Tetralogy of Fallot is not one of your garden-variety heart murmur defects, as if any heart defect should be taken lightly. Tetralogy of Fallot has four concurrent and distinct heart anomalies, too difficult to describe with words, even too difficult to portray with a medical illustration, which is to say even a diagram of Tetralogy of Fallot would look like an M.C. Escher or Picasso drawing of a heart. The constellation of heart aberrations results in significant mixing in the heart of oxygenated good blood with un-oxygenated bad blood. In layperson terms the mixing of blood through a hole in the heart is called a murmur; a murmur of course is the medical name given for the soundrushing blood makes through a heart defect and not the defect itself. Tetralogy of Fallot is the poster child of heart murmurs.
When oxygen is attached to hemoglobin, it imparts a red hue, which is why our arteries are red. When hemoglobin gives up its oxygen on its journey through the body, the “naked” hemoglobin imparts a blue hue, which is why our veins are blue. The end result of Tetralogy of Fallot is that the blue blood dilutes the red blood so much so that the newborn infant are born blue, giving rise to the other name for the anomaly: Blue Baby Syndrome. Shaun White was a Blue Baby, he was born blue, and his parents must have been “blue” with worry.
If Shaun White had been born prior to the mid 1960s but especially before 1944, he would have died soon after birth. Through a series of surgical techniques that began at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the early 1940s and continued on at the University of Minnesota in the 1960s, a surgery that finds a historic connection with the intellectual salonof five Baltimore women, members of The Friday Evening Group, the surgical repair puzzle of Tetralogy of Fallot might have unfolded differently.
Today a salon is a place to get one’s hair styled, and perhaps engage in catty gossip; a century ago a salon was a room in a home where high-minded intellectual discussions took place, and before that, a salon was a large greeting room in a castle or home of nobility.
Ernest Hemingway’s pal Gertrude Stein became fabulously famous for the salon she hosted in Paris from 1903 until 1938, so famous a salon that is was simply known as the Paris Salon, an intellectual sitting room at the home she shared with her lover Alice B. Toklas, 27 rue de Fleurus, Left Bank, Paris, pictured right. Frequent visitors to Gertrude Stein’s Paris Salonincluded Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Henri Matisse and Ezra Pound. Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Parisstarring Kathy Bates and Adrien Brody reflects that “Lost Generation”, as Hemingway christened his band of rebels, a group of writers and artist who it is said “came of age during World War I”.
Salon is derived from the French and means a “reception room”, such as in a palace, pictured left, likely dating back to 17th Century French royalty. Architects soon after then adopted the greeting room or salonconcept for wealthy albeit non-royalty as well. After all, if you weren’t born into nobility you could at least buy your way into aristocratic trappings. Over several generations, some of those affluent Europeans who fancied themselves more intellectual rather than patrician, morphed their salon greeting room into a salon for highbrow minded and artsy pursuits, like Gertrude Stein’s Paris Salon, and like The Baltimore Evening Group’s salon in Baltimore, Maryland, which is where our story now turns…in Part 3…to be continued…
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.