The University of Michigan Department of Urology 3875 Taubman Center, 1500 E. Medical Center Drive, SPC 5330, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-5330

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What's New August 3, 2018

Sunrises, sunsets, summer imaginations, and facts

10 Items, 30 Minutes

One.

Michigan sunrises and sunsets are hard to beat this time of the year. [Above: Michigan sunrise: Campbell Cottage, Platte Lake, 6 AM July 9, 2018.] Regional newcomers find our summer nights come late, due to the fact that Michigan is about as far west and north as you can go in the U.S. eastern time zone. The western claim seems to be a true fact, at a tiny corner of Ontonagon County in the Porcupine Mountains, west of Silver City, Michigan (89.887453 west and 46.766675 north). The nearest named place on the map is Lafayette Landing, northeast along the Lake Superior shoreline (longitude 89.8407 west, latitude 46.7991 north) where August sunsets will be late and no doubt amazing.

Michigan still stretches further west to Gogebic County, but all four Michigan counties

bordering Wisconsin are in the Central Time Zone (Gogebic, Iron, Dickinson, Menominee). If you extended the entire Eastern Time zone to a line drawn south from Lafayette Landing, the

zone would incorporate Madison, Chicago, Memphis, Jackson, and Bogalusa, Louisiana (89.83881 west, 30.780556). Michigan comes close regarding the northern claim, but the most northern U.S. mainland place in the eastern time zone is actually Estcourt Station in Aroostook County, Maine, at a latitude of 47 degrees 27’ 35.51” N (47.4582 degrees N) (population 4), barely displacing Eagle Harbor in Keweenaw County, Michigan, at 47 degrees 27’ 30” N (population 76).

However, if you are willing to navigate to Isle Royale National Park, you can expand the northerly claim. Even better, Isle Royale has 450 minor islands and Gull Island may be the most north (48.2622 north, 88.26472 west). Rock of Ages Lighthouse is further west in Lake Superior, (89.3133 west, 47.86667 north), but not as west as Lafayette Landing. Possibly some real navigators could improve on these claims of fact, all derived from maps and Internet.

New house officers are a big academic feature of summer at the University of Michigan.

We select them carefully and anticipate their arrival eagerly. This is sunrise for their most critical phase of medical