Blood and Betrayal (eBook)

Introduction

Joseph MacGlashan, Hill M.D.: Background and Career

My father, Joseph MacGlashan, Hill, M.D. , then I, practiced hematology, oncology and blood banking in Dallas from 1934 through 1990.

Dad was a man with boundless physical and intellectual energy. He was born on March 26, 1905, in Buffalo, New York, the fifth of seven children. His father, William Hill, was a craftsman whose Hill Manufacturing Company made carriages and carriage accessories before the automobile. According to family lore, he made parts for the Thomas Flyer, the first car to go around the world. The movie, The Great Race, starring Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood, was based on that trip.

His mother, Cassie Groh Hill, was an inspiration to the academic success of all her children. His older brothers, Ernest, William Oakley, and Norwood Mellville Hill, became respectively a dentist, a surgeon, and an attorney. His older sister, Kitty, married the chief chemist for General Motors, Ledra Lawton, PhD. His two younger sisters, Esther and Keith, married surgeons George Young, M.D., and David Johnson, M.D. My dad once remarked that he was motivated to do so well in school because every time he brought a good grade home it made his mother so happy.

My father had an early and insatiable interest in all aspects of science. As a teenager, he had a laboratory on the third floor of the family house at 134 Claremont Avenue. He learned chemistry, and built some of the earliest vacuum tube radios in Buffalo in about 1920. He used his radio to listen to faraway programs, including broadcasts from the Blackstone Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, never dreaming that most of his professional accomplishments would occur in nearby Dallas.

He also developed an interest in sports. He ran hurdles on the track team in high school and college while at the University of Buffalo. Along with the rest of his family, he had a passion for the outdoors. Most of his summer vacations involved hiking, mountain climbing, backpacking, and fishing with our family.

In our home, evening meals included many fascinating discussions. We discussed history, science, world events, and medicine. Dad had many hobbies and always had a project. When he wasn’t reading his journals or writing medical articles (in the early years, grading the papers of medical students), he was in his shop working on the latest project. He was an amateur astronomer. He carefully crafted both six-inch and ten-inch reflecting telescopes even going so far as to grind and polish the parabolic lenses by hand. He also helped his grandsons Lawrence Marshall Hill, John Walter Lanius, Jr., and Joseph MacGlashan Hill III grind their own six-inch telescope lenses. He taught his children and grandchildren alike some of his hobby skills. We learned basic woodworking while he built beautiful cabinetry for his library and high-fidelity stereo system. Those cabinets in the Dallas home on Avalon Avenue are now owned by another family. When I was recently invited into the home to see them, they still looked as beautiful as they did more than sixty years ago.

He developed his own black and white, and color photographs and taught us some of those same skills. He built three boats, including a 14-foot speedboat, a 21-foot cabin cruiser, and a small racing boat. He built that racing boat with the son of Italian hematologist Giovanni Astaldi. While I was away at Baylor Medical School in Houston, Giovani’s son (Alberto Astaldi) spent a summer with my mother and father. My sister Patricia lived with the Astaldi family in Italy. Of course, there had to be a project to work on with Alberto. He helped Alberto build a motorized racing skiff. Alberto shipped the boat back to Italy at the end of the summer. Incidentally, Alberto later became an outstanding European medical scientist specializing in transplantation. As for boat building, my brothers and I helped finish the 21-foot cabin cruiser in the days before power screwdrivers. We drove hundreds of Phillips head screws by hand as we gradually wrapped the marine plywood around the boat frame. Suffice it to say that when we were finished everybody had a very powerful right forearm.

My father never missed an opportunity for an outdoor adventure. After the International Society of Hematology meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1952, he and colleague, Sol Haberman, PhD, and their friend Dr. Walter Seegars stopped in Cabo Blanco, Peru, to fish for pacific Black Marlin. They rented the Miss Texas, a boat owned by famed Houston sportsman Alfred Glassel, Jr. It was the first time Dad had ever fished in the ocean. The Marlin that he caught weighed 991 pounds. At that time, it was the tenth largest fish ever caught on rod and reel. Glassel held the world record at 1025 pounds. Talk about beginner’s luck!

This introduction tells you something about the kind of person my dad was. He was a philanthropist. He carefully explained the meaning of that word: it meant a love of humanity. Dad was never wealthy or in one of the more highly-paid medical specialties but he made a good living. He gave to every financial campaign when he was on the staff of Baylor Hospital in Dallas. Also, to the best I can determine, the total amount he gave to Wadley Research Institute and Blood Bank exceeded his lifetime earnings as CEO. In the final balance, he earned his living only from his medical practice. In their practice, he and his partner Ellen Loeb, M.D. (later Ellen Loeb-Katz), treated all leukemia patients regardless of their ability to pay.

I remember an object lesson to me personally during the mid-1940s when I was a small child. As the collection plate came around during services at Highland Park Methodist Church, I realized that I only had a dollar bill. I had earned it 25 cents at a time mowing lawns or other tasks. I had no change. I only had the dollar bill. In those days, that could pay for 20 after-school sodas or ice cream cones. I struggled with my conscience and made the difficult decision to put the dollar in the plate. In the car after church, my dad turned and handed me a dollar bill and simply said. “You made the right decision.”

But it was in his professional accomplishments as a physician and medical scientist that he made his greatest contributions. My great father turned out to be a remarkable man.

In 1928, he graduated from the University of Buffalo Medical School (now the State University of New York at Buffalo). He served a general internship at the Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver from 1928 to 1929. He continued in the Army reserve until 1943 when he was honorably discharged in order to continue essential civilian duties during World War II. These duties included medical direction of the wartime Red Cross blood collections in Dallas and teaching medical school students at Baylor Medical School before it moved to Houston in 1943. He was then a founding faculty member at Southwestern Medical School where he was Professor of Clinical Pathology. He also consulted twice monthly at Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio.

When Dad was over 80 years old, I once asked why he had specialized in pathology. He first planned to become a surgeon like his older brother William Oakley Hill, M.D. During his 1928 to 1929 Army internship, he traveled to the University of Minnesota to interview for a surgery residency. His interviewer was Dr. Owen Wangenstein. To start the interview, Dr. Wangenstein said: “I see that you didn’t go to a very good medical school.” Dad answered: “That’s funny, why did I finish number two on the National Board examination?” Dr. Wangenstein then offered Dad an opportunity to work for free for a year. If Dad did a good job, Wangenstein would then consider him for a surgical residency. Dad could not afford that generous offer. So, he returned home to Buffalo General Hospital where he could take a year of pathology residency. Many surgery programs at that time recommended a pathology residency year before starting surgery training. But that year made my dad decide on pathology. Dr. Wangenstein would become Chairman of Surgery at Minnesota two years later and go on to build an outstanding department that trained a number of leading surgeons. Among them was Christian Barnard of South Africa who would perform the world’s first heart transplant.

Dad, however, found that pathology, central to so much of medical science, was a better fit for his own approach to science. So, he set his career on another path that would prove both highly meaningful and productive. That choice was fortunate, since he cut off the tips of two fingers on his right hand while using a power planer in his wood working shop when he was about 45 years old. Needless to say, such an injury would likely have ended a surgery career.

In 1932, he completed his three-year pathology residency in the University of Buffalo program at the Buffalo General Hospital. He then married Lilly Isobel Pogue and began to look for a...