Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings April 2017 - 241

sports cardiology, medical mission trips, care of the homeless,
Special Olympians, and uninsured) without pay.
As the physician-poet William Carlos Williams once wrote:
"My medicine was the thing that gained me entrance to the
secret gardens of the self." Dr. Williams went on to write:
It's the humdrum, day-in, day-out, everyday work that is the
real satisfaction of the practice of medicine; the million and a
half patients a man has seen on his daily visits over a forty-year
period of weekdays and Sundays that make up his life. I have
never had a money practice; it would have been impossible for
me. But the actual calling on people, at all times and under all
conditions, the coming to grips with the intimate conditions of
their lives, when they were being born, when they were dying,
watching them die, watching them get well when they were ill,
has always absorbed me (6).

Figure 1. My medical school graduation present from my dad, a used 1965 red
Mustang convertible which I wish I still had.

whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears
to be doing both (4).

That has been my own experience, reﬂecting upon it at my
present age of 76. I loved what Leila Denmark, MD, age 100,
replied when I visited her oﬃce and asked how much longer
she was going to work. "This isn't work. Work is something you
have to do. I don't have to do this" (5).
I enjoyed sports as a youth and didn't seem to have much
of an interest in or aptitude for science. Perhaps a future in
coaching would have seemed logical, and indeed I have great
respect for the impact coaches can have on young lives. I was
intrigued, however, by the impact my physician-father (Figure 1)
had in our community. He was a man so highly respected that
one would seek his thoughts and advice on various problems. I
decided to take a leap of faith, enduring the likes of long organic
chemistry labs on beautiful afternoons at Duke University to
follow in his footsteps.
Along the way, I've tried to merge what Paul and Greitens
espoused to my profession. For 41 years, I was a team physician
for the Atlanta Braves. For 36 years, I have been the team cardiologist for Georgia Tech athletes, screening each freshman for any
potential heart problems. The only downside of the latter job is
that each year the athletes are always age 18, while I am always
another year older. We have been fortunate in such screening in
that we have had to disqualify only two athletes for competition
because of cardiac concerns (one due to a clinically silent viral
myocarditis, the other due to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy).
My interest in sports and medicine has also led to trips to
Russia as a physician for Ted Turner's Goodwill Games, to being
named chief medical oﬃcer for Atlanta's 1996 Olympic Games,
and most recently to being team physician for the Major League
Baseball All-Stars who toured Japan in November 2014.
I have never made a medical job choice based on income. I
can also say, after over 4 decades of medical practice, that I would
do everything I am currently involved in (oﬃce cardiology,
April 2017

Figure out what you are good at, what you really enjoy
doing, and pursue it. I hope that when you reach my age you
can look back with the same satisfaction I feel.
BOOKS AND LIFELONG READING AND LEARNING
Erasmus once wrote: "When I get a little money I buy
books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes." That could
almost be said about me.
I didn't read much as a kid, for I was too wrapped up in
sports. I did begin to read for enjoyment in summers out of
college. That pattern has gradually increased to where I probably
read at least two books a week, usually nonﬁction. It helps that
we don't have a television set.
As S. I. Hayakawa has written:
In a very real sense, people who have read good literature
have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It
is not true that we can have only one life to live. If we can
read, we can live as many lives and as many kinds of lives
as we wish.

Perhaps I should take a speed-reading course, like Woody Allen
did. He said he was able to read War and Peace in 20 minutes,
adding, "It's about Russia."
In her autobiographical work, One Writer's Beginnings,
Eudora Welty tells about how important books were to old
Chinese scholars. During World War II, fearing that their great
library would be destroyed, these scholars "took the books up
in their hands, and put them onto their backs and carried all
of them, on foot, over long mountain paths, away to safety."
Welty also tells of her mother, who once went back into a burning building, on crutches no less, to "rescue her set of Dickens
which she ﬂung, all 24 volumes, from the window before she
jumped out after them, all for Daddy to catch."
As for her own passion, Eudora Welty writes:
I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them-
with the books themselves, cover and bindings and the paper
they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and
with their possession in my arms, captured and carried oﬀ to
myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all
the reading I could give them.

From my little black notebook: lessons for young physicians and medical students

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings April 2017