The Making of a Surgeon: The Story of the First Heart and Lung Transplants and the Murder of Medgar Evers

By O. Gordon Robinson Jr. M.D.

Segregation was a way of life in the 1960s, especially in the South when O. Gordon Robinson Jr. was completing his surgical residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

The Ku Klux Klan was a force to be reckoned with at the time, and Robinson chronicles the events he witnessed as well as the civil rights movement of the time against the backdrop of completing his medical education.

His main focus is on the daily lives and work of the residents, including the innovative organ-transplant research led by Dr. James Hardy.

One of Robinson’s initial assignments was to transplant a kidney from one dog to another, and from the recipient dog, one of his kidneys to the first dog. The helpers anesthetized the animals, prepped and draped them, and started IV fluids if necessary.

Dr. Hardy was a real pioneer in the field of transplantation, and as time went on, it became obvious that he and his crew were preparing to do heart and lung transplants on humans—something that had never been done before.

Whether you’re interested in life during the civil rights movement, medical education or both, you’ll enjoy The Making of a Surgeon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Oct 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781489719201

O. Gordon Robinson Jr. M.D.

O. Gordon Robinson, Jr., M.D. was in the maelstrom of segregated Mississippi as a surgical resident. He writes of quantum medical breakthroughs as well as quantum social change from the perspective of a house resident at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in the early 1960s. He currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 O. Gordon Robinson Jr., M.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

LifeRich Publishing is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.

LifeRich Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.liferichpublishing.com

1 [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1919-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1921-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-1920-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018910907

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 10/11/2018

Contents

Introduction and Dedication

Dedication

Sources

Chapter 1 The Civil Rights Movement During the Sixties in Mississippi and the South

Chapter 2 October 1961: Jackson, Mississippi

Chapter 3 The Animal Laboratory, aka Dog Lab

Chapter 4 The Emergency Room

Chapter 5 Squirrel Shooting

Chapter 6 The A-Service

Chapter 7 The VA

Chapter 8 B-Service Second Year

Chapter 9 The Burn Service

Chapter 10 The Cafeteria

Chapter 11 Plastic Surgery Rotation

Chapter 12 Transplantation and Death of Medgar Evers

Chapter 13 A-Service Again

Chapter 14 Trouble at the University

Chapter 15 The First Heart Transplant

Chapter 16 Back to the Dog Lab

Chapter 17 Chapman and Georgiana

Chapter 18 Visiting Firemen

Chapter 19 Plastic Surgery

Chapter 20 Finishing

About the Author

Introduction and Dedication

This book is written about a grueling yet outstanding surgical residency training program at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. It could be very similar to a story from any other large university training program, with one notable exception: it takes place during the sixties in probably the center of most of the civil rights activities, including the bloody changes that were going on throughout the South. I apologize profoundly to all of the decent black people and my tremendous number of black acquaintances for the terminology and attitudes expressed by some of the characters as well as some of the situations addressed in this book. This is my story, and I have attempted to tell it like it happened.

The names of the many surgical residents—approximately twenty, counting all levels—have been changed, for the most part, so that the content of their grueling years and events of the sixties in Mississippi could progress in an orderly fashion, with unnecessary and sometimes unpleasant parts omitted.

This is a true story. Some of the details have been changed, rearranged, added to, or subtracted from to maintain continuity, but all were inspired by real events. I have made every effort to maintain the authenticity of the situation being described and to give credit to those who played such a huge part in the drama when at times I was only a minor participant.

The sixties was a time when the Korean War was over and the Vietnam War was in its early stages, so we had a good many veterans beginning their training programs—not only in surgery but also in other branches of medicine. Some of us had had our education interrupted by military commitments and were a little older with families, but most of the guys were young, single, and dating. We dealt with them, and they dealt with us.

Also note, the only means of communication we had at that time was the telephone, with calls from home going through the operator at the hospital. Pagers and cell phones would not be available until years later.

In order for especially young readers to understand and appreciate this story, I thought it appropriate and necessary to include a brief background of the civil rights movements that were prevalent during the sixties in Mississippi. Segregation was a way of life, especially in the South during this time, and the Ku Klux Klan was quite active in Mississippi. This was the environment in which we—both white and black—lived our daily lives. It was responsible for many catastrophic events, some of which I have attempted to describe in the book.

