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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
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