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The life as a physician and being involved in healthcare for most of my career has been
one that's been personally exciting and fulfilling for me and I hope that you too can find a
happy pathway for just the right career so that you can make a difference in people's
lives. So I do want to hit on both of those themes today; healthcare as a career and our
university's role in healthcare. Let me begin with a story about one of our pioneers at
the University of Mississippi, Dr. Jim Hardy and events that took place in his life; so
our medical school relatively new as a four year school in 1963 when Dr. Hardy was doing
groundbreaking research in transplant surgery. So our medical school had begun in 1903 here
on the Oxford Campus was a two year school; students would spend two years here on Oxford
and then to finish their medical school experience would take their last two years of medical
school was around the country. In 1955, the medical school moved from here in Oxford from
Guyton Hall, which now houses our school of education to Jackson so that there could be
a medical school that had the third and fourth year clinical components; needed a large hospital
to do that, needed to be in a place larger than Oxford was at that time to accomplish
that. And so the medical school was moved to Jackson and Dr. Hardy was one of the original
faculty members for the four year school as it was established in Jackson. So Dr. Hardy
had been doing research in transplantation for several years and in 1963, a historic
event took place at our medical center in Jackson; Dr. Hardy and a team of surgeons
there performed the world's very first lung transplant so they took a diseased lung out
of a patient, looked into that empty chest where a lung was, took a healthy lung from
a patient who had recently died and placed it into the chest of this patient and extended
this patient's life, at that time, a miraculous event and we were the pioneers at the University
of Mississippi in the doing the world's first lung transplant. Just two or three years later,
Dr. Hardy and his team were also the first to attempt a human to human heart transplant;
that is an interesting piece of history. There were technical issues with the heart and Dr.
Hardy wound up using a chimpanzee heart to implant into this patient's chest and it was
the first attempt at a human heart transplant. A few years later, surgeons in South Africa
completed the first successful human to human heart transplant but Dr. Hardy was really
an important pioneer in the world of transplant surgery. So it's really an interesting twist
on history on that night in 1963 when Dr. Hardy and his team were doing that lung transplant,
just as they were completing the case, a call came to the operating room from the emergency
room and the most talented surgeons were there with Dr. Hardy in the operating room and there
was a call for a surgeon to come to the emergency room because there was someone there with
a gunshot who was an extremist who was going to die it appeared and they wanted the surgeon
to come and help to try to save this patient to revive this patient. It turns out that
man who was lying in the emergency room dying of a gunshot wound was Mr. Medgar Evers and
that was a really crossing in history for our university. Of course Mr. Evers was a
pioneer in Civil Rights in trying to right the wrongs of the past, the injustices of
the past around race and sadly, he died that night in the emergency room at the University
of Mississippi Medical Center but that episode on that night in 1963 defines what are two
important goals for us as a university in healthcare. That heart transplant is an indication
that we want to be leaders in research and in taking care of patients. We want to provide
the very best healthcare and want to be on the cutting edge of science and Mr. Evers'
death in the emergency room that night offers an opportunity for us to see the importance
for us to be associated with dealing with the injustices of the past as they deal with
healthcare today. There are large racial differences in the health outcomes and much of that is
a vestige of the years of injustice around racial discrimination in our society in our
country and our state. And it's an important goal of our university to be a part of improving
healthcare for all Mississippians and to do our best to move the needle forward on solving
the issues of healthcare disparities. Think about why is it actually considered healthcare
as a career? Let me just offer two or three thing for you to think about; number one,
healthcare is going to be an important part of our economy going forward. It's going to
be an important part of the growth of our economy. People are going to be sick, people
are living longer, the aging is leading to more and more opportunities in healthcare
and then healthcare jobs usually provide a good compensation. Now some of you may be
nervous about some of the changes that are taking place and the way healthcare's financed
in our country and may have negative impressions bout some of the changes that are taking place.
Let me assure that you in this country, I'm confident that people who participate in healthcare
are always going to be able to have good compensation, they'll make good salaries and be able to
provide well for their families. I don't think that tradition is going to change in our country
and then the most important reason I would like for you to consider a career in healthcare
is the personal fulfillment that it provides in making a difference in people's lives.
