Research has always been very important to me. I had the great fortune of working in places that were supportive of it and with people who contributed so much to my growth.
When I was very young, an uncle of mine, who was a physiologist,
made a great impression on me. From the age of five, I was
going to be a doctor and I was going to operate like my uncle.
I started out as a surgical house officer at Johns Hopkins
with plans of going into neurosurgery. During my first year
of medical school I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. So,
it didn't seem that continuing with surgery would be desirable.
But I had to rotate through anesthesia, and I met the head
of the department, who offered me a post as a resident. I
took it, and it was during that time, working under Dr. [Alfred]
Blalock [one of the two physicians who developed the "blue
baby" operation], that I had the extraordinary experience
of being the first to anesthetize a blue baby, a child afflicted
by a fatal heart malformation. The operation--making a bypass
for the blood to get to the lung--had never been done. This
was a very dramatic procedure, a world event. It was 1944
and people came from all over the world to see Dr. Blalock
operate. That colored my career, you could say.
