Meals “at Your request” - Johns Hopkins Children's Center

Hopkins Scrapbook
the featured speakers at the
Final Meeting were all pediatrics
pioneers: Helen taussig,
Hugh Josephs, “Buck” schaffer,
Leo Kanner, and Barton Childs.
self, a co-developer of the world-famous
Blue Baby heart operation.
“I remember being overwhelmed to
hear some of my heroes speak, especially
Buck Schaffer, who was Dr. Neonatologist
to me,” recalls Alex Haller, pediatric
surgeon-in-chief from 1964 to 1997. “I sat
like a medical ‘bobby-soxer’ at the feet of
my mentors.”
David Valle, a serious amateur photographer
who would go on to complete his
residency at Hopkins, appreciated that
something of a historical moment was
happening. He drove up with his cameras
from the NIH where he was working at
the time. Photos he took that day illustrated
the event’s transcript in The Johns
Hopkins Medical Journal.
“It was a chance to sit with my friends
and mentors in a place that meant so
much to me during my residency [in the
1960s],” says John Neff, later medical director
of Seattle Children’s Hospital. “I
would not have missed the event. That
very amphitheater had been filled every
Saturday morning for pediatric grand
rounds. It was a high point of the week. It
was terrifying for me as an intern to present
a case there. We were expected to be
succinct and include all of the pertinent
patient information without notes.”
“Nostalgia,” postulates Neff, “is built
around valuable and memorable experiences
that can never be repeated.”
4 HOPKINS CHILDreN’S | hopkinschildrens.org
my colleagues and I may have grumbled at times
about small budgets, poor equipment, and shabby
quarters, but we were grateful for the one magnificent
gift which outweighed everything else—
the opportunity to work unhampered.
– LeO KANNer, m.D.
For Larry Pakula, who’d been on the
house staff starting in 1957, the setting
also brought back the hours he’d spent
right there being exposed to his professors’
thinking as they debated and argued
at grand rounds. “Then we’d all go on to
the Doctors Dining Room for coffee. It
was a great time,” Pakula says. But the
Final Meeting “brought sadness that such
intimacy was disappearing in medicine.”
Taussig opened the program by introducing
Hugh Josephs, who had interned
under John Howland, the Harriet Lane
Home’s chief from 1913 to 1927. What
Josephs made clear were the changes that
had occurred in 60 years in medicine itself.
“Perhaps the most striking thing about
the beginning,” he told the group, “was
the lack of conveniences and equipment.
There was no clinical laboratory to which
one could send specimens for examination.
Each intern did his own bacteriological
work. Hematology consisted of a white
count and, if indicated, a hemoglobin de-
termination. Blood chemistry was about to
be invented as a part of research.”
Josephs described typical cases from
those early days: “Diarrhea was rampant
in the summer.” The successful understanding
and treatment of this condition,
he said, “was the first great contribution of
the workers at the Harriet Lane.” Pneumonia
was the disease of winter. “We had no
drug for that. We would wrap the babies
up and put them out in the cold where
they generally did well.” In the fall, there
was typhoid. “The city water was safe,
but these children had been with their
parents picking fruit in the country and
drank country water. Congenital syphilis,
we saw at any time. We could recognize
that across a room in a crowd.” Conquering
rickets, Josephs said, was the second
great triumph of Harriet Lane, “and for
that very reason, largely unknown to you,”
he told those assembled.
Next up was Schaffer. “I came here
feeling rather joyous and happy,” he said