Bull of the Bullpen

Into the-amphitheater of New Orleans' old and vast (1,800-bed) Charity Hospital * stepped a trim figure with a calmly confident air: Dr. Edward William Alton Ochsner, then 31, newly appointed professor of surgery at Tulane University. He had ideas about how to teach diagnosis and surgery to medical students. From an adjoining examining room the first student-victim stepped in. He had just spent half an hour worriedly examining a patient. Now Professor Ochsner called for his diagnosis.

"Phlebitis," said the student.

"Why?" bellowed Ochsner.

The student fainted.

In the same bull-throated voice, Al Ochsner demanded of the class: "Why did he pop out?" At which point several other students would have been glad of a merciful faint.

Dr. Ochsner, normally well-modulated in tone, was promptly dubbed "the bull of the bullpen." He recalls now: "My purpose was to teach students how to think under stress. They must learn to think quickly and correctly, and to back up every decision they make. Later, in practice, they will often have a waiting room full of patients when a man comes in whom they have never seen before.

Their task then is to make a quick diagnosis -- take a case history, make a physical examination, write a prescription or a referral for surgery. Meanwhile, the waiting room is still full."

Ochsner's bullpen clinics made the impression that he wanted. That was in 1927. Now some 3,000 physicians, graduated from his surgery classes, are practicing in Louisiana and neighboring states. He has done much to boost the level of medi calpractice throughout the Deep South, and thus fortified a great Tulane tradition. For its chair of surgery is the most noted south of St. Louis and one of the most influential in the U.S.

Indispensable Man. By the time Ochsner took over, conditions were vastly different from that January Monday in 1835 when eleven students gathered before Dr. Thomas Hunt, a ripe young 26, in a Unitarian church, to start the first medical school in all the Louisiana Purchase territory. Over conservative Creole (Sorbonne-trained) opposition, Dr. Hunt and his successors built a good regional school in a city which in three years (1833-35) had had 19,000 deaths in a population of 50,000--caused largely by typhoid, cholera and yellow jack.

One of its noted graduates was Dr. Rudolph Matas, born of Spanish parents in nearby Bonnet Carre. When the surgery chair was vacant in 1894, there was talk of importing a Johns Hopkins man, but the New Orleans press staged an unprecedented campaign: "Matas and Matas only!" "Call for Matas." The outrage was averted, and in 33 years goateed Dr. Matas raised Tulane's banner high. He was one of the first surgeons to operate behind a screen of sheets soaked in carbolic acid in an effort to achieve sterile conditions, one of the first to use drip infusions (such as sugar and salt solutions) into veins. And he invented a daring operation to open and then stitch together an artery which had developed an aneurysm (like a blister on an inner tube). When Matas retired at 67, the trustees imported Ochsner from South Dakota (by way of St. Louis, Zurich, Chicago and Milwaukee); this time there was no home-grown crown prince.

Patients by Air. Ochsner, actually a pleasant and sophisticated man and no hell-roarer, soon showed his skill as teacher, surgeon and organizer. Between fishing trips and serving as king of the Mardi Gras, he found time to establish the Ochsner Clinic, which he built into a "Mayos' of the South," and a hospital operated by the Ochsner Foundation. The hospital is so modern that it has its own heliport, largely to receive casualties from tidewater oil rigs. Along the way, Lung Surgeon Alton Ochsner has become a leader in the medicosurgical fight against cigarette smoking as a cause of lung cancer. He makes as many speeches (professional) as a man who says he is not running for the presidency, and has also found time to cement relations between U.S. surgeons and their colleagues throughout Latin America.

Last-week, at a mere 59 (Rudolph Matas is still alive at 95 and working on medical histories), Alton Ochsner gave up the reins as head of Tulane's department of surgery, though he will continue as a professor and can still be the bull in the bullpen. So far, no surgeon has been named. In a reminiscent mood, Ochsner recalled some of the Latin American dictators (including Argentina's fallen idol Juan Peron) on whom he has operated or for whom he has served as consultant.

When, at the end of one of his 18-to 20-hour days, a friend tells Dr. Ochsner that he should take it easier and enjoy life, he retorts: "This is a faulty diagnosis and a poor prescription."

* Now newer and vaster: replaced in 1938 with a 3,200-bed structure.

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