Pearl River Wade’s World, my weekly radio show, usually focuses on organizing, politics, and whatever else might come across my desk or cause some brainwaves to heat up for me. One of the bookers and public relations people who pitches me from time to time knew I would have trouble saying no to talking to a retired Chicago surgeon, Dr. Allen Saxon, who had written a thinly disguised novel called Training in Charity that excavated his own experiences in the early 70s as a resident at the famous Charity Hospital in New Orleans.
Charity Hospital was founded in 1736, not long after the first such hospital for poor, Bellevue, began in New York City the same year, only short months earlier. Charity was originally located in the French Quarter and established through a gift in the 1735 will of Jean Louis, a sailor and shipbuilder. It went through various stages until populist Governor Huey P. Long shepherded the rebuilding and expansion of the facility, a new, 20-story art deco building on Tulane Avenue completed in 1939, shortly after his assassination. This massive $12.5 million project made it one of the largest and most modern hospitals in the U.S. at the time. That was then, but Hurricane Katrina in 2005 overwhelmed the facility, closing it down despite extensive protests demanding the hospital be reopened, and endless proposals that still continue for the old building, called “Big Charity” by New Orleanians for generations.
Fifty years ago, when Saxon was learning his trade in the medical profession, besides the fact that Charity was the hospital for lower income and minority families throughout New Orleans and south Louisiana, in the same league with Cook County in Chicago and Grady in Atlanta, it was also a much sought after training hospital for doctors. Charity’s connection to Tulane’s Medical School and their doctors and professors, along with the volume and variety of cases it presented, could take a rookie intern and in three or four years of experience produce a skilled surgeon, like Saxon.
The novel name checks numerous New Orleans signature locations from Café Du Monde to Felix’s Oyster House along with Mardi Gras and a hurricane scare, but reading much of it for contemporary readers and HBO viewers would be something like being in the shoes of some of the newbie interns in the award-winning emergency room show, “The Pitt.” Saxon gets your hands bloody in one procedure after another, when you aren’t Googling to find out the meaning of different terms and use of certain tools. He also shared his admiration for the show as exceptionally realistic.
The most dramatic scene in the book involves a series of what seem almost miraculous moves to save a young boy injured in a car wreck. His life was saved after losing a spleen, gall bladder and part of his liver. Talking to Saxon, it turned out this was the top of his own personal hit parade while spending his career at Northwestern University Hospital in Chicago that he inserted into Charity. No matter, it was a riveting tale with a happy ending. Having watched “The Pitt” on transatlantic plane flights, Saxon shared that the super surgery in a recent episode where they had to tilt the lung in order to stop bleeding was actually a dramatization of a procedure that a well-known surgeon has offered as a theoretical case study, rather than something from real life.
That was interesting to hear. More worrisome in our conversation was Saxon’s reflection on how much training for doctors and emerging surgeons has changed since his experience at Charity. More is video and practice on dummy models rather than in operating rooms serving and saving patients. In a time when one study after another establishes that your best odds for successful outcomes are in hospitals and with doctors who do similar procedures hundreds of times a year, rather than in smaller facilities where practice has not made the experience somewhat more perfect, this was a sobering warning to us all, and yet another reason to mourn the passing of Charity, no matter where we go for our healthcare.