Gov. Phil Bryant may be wrong — and I think he is — in opposing expanding Medicaid in Mississippi to provide insurance for working poor people.
But give the Republican chief executive credit for pushing the expansion of medical facilities and medical education in the state.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson has a storied history of pioneering transplant surgery, and more recently one of its physicians — Dr. Hannah Gay — received world-wide recognition for achieving a functional cure in an HIV-positive infant.
The current issue of the Ole Miss Alumni Review includes an article about the late Dr. James D. Hardy (1918-2003), who led the UMC team that performed the first human lung transplant in 1963.
The article, marking the 50th anniversary of the procedure, reports that before the operation was concluded, a member of Hardy’s surgical team — Dr. Martin Dalton, a senior thoracic surgery resident — was summoned to the hospital’s emergency room.
There he found an African-American man who had suffered a gunshot wound. “Dalton attempted to stop the man’s bleeding and revive him, to no avail,” the article reports. “Dalton pronounced the time of death and went to notify the man’s family. It was then that he learned the man he had been trying to save was civil rights activist Medgar Evers.”
On the Alumni Review page preceding the Hardy article is one about Myrlie Evers-Williams giving the commencement address at the University of Mississippi in May. She, of course, was Medgar Evers’ wife. Neither Evers would have been welcomed on the Oxford campus in 1963.
It goes without saying that race relations in Mississippi have come a long way since then, as has transplant surgery.
Not mentioned in the Ole Miss article on Hardy is another transplant he performed at UMC several months later, in early 1964.
That was the first heart transplant, in which the heart of a chimpanzee was transplanted into the chest of a 68-year-old man who was dying. Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia, calls it the “last effort trying to save him, as no human heart was available.” The man died after 90 minutes, and Wikipedia correctly notes that Hardy dealt with “severe criticism for performing the transplant, but the operation manifested the possibility of human heart transplantation.”
Three years later, the first successful human-to-human heart transplantation was performed in 1967 by Christiaan Barnard in South Africa.
Hardy, an Alabama native, by all accounts was a remarkable surgeon and teacher who could have practiced anywhere in the country, but he chose to stay at UMC where he had been recruited from Tennessee in 1953 to become chairman of surgery at the Mississippi Medical School then still under construction.
The first lung transplant and especially the first heart transplant were indeed controversial at the time. But, according to Hardy’s many defenders, he employed strict ethical standards.
And bluntly speaking, the two recipients were about to die anyway.
Hardy and his associates showed transplantation could be done, and countless people have benefited from it since.
So, Phil Bryant’s vision of a cutting-edge medical corridor in Jackson, likened to those in Birmingham and Houston, is not without historical precedent.
The early 1960s which saw, among other accomplishments, a national championship football team at Ole Miss, Miss Americas from the state and the first transplants at UMC offset by atrocities opposing the civil rights movement were a microcosm of what too often has been this state’s history of highs and lows.
Mississippi, it seems, has always had people who stack up with the best, be it in medicine, the law, entertainment, sports, art, music, literature, you name it. But it also has more than its share of poor, uneducated under-achievers.
Between those two extremes, it seems to me, lies the largest challenge to improve.
