Louisville Medicine Volume 66, Issue 11 | Page 29

DOCTORS' Lounge SPEAK YOUR MIND If you would like to respond to an article in this issue, please submit an article or letter to the editor. Contributions may be sent to [email protected] or may be submitted online at www.glms.org. The GLMS Editorial Board reserves the right to choose what will be published. Please note that the views expressed in Doctors’ Lounge or any other article in this publication are not those of the Greater Louisville Medical Society or Louisville Medicine. LEARNING and Unlearning Mary G. Barry, MD Louisville Medicine Editor [email protected] I t is hard to know sometimes which one is more vital. Giving up preconceived notions is hard for all of us. I was re- minded of this when visiting Nashville for an old timers’ house staff celebration with Dr. Andre Churchwell, former Grady Chief Resident in Medicine, and now the first Levi Watkins Jr., MD, Chair and Se- nior Associate Dean for Diversity Affairs at Vanderbilt. He had taught and worked with all of us present and holds many degrees and titles: BS in engineering at Vanderbilt, Harvard Medical Degree, medicine resi- dency and cardiology fellowship at Emory University. At Vandy, he is a professor of cardiology, radiology, radiological science and biomedical engineering. In the Emory system, the chief resident in medicine has generally completed some years of a fellowship already, before being designated as the best doctor of the entire house staff and given leadership over all. The chief is always assigned to Grady, the heartbeat of the program. To myself and Diane, his newbie interns on the “Coma and Death” services at Grady in the summer of 1984, he was the rock who steadied us, the guiding star who understood that we knew nothing. With our director, the matchless Dr. Ken Walker, he expected us to learn everything, the hard way, the exhausting way, from the devoted care and study of our patients. He took care of us; we took care of them. Andre is so incredibly learned, in so many fields. He is an artist, an author, a musician, a designer. He’s a researcher and one of the founders of the Emory/Geor- gia Tech Biomedical Technology Research Center. He is a consummate teacher, direct, precise and kind. He and Dr. Henry Sadlo (one of the instigators of this weekend, along with Dr. Diane Schneider of my class) have helped to fund a lecture series in honor of Dr. Bruce Logue, one of the finest cardiolo- gists ever in America. Dr. Logue’s ears were hardwired to his brain in a way that can only be considered genius. With a two-minute exam, he diagnosed complex heart mur- murs and conditions for over 20 years prior to the invention of echocardiography, and often did not need an echo after that. Andre sat at his feet, ran the echo lab and marveled. If there is one thing that doctors know, it’s that we owe the greatest debt of gratitude to the physicians and surgeons who taught us. The way we pay that debt is to serve and teach the next generations. Andre has spent his whole life doing just that. What I did not know in 1984, and did not learn until 2019, is that Andre was the first African-American chief resident in medicine at Grady. His father, Robert Churchwell, a noted journalist and author, was the first African-American reporter at a major southern newspaper, the Nashville Banner. Whereas Andre ruled over all, with- out question the best of us, his father was forced to write his articles on a typewriter at home. He was not allowed to sit in the newsroom with the white reporters. His copy was edited until unrecognizable. He was not allowed to cover major events in the Civil Rights demonstrations and up- heavals of the ‘60s. He was not allowed to write about the beatings, the lynchings, the murders and the mass arrests of the dem- onstrators. Instead, his publisher sent the white reporters to interview the police and members of the National Guard, many of whom were violently enforcing the law of segregation. Those things came as no surprise to me. What surprised me is that, coming from integrated schools and a literate family, I had simply assumed that by 1984, some other stellar chief resident might also have been African-American. When we toured the Robert Churchwell Museum Magnet Elementary, a school in East Nashville named after his journalist father, we met his brother, Robert Jr., a lifelong educator. He and Andre and their (continued on page 28) APRIL 2019 27