Roy Exum
You and I both know what they call the guy who finishes dead last in medical school -- “Doctor.” We also know that is the exact same word they call some other bozo right after he is called before the Ethics Committee. As a matter of fact, if a physician has magazines so old in his waiting room that Roosevelt is on the cover, it is commonly known the same wizard drives a new Mercedes, thinks he is invisible when he meets up with his “next wife,” and delights in humiliating floor nurses.
Now comes the embracing news that the Chattanooga-based UT School of Medicine is no longer sending some Clyde over to the Humane Society to get a couple of cats and unlucky dog to use in medical experiments. Forget for a minute that our UT “teaching” facility is the very last in all of our United States and Canada to do away with the systematic torture of live animals, the better story is that a car bumper has just replaced UT as the leading cause of death for animals on East Third Street.
Let me clarify my mirth. If sacrificing 50 white mice so that some kid can overcome neuroblastoma I’m for ordered a thousand of them. I am also not so naïve that I don’t comprehend live-animal research over the past five centuries has enabled millions of people to live that otherwise probably wouldn’t. How else would we know a pig’s valve works just dandy in open-heart surgery?
But when I hear that places like Stanford, Mayo Clinic, Cedars of Sinai, and M.D. Anderson did away with the heinous practice many years before, I look at our UT College of Medicine and kind of wish it was in Strawberry Plains or Unicoi. Why is it that once again our branch office of the UT Medical School is the very last in the Western Hemisphere to ‘get it?’ The only plausible answer is leadership, this in the more-popular area at UT, the one under the asterisk, “lack of.”
The “inside skinny,” if the truth be told, is that the Erlanger-based collaborative of UT School of Medicine still can’t cure the chronic headache that has shrouded it in recent years like some surgical drape. Erlanger has some truly world-class physicians – I know this better than most – but collectively the best will admit most suffer badly from the obviously infectious disease NMP (“Not My Problem”).
In 1985 the Washington-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine was created to urge medical schools to stop using live animals. It represents 12,000 physicians who blanch at the idea of using a live pig to improve surgical technique, in much the way the Army Rangers teach knife-fighting skills with similar unfortunate swine at 2 a.m. in the rain.
Friday a week ago the Physicians Committee made a landmark announcement in Washington that it had been officially notified by the UT College of Medicine that, as of June 24, the citizens of Chattanooga and Hamilton County will no longer have to worry where the pulled-pork barbecue served at the Level 1 Trauma Center has come from. Dogs and cats, carp and gerbils … no more “don’t waste the anesthetic.”
Dr. John Pippin, the director of Academic Affairs for the Washington group, was more emphatic. “With the decision by the leaders at the University Of Tennessee College Of Medicine to eliminate animal use in the Surgical Skills laboratory, we (the United States and Canada) are entering the post-animal era in medical student education.”
Dr. John A. Patterson, who was a medical student at UT-Memphis back 40 or so years ago and is now on the teaching faculty at the University of Kentucky, will never forget how one sadistic professor used a dog in the physiology lab to test for an unknown drug with some antidote.
He told Kevin McKenzie of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “Within seconds the dog began howling plaintively, like you never heard a dog howl.” He said it sounded as though the poor dog was being torn limb-from-limb as the animal rolled, turned and defecated with mind-boggling seizures.
“The professor seemed quite proud of himself that now we knew, since you know what happens when you give the antidote, we had correctly identified the unknown drug,” he said in the interview.
You are serious? How could someone not have physically attacked the deranged professor? “One guy did storm out, ranting and cussing,” recalled Dr. Peterson, “while the rest of us … I’d have to certainly say my reaction and the reaction of the majority was horror and shame, that as part of our experience as medical students and future physicians that we were doing harm.”
Can you imagine … Dr. Patterson has kept that paralyzing image of UT’s Dr. de Sade in his mind for 40 years. Since it has just taken over 30 for the UT School of Medicine to join the civilized world but as despicable as it is to be identified as ‘the last tree to fall,’ maybe now we can do away with the belief, “I’d rather be seen by a veterinarian.”
royexum@aol.com