This blog “Heart Defects, Salons, Five Women of Medicine and Hands Only God Could Make” is a blog series that will cover:
• Congenital Heart Defects
• Five Women from the late 1800s largely responsible for the formation of Johns Hopkins Hospital
• Gertrude Stein and her Paris Salon
• Prejudice against women and African Americans in medicine a century ago
• Religion’s suppression of science
• Brief synopsis of our Solar System
• Opium and Cocaine addictions
Ernest Hemingway in classic Hemingway-esque fashion once proclaimed “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” Whether Hemingway originated the phrase or not is not known, he wasn’t deriding gameswhich involves more than one player, as much as he was celebratingsportwhich tests individual skill and achievement. Hemingway was just being Hemingway, an artistic temperament with a fine madness. The modern Olympic Games celebrate both Hemingway’s “sport” of individual achievement as it celebrates “games” as team achievements.
Snowboarding finds its origins in 1965 Muskegon, Michigan when chemical engineer Sherman Poppen fastened two short skis together so his young daughters could glide down a snowy mound. The theory being that a single “wide” ski, like a surfboard, would be easier to manage than two skis, which glide independently even if hopefully in the same direction. If you’ve ever crossed your skis and enjoyed a “face plant” you’ll appreciate that two independent skis sometimes work discordantly. Poppen called the new sport snurfing, combining snow and surfing, dubbing the board a snurfer. Dimitrije Milovich, Jake Burton and Tom Sims are separately credited with advancing the sport of snowboarding and improving the design of the modern snowboard. What one might have predicted would have remained a fad, like roller blading, snowboarding did not, instead growing quickly into a worldwide sport, becoming an official Winter Olympic event in 1998.
Shaun White was born in San Diego, California in 1986. When Shaun was nine years old Tony Hawk, a pioneer in competitive skateboarding, befriended Shaun at a Southern California skateboard park, having recognized Shaun’s transcendent skills. Hawk, known as “The Birdman”, ended up mentoring Shaun White until he was 17, at which time Shaun, still in high school, became a professional skateboarder. In short order, Shaun White won nearly every adult skateboarding title there was and he still had high school homework and 3rdperiod math to contend with. Shaun White pictured in a brilliant photo graph by William R. Sallaz/SI, has two Olympic snowboard Gold Medals, 18 Winter X-Game snowboard medals, 13 of which are Gold; all the while still parallel pursuing skateboarding fame, having garnered five skateboard X-Game gold medals. In case you were wondering, “X-Game” means skateboarding; if you add “Winter” in front of it as in “Winter X-Game” it means snowboarding.
Because of his red hair, Shaun White’s nickname became The Flying Tomato. Ernest Hemingway perhaps in a lighter mood, if Hemingway ever had many moods beyond boorish, beyond the sadness that haunted him, might have celebrated Shaun White’s individual talent as a “sport” achievement. With all Shaun’s individual sport success, you might be surprised then to learn that he was born with the serious cardiac heart defect Tetralogy of Fallot – pronounced fay-low– a heart deformity incompatible with life unless surgically corrected.
…stay tuned…more to come, a lot more…
John Bershof, MD
John Bershof, MD is a plastic surgeon who has been in private practice for over 25 years. He is the author of numerous medical articles as well as the first textbook of medicine for mobile phones, entitled skynetMD 2005-2015. An essay entitled Gin & Tonics, Clerics, and Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?, which was extracted from one of his future as yet published books was featured in The Antioch Review.
While working on the medical textbook skynetMD for mobile phones, Dr. Bershof, perhaps not too surprisingly became more interested in the backstories of medical history, like who was Lou Gehrig, what is Lou Gehrig's disease, what was his lifetime batting average for the New York Yankees—.340, nineteenth overall—and who invented baseball anyway. Questions such as these piqued Bershof's interest. Having read At Home 2010 by Bill Bryson, his engrossing narrative journeys room-by-room through his Victorian English countryside home, a former rectory, where each room is a chapter about domesticity, about home. It occurred to Dr. Bershof that in similar vein he could take the reader disease-by-disease as jumping off points into human history, science, medicine—his canvas blank, no subject not within reach—and learn a little medicine along the journey.
The ability of a book that is heavily fortified with science and history to connect with a general readership can be challenging; Dr. Bershof through storytelling, humor, jumping off points and personal anecdotes, accomplishes it, written in a language fleeced of the jargon that normally accompanies such narratives. The first two books, The First History of Man published in 2020 and The Second History of Man published in 2021 are available in print, ebook and audio. The Third History of Man is in final stages of editing to be published in 2022, with more volumes to come after that.