Summer 2002

Volume 19 Number 2
 Jump to the Alumni section: Stanford MD

Cover Illustration

Cover Story: Liver Donors take on risks so transplant recipients can survive

Sharing Life

By Camille Mojica Rey
Illustration Christian Northeast
Photographs Leslie Williamson

Tom Casey was more than a little relieved when he heard the news on March 18, 2002, that his brother Patrick was well enough to be released from Stanford Hospital. Patrick had endured his body’s attempt to reject the portion of liver Tom had donated to him. “I didn’t realize the rejection had affected me so severely. I didn’t think that I would feel so rejected,” Tom explains. “You just expect: ‘Here. I’ll give you a liver’ and, bam, you’re healed. But you have to let time take its course.” Six weeks after the surgery, doctors had controlled the mild episode of tissue rejection and Patrick’s new liver was functioning well enough so that he could return home to continue his four- to six-month recovery. “It actually helped my recovery knowing he was improving,” Tom says. >> Read Story

Expect No Miracles

By Mike Goodkind
Illustrations by Stan Fellows

Inside the wood-paneled library of the 190-bed Hôpital Albert Schweitzer in rural Haiti, the drumbeats from a neighboring settlement's voodoo ceremony the night before are only a memory and the smells from visitors' cooking fires are blocked by the closed door. >> Read Story

More Stanford Medicine

 

Stanford MD

Letter from SMAA President

Newton J. Harband, MD
President, Stanford Medical Alumni Association

I’d like to encourage all of you to participate in our activities this year. >> Read Letter

Not For MDs Only

Populist Science: PhD alum Joe DeRisi brings innovation to the masses

When Joe DeRisi started working toward his PhD in Pat Brown’s lab, DNA microarrays were just beginning to take off and the Brown lab was at the forefront of the field. “There was a huge potential to make a lot of money,” DeRisi says. “I was totally against that.” >> Read Story

FrontlineMedicine

This year’s Sterling award winner, F. William Blaisdell, MD, talks about trauma’s past, present and future

A diary stopped a bullet 138 years ago during the Civil War battle at Cold Harbor, Va. If it weren’t for that diary, this year’s J.E. Wallace Sterling Alumni Lifetime Achievement Award wouldn’t be going to F. William Blaisdell, MD, class of 1952.  >> Read Story

Medical School Recollection

The Beginning:In the 1930s a woman entering the medical profession was out of the ordinary

Anatomy. The first class in the first year of medical school took place in a long, cold room, with rows of examining tables that held shrouded objects smelling of formaldehyde — their stark contents to be disclosed and investigated. Eleanor Rodgerson, MD, class of 1935, still recalls the “fear and apprehension” the class evoked for her and other young medical students. Biochemistry followed, with its own particular anxieties, this time in the form of sliderules, which some classmates adroitly used for quick calculations but she had never even seen before. >> Read Story

Class Notes

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