Summer 2002
Volume 19 Number 2
Jump
to the Alumni section: Stanford MD
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
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
1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000 | Obituaries
