go to Presbyterian.
Actually, it would have been nice had my Protestant
patients gone to St. Josephs
and my Catholic patients gone to Presbyterian, because
the Sisters knew they had captured the Catholics, so they worked a little harder on Protestants.
SPIDLE: When I spoke with Dr. Edward Parnall a week or two ago, he mentioned
his experience as a young doctor
here in the late 1940s.
He said he had difficulty getting patients into the hospitals--the older doctors "controlled the beds," to use his phrase.
Apparently you had no similar experience.
ROOD: Oh, yes, I sure did. I had a lot of trouble getting
patients into St. Joe's.
They were supposed to accommodate us on a rotating
basis, but they gave tremendous preference to members of Lovelace Clinic
before Bataan Hospital
was built. So much so that I finally
went to the Sister
Superior and explained that it was my turn,
and I wasn't able to get a hospital patient admitted. She looked me right in the eye and said, "You know what you can do about it, Doctor," so I realized
I had a problem there. That was in the early days. Later,
when the new hospital was built and Sister Celeste
came in, things
were entirely different. She
was a wonderful
administrator and a fine person
to know. Actually, she also was president.
SPIDLE: Yes, she was a very talented
woman. ROOD: I admired
her a great deal.
SPIDLE: Dr. Parnall said he sometimes had recourse to Dr. Rice's Women's and
Children's Hospital.
ROOD: I operated
there on occasion
too, and found it all right.
It was a little different, but I never had any serious
problems.
SPIDLE: In general, how would you appraise
the facilities in Albuquerque hospitals during the 1940s? Did they compare favorably
with Pittsburgh, for example?
ROOD: Well, Dr. Cornish was a much better surgeon than anyone I saw in Pittsburgh. There was no comparison. I was really hypnotized with his diagnostic
capabilities. I saw a couple of things the first week I was in Albuquerque that amazed me.
He once said to me, "Rood, would you go out to 214 South Stanford, where Mrs. so-and-so has a ruptured ectopic. I want you to put her into the hospital, schedule
her for noon, and we'll operate on her over the noon hour."
Diagnosing an ectopic pregnancy
can be one of the most difficult
things in the world, and
he did it over the telephone. I was very impressed (laughter). She entered the hospital and, sure enough, that's
what she had. We operated on her, and she got along fine.
Another
time concerns an old doctor in Los Lunas, Dr. Wittwer, who practiced up into his
nineties. He was always very well dressed, with his whiskers trimmed
just so. He was kind of the king of Los Lunas and everybody loved him.
But when he called to say he was sending a patient to Presbyterian Hospital, you had better be there, because
it was always something terrible that he couldn't manage and we might not be able to, either.
One of the first patients
I saw that he sent to the hospital was a pregnant
woman who had
been
delivered breech by a midwife
down there, and she had pulled the head off, rupturing the uterus. When
we opened her up, the head was floating around
in the intestines. Dr. Cornish
took her uterus out, gave her transfusions, and she got well.
But I was horrified. That was quite an introduction.
Dr. Wittwer
lived for several years after I
came here. I used to meet a couple of old doctors at medical meetings
around Albuquerque occasionally -- Dr. Solomon Burton and Dr.
E.M. Clayton. Dr. Clayton practiced
pretty much the way Dr. Wylder did, so one day I said,
"When you're doing a
delivery in the home, Doctor, do you carry a sterile pack with you, and drapes and so on?"
"Oh, hell," he said. "I
don't have any drapes or anything. If a woman gets cold I'll throw a
horse
blanket or something
over her"(laughter). I never saw him practice
in a hospital, but those two old doctors were fun to visit with.
Dr. Cornish told a story about Dr. Burton, who had pernicious anemia in the days before they had liver extract
or any of the more specific medications for treatment. There wasn't much to do for them except feed them raw liver and give them transfusions.
Dr. Cornish
gave Dr.
Burton a transfusion and it wasn't
long afterward that he made a very successful and lucrative real estate transaction, so Dr. Cornish teased him by saying he had given Dr. Burton a pint of
Jewish blood. Dr. Burton didn't think hat was funny at all (laughter).
Both Burton
A venue and Burton Park are named after him.
SPIDLE: When you came was everyone still in the First National
Bank building?
ROOD: Pretty much, yes.
It was crowded,
and maternity cases hated it because they got jostled in the elevators. I had one examining
room and was always waiting for some woman to
get
her girdle either on or off, so I wasted a lot of time. Dr. Cornish practiced
with his father
in the same old suite and they had an assistant
before I arrived. He was a nice young man who had tuberculosis and is dead now, but he couldn't
stand the pace. When
I came to Albuquerque, Dr. Cornish was doing 700 majors a year, which is a tremendously large surgical practice
to be doing by yourself.