It provides, in my view, the most tangible for someone to live a life of service making
a difference in other people's lives but at the same time, be able to provide well for
your own family. So let me share a little bit of my own pathway into a healthcare career
as a way for you to think about your own life; so I was a high school student, who like most
high school students in Mississippi when I was growing up wanted to be a football player.
Sadly, God didn't bless me with speed or the size I needed to be a good football player
so I was walking off the practice field one day when I was a 9th grader. The football
coach put his arm on my shoulder and said son, if you keep playing football, you're
going to get hurt really bad and so he talked to me about choosing some other pathway for
success and he offered me the opportunity to become the athletic trainer for the football
team. Now I didn't know anything about what a trainer was. He provided me the opportunity
to get a little bit of an education in how to take care of injuries and so I moved from
being an on the field football player to being one that was helping to take care of the football
players when they were injured and hurt. I remember at that time, football shoes were
not very comfortable, the socks weren't very good, blisters on the feet was a big problem
in athletes and I can remember vividly that the sense of fulfilment I had in dealing with
one of our star players who we really needed to play who got a blister on his foot and
wasn't able to run and then after I did my little tricks with helping his blister get
better, things I'd learned and I saw him a couple of days later back out on the field
and able to run comfortably a lot faster than if we had not had that intervention. I had
the sense well, you know what, I was an important part of helping the team win by what was I
doing. It was a -- it was really an ah-ha moment for me, this fulfilment of being able
to do something about somebody's health problems that would make their life better. Went on
to undergraduate school and then to medical school and for me, it was never a love of
science that drew me to medicine. I know some people go into medicine because they love
science and want to apply science. For me, it was always about a desire to help people
and I was good enough in science to, you know, to follow that path and to be able to do well
enough to do that but all along the way in my training, I always felt a step behind from
time to time. I could remember after I'd graduated from medical school, my first year as a resident
and we were taking care of patients who were really sick and it all seemed too complicated
for me. I wasn't sure I'd be able to do -- I remember standing in the ICU at the foot of
a bed of a patient who was really sick and the senior resident who had two more years'
experience than me was at the head of the bed taking care of the patient and making
decisions, fast decisions because this patient was really sick and was going to die if we
didn't do something soon and I remember watching that resident make very complex decisions
in adjusting medicines and making other changes and I watched the patient in front of my eyes
from someone who was dying to someone who was stable and then went onto a full recovery
and I can remember standing at the foot at that bed saying to the person next to me,
I'll never be able to do that. Two years later, I was the senior resident taking care of a
very complicated patient, a very similar kind of situation, just mindless about doing the
things that my training had taught me to do . I was comfortable by that time doing them,
made the decisions that needed to be done, the patient stabilized, went on his way to
recover and just as I was kind of finishing up with the patient, overheard two young resident
physicians at the foot of the bed and one said to the other one, I'll never be able
to do that and it was another great moment in my pathway to becoming a physician that
understanding that though the science is complex and the training road is long and hard, most
of us can do it. It's something that can be done. The education process takes care of
itself and if you think now well, I'm not sure I could do that, if you just are willing
to be disciplined and be responsible, there are lots of opportunities for you involved
in healthcare, lots of different things that you can do within healthcare that makes lives
better for other people. Well, let me share a story about one more important pioneer in
the University of Mississippi and our role in healthcare professions and medicine. This
is the story of Dr. Arthur Guyton so Guyton Hall now the school of education is actually
named for Dr. Arthur Guyton's father, Dr. Billy Guyton who was dean of our medical school
in the 1930s and early 12940s when it was still a two year school here on the Oxford
Campus. And Dr. Billy Guyton is a hero in his own right but that's another story for
another day. Dr. Arthur Guyton, his son, did his undergraduate years here at Ole Miss and
then went to medical school at Harvard, was a very, very bright and promising physician.
Finished medical school at Harvard and was doing a residency in surgery when sadly contracted
polio, lost the use of his arms and legs and could not continue his surgery residency because
of his physical disabilities. He took a period of recover and then moved back here to Oxford
and then eventually was offered the opportunity to teach in the medical school and became
the chair of the department physiology, one of the basic sciences in medicine. Now Dr.