We became close friends with many of the other families during our training programs—and to this day, some fifty years later, we still maintain contact with a lot of them. We stuck together and shared our many ups and downs. The times that we did have off on certain rotations or when we were plain lucky were often spent drinking beer and singing Peter, Paul, and Mary songs. Some of the guys played guitar, and we would either congregate at someone’s house or simply ride around in someone’s station wagon singing. My wife had and still has a beautiful voice and, accompanied by Tommy Kilgore on the guitar, would sing Old Blue or Scotch and Soda, and everyone would clap.

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to all the wives who put up with us and for the many sacrifices they had to endure in their lives during these years of absent husbands and the adjustments they had to make. My wife, Kitty, being one of these sacrificial wives, is one of the most wonderful and saintly human beings God ever put on this earth, who takes care of me and our children. I love you, Kitty, with all my heart.

Sources

My grateful acknowledgement to the following authors and sources of information for their insight and careful research on these turbulent times.

• Mississippi and Freedom Summer, Lisa Cozens

• Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, 1951-1959, Lisa Vox

• Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1964, Lisa Vox

• The Latest in African-American History, Femi Lewis

• What is Jim Crow?, Femi Lewis

• Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders, Wikipedia

• An Overview of the Civil Rights Movement, Nadra K. Nittle

• Medgar Evers and the Origin of the Civil Rights Movement In Mississippi, Dermoral Davis, Chairman of the History and Philosophy Departments, Jackson State University

• Alabama’s Civil Rights Trail, Frye Gaillard

• The Academic Surgeon, James Daniel Hardy, MD

• African American Resources, MS GenWeb

• African-Americans in the Progressive Era, Femi Lewis

• The New Negro: An Interpretation, Alain Leroy Locke

CHAPTER 1

The Civil Rights Movement During the

Sixties in Mississippi and the South

Slavery

I n biblical times, as described in both the Old and the New Testaments, slavery was an accepted and common way of life. Conquered people became the slaves of the conquerors. The Jewish slaves escaped Pharaoh and, led by Moses, eventually migrated to the Promised Land.

In the seventeenth century, slavers began to capture and sell slaves from Africa. Exactly how many black people—including entire black families—were taken from Africa and sold is unknown; estimates are in the millions. Many black slaves did not survive the voyages to be sold. They were stuck in the holds of sailing vessels with barely enough food to survive and no personal hygiene facilities. Disease was rampant. When a slave died, he or she was just thrown overboard to be disposed of.

The import of slaves to America was banned in the early 1800s but continued until about the middle of the century. Slavery never became such an issue in the Northern states because the plantation system—which required the extra manpower for the growth and sale of cotton—was not prevalent there. A huge split developed between the economic needs of North and South.

As stated previously, slavery has been part of history for thousands of years, but it differed significantly in America because it was not only an economic problem but a human one between whites and blacks. These differences of opinion—mostly concerning the labor problems as well as the inhuman side of slavery—were major contributors to the Civil War, a catastrophe that should never have happened and that resulted in over 600,000 deaths of young men of the United States. The ramifications of this conflict remain with us today in certain quarters.

Some Miscellaneous Chronology

This is certainly not a complete list but one that I think provides an important background to my story about a surgery training program at the University of Mississippi in the sixties. I have copied extensively from the authors listed in the bibliography at the end of this section, and my thanks goes to them for their help.

1931

• April 7: I was born to Mabel Crenshaw and O. Gordon Robinson Sr. in Birmingham, Alabama. My father was in the coal business, and we lived on top of a hill in a remote suburb of Birmingham in a white house. There were three houses at the foot of the hill not in proximity to each other. These houses had open fireplaces for heat and no running water.

Our house had open fireplaces for heat in the winter and electric fans for comfort in the hot summer. Air-conditioning was not a common luxury at that time for family homes. We had a coal-burning generator for electricity, a deep well for water, and a septic tank.

My earliest recollections of my childhood were of the black families that lived in those houses at the foot of the hill. Bennie and Alf lived in one of them. Bennie worked for my father in the coal mine across the road, and Alf was our cook on a coal-burning stove. She made four dollars a week. In another house, in the other direction, was a black family that included Howard, our chauffeur and yard man; Daisy, our maid and nurse for me and