I felt he needed
an assistant; his wife felt he needed an assistant,
so we worked that out, and we hit it off very well.
I know Tom Cornish better
than I know P.G Cornish,
III. When I needed legal counseling,
I
usually asked Tom. I once had a large home on Santa Clara, Southeast, but there was no sense
in
living there after my children left and I retired. We moved into this rental unit and decided to
sell
the other house. When
I asked Tom whether I should get a realtor
or sell it myself, he said
he would help me with it if I wanted
to sell it myself.
He was very nice about it, and after we
got the house
sold, I asked him how much I owed him.
He said "After all you did for my dad, I won't charge you anything."
I never forgot that.
SPIDLE:
that.
Tell me more about Medical
Arts Square, because
I don't know anything about
ROOD: We were all cramped
up in the First National
Bank Building, and Dr. Van Atta, Hannett and Cornish were kind of the sparkplugs behind that. Dr. Wes Connor and Dr. Nissen were also on the original planning
committee, all of whom, with the help of Architect Max Flatow, designed the building.
About 45 of us were original stockholders in it. We didn't charge ourselves much rent for space there, but we did pay a monthly per-square-foot rental on the property, and after a period of time we were able to sell it. ·
I practiced there for twenty-five years and it was a most satisfactory arrangement. It was in the very best location
for my needs, close to the two hospitals where I worked most of the time. A small coffee
shop was located in the main building,
which was my downfall, because
I went there almost every afternoon to gather in a few calories that I didn't need, and I started gaining weight. When
I first started practicing there I weighed 145 pounds,
but it wasn't long before I was 175 pounds.
We also had a little pharmacy,
which was handy.
Dr. Forbis, another capable surgeon, was the first active
orthopedist in the group,
but it wasn't long before
he expanded, built
his own building
nearby, and took on several
partners. He had a tremendous practice, doing the orthopedic surgery at Carrie Tingley Hospital,
and
traveling to towns all around the state to do surgery, including
Farmington -- he even married
a girl from there -- and his results were excellent.
He and Dr. Parnall
didn't see eye to eye. I liked them both very much but, unfortunately, they weren't very friendly.
This is something
I've observed in small towns; many of the doctors aren't friendly
with each other, even though they have common cause.
I
guess they're too competitive. The way the profession was originally practiced, where they said nice things about each other and passed the word around, was a much better arrangement than advertising on television and all the things we
see
today. I don't agree with that at all, because you can't tell who is honest, who is capable,
from an advertisement. You can more quickly
tell who you should go to by talking to a nurse than any other way. But I do see that it's quite a difficult
thing for a patient to decide who they should go to.
SPIDLE: Your practice
has spanned some extraordinary changes in the history of
medicine, not just in terms of medical ethics and advertising, but you went to medical
school in the days before penicillin--1936 to 1940.
ROOD: Yes. When I was at Fort Stanton,
one of the men who worked in the materiel office there developed a loud murmur. After
taking a throat
culture, we decided
he had
sub-acute bacterial endocarditis, a very serious
condition that usually
results from some bacterial growth on the heart valves.
This material
breaks away to locate somewhere
else in the body and
can be fatal in the majority of patients.
There was no really good medication
for it, so we sent a telegram to the National
Institutes of Health asking for 800,000 units of penicillin, which was a lot of penicillin in those days. They wired back through the Signal Corps: "Are you sure you
want
this penicillin? There is no indication
in the medical literature that penicillin is of any value in sub-acute bacterial
endocarditis."
Well, it was soon learned that it was specific for that.
We gave this guy the 800,000 units of penicillin in sterile saline, dripping
it in slowly over a week's period. He got well and lived nearly twenty years after that.
SPIDLE: It made a believer
of you, did it?
ROOD: Yes, but it was just guesswork in those days. We didn't know whether
it would help but we didn't
have much to fall back on.
SPIDLE: Your first years of practice in Albuquerque saw the end of the TB era, due to
streptomycin and all. You mentioned
Dr. Peters, and a number of other TB doctors were still around then.
ROOD: Dr. Peters was gone when I arrived so I never got to meet him. He was a close friend of Dr. Cornish,
and he visited their home many times,
because Mrs. Cornish
liked Dr.
Peters, too.
SPIDLE: Was Carl Mulky still around?
ROOD: Yes.
He was very nice to me and taught me several tricks that the older doctors knew about. For example, there was a medication years ago called Squill that acted very much like digitalis. It slowed and strengthened the heart rate in certain cardiac cases, and was useful with elderly patients who would vomit on digitalis. He told me who made it, how to use it, and so on. The old Methodist Sanatorium
where the Cadillac agency is now was still operating.
Everybody had tuberculosis patients around here. Presbyterian Hospital had a TB unit, and there were several sanatoriums around town besides
that. But
when I first came to Albuquerque I saw some active tuberculosis patients
from Fort Stanton who had received a pass walking
on the streets of Albuquerque. I thought it was a hazard to children,
so I immediately called the county health officer.
He said, "This
is a center for tuberculosis and we have to make allowances for them.
These contagious disease
laws are rather loosely applied to tuberculosis patients."
SPIDLE: With Albuquerque calling itself the "heart of the well country," they perhaps felt they had to lean over backwards
for their tuberculosis patients.
ROOD: I went to Dr. Van Atta, who was doing a majority of the X-ray work here, and said, "I
see people with active tuberculosis on the streets. How much of this stuff do you think is
spreading around?"
He said, "I could count the cases I've seen that originated here over the last year on the
fingers of one hand. Scarcely any tuberculosis is acquired in Albuquerque. They come here with it."
That was sort of comforting. They felt the sunshine
and dryness killed the tubercular bacilli rather effectively. So if they spit in the street, it didn't matter
too much.
SPIDLE: You also mentioned BCMC or BCI. I know relatively little about its foundation other than the fact that downtown
doctors were involved
in helping to get it started.
I assume you had contact with that, too.
ROOD: I helped in a small way toward opening the medical school. I wasn't too
enthused about the county hospital because
there was an old building
on the hill just this side of Presbyterian Hospital
that had been used as a VD clinic which I thought would be quite
satisfactory for starting
a county hospital.
But I didn't have the forethought I should have had at all in looking to the future. When
I first came to Albuquerque, the population was 60,000 and there were only 59 members in the County Medical Society. Now, with the growing population and the medical school, we have nearly 400,000
people and almost a thousand
doctors, which I couldn't have anticipated at all.
I didn't see that far ahead.
I was wrong about that.
When the county hospital was finally built, the operating
rooms were placed in the basement so that if they dropped the atomic bomb somewhere,
perhaps the operating
room would be spared. It is the only hospital
I ever was in where operating rooms were in the basement. The strange thing about it was that people felt sort of claustrophobic down there, and nurses didn't stay very long. If they lasted three months,
that was about as long as they could stand it.
They would leave to do something else to get away from those closed-in
rooms. Most
operating rooms have windows
opening to the north to bring in light from that side of the building, and they
were used to that.
Even though I contributed considerable funds to it, we had a hard time getting
a library started in the county hospital, which was used a good deal by the medical
school. When
the university expanded, they built a nice library building and I could see well enough at that time to go over there and read once in a while.
However, after
having spent thirty-one
years reading the medical literature, the first thing I read after retiring was the Harvard
Classics, because I never seemed to have the time before. Two years before the Mast was the best sea story I ever read.
As a result, I decided
there were a lot more interesting things
to read besides medicine, so I wasn't going to waste my time reading that. So I haven't
kept up with it.
SPIDLE:
right?
The eye problems you developed apparently forced your retirement, is that
ROOD: Yes.
Although I liked to hunt I began noticing
that I couldn't ride horseback very well at night because I couldn't see the twigs any longer. I had to wear glasses and developed night blindness.
A friend,
Dr. Guy Williams, an eye, ear, nose and throat
specialist here, looked in my eyes one time and was very upset because he found a little pigment
on the retina. He immediately sent me to an ophthalmologist, who diagnosed retinitis pigmentosa, which is a progressive type of blindness
and nothing can be done for it. I went to the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Institute in Boston to see the leading authority
on the subject. I was
checked out completely, and they, too, had no cure or treatment for it.
Even today, they don't know any more about it than when I was there.
I was fortunate
that it didn't develop in childhood, because
I saw a lot of blind children stumbling around
back when I was in Boston. I never saw the problem
in any of my patients, but af ter I retired a couple of my patients
called to tell me they, too, have developed this problem. I asked Dr. Berson,
Professor and Head of the Department of Ophthalmology at Harvard whom I went to see, how long he thought I would be able to drive a car.
He said, "You wouldn't be able to drive a car in Massachusetts now."
When I
asked about my work, he thought I would be able to do surgery until I was into my seventies, but it didn't
work out that way.
Later that year I could hardly see well enough to drive home, so I went to Dr. Schonberg,
my eye doctor, who said he didn't want me to do any more hospital
work at all, including the surgery I had scheduled. "I don't know how you've gotten by this long." So I transferred my surgical patients
to my friends and closed my office within a week.
SPIDLE: This was in 1975?
ROOD: Yes.
SPIDLE: Thank you for your time today,
Dr. Rood.