Guyton didn't have a degree in physiology. He had a medical degree and it was unusual
for somebody without a degree in physiology to be placed in this important leadership
role but there he was as a young man, handicapped in the time when handicapped people typically
didn't work in the workplace. He was disabled in a very significant way but he took on this
responsibility of teaching physiology and leading the physiology department right here
on our campus, down in what is now Guyton Hall was housing the medical school then.
In his early lectures, he kept notes and then he was using a textbook of physiology that
he didn't think really met the needs of the students and so he took his notes and wrote
a textbook and that textbook, Guyton's Textbook of Physiology has become not only the bestselling
textbook of physiology used by medical students but we believe that textbook has been used
by more medical students around the world than any other medical textbook. Dr. Guyton
has put the University of Mississippi on the map through his writing of that textbook of
physiology. Now many years later, that Guyton's Textbook of Physiology is still being written
by a University of Mississippi faculty member, Dr. John Hall, who chairs that department
now on our medical center campus is the author of that textbook and inherited that role from
Dr. Guyton and all around the world as medical students study physiology, they are familiar
with Arthur Guyton and his name in with the University of Mississippi. Dr. Guyton's remarkable
for a number of other ways in his personal story. He and his wife, Ruth, had 10 children,
10 children and all 10 of those children became physicians. Can you imagine the pressure that
number 8, 9 and 10 were feeling along the way after all those other children had become
physicians? Yeah, so one of those 10 children is actually here at the University of Mississippi
now in Oxford, Dr. Jean Gispen, who runs employee health here at the university is one of those
10 physician children from Arthur and Ruth Guyton. Probably the most remarkable contribution
that Dr. Guyton made to the field of medicine was in training so many other chairs of physiology
so a few years ago, when there were about 120 medical schools in this country, we did
a survey and at that time, there were 29 of those 120 medical schools in the U.S. who
had chairs of physiology who were trained by Dr. Arthur Guyton so nearly a quarter of
the chairs of physiology teaching at that time had been trained by this one man at the
University of Mississippi, quite a remarkable contribution to the field of medicine. One
last story to tell you Dr. Guyton's impact and intertwined with my own career in medicine.
So in his research, Dr. Guyton was the first to propose the idea that in blood pressure
regulation, it was not the heart that was the primary regulator, as people had thought,
or the brain as other people had thought but he was the one to put forward the idea that
the primary organ for regulation of blood pressure was actually the kidneys. This was
thought to be a crazy and strange idea when he first proposed it but gradually over the
years, other physiologists have agreed and now it's commonly accepted that the kidneys
are the primary organ responsible for blood pressure control. Dr. Guyton's research and
those who have followed him at our university have been the primary contributors to this
fundamental idea on blood pressure control. Part of my life as a physician was spent practicing
at a hospital in South Korea and early in my time there, when I was trying to establish
myself as a credible physician in another country, a young patient came to me, a teenager
who had a very difficult problem with high blood pressure. My evaluation led me to believe
that his problem was from a small kidney that he'd been born with that had been causing
him to have problems with the production of a hormone that helped control blood pressure.
He was producing too much of this hormone that was raising blood pressure and I came
to the conclusion that removing that small remnant kidney that was abnormal from birth
would be the solution to his high blood pressure but this was still in the early days of believing
that the kidney was responsible for blood pressure regulation and I'll just say that
there was not a strong consensus among the physicians taking care of him that this would
solve the problem and it was a risky operation and one a decision that I made with some trepidation.
You might imagine a young American physician practicing in another country, if you made
a mistake with a teenager and things didn't work out good, it could have had very difficult
results for me. Using the knowledge that I had gained at the University of Mississippi
School of Medicine and my education with Dr. Guyton, I made the bold decision to have the
surgeons remove that kidney and it did indeed lead to the solution to this young man and
his blood pressure normalized and he's led a long and normal, healthy life after that
operation took place. And I'll always be grateful to Dr. Guyton and my education at the University
of Mississippi for putting me in a particularly strong position to take care of this patient.
That fulfilment of making a decision and making a life better is one that you have to experience
for yourself to really understand and today as you think about healthcare as a career,
let me just encourage you to think about what a fulfilling life it could be to commit yourself
to making life better for other people through a career in healthcare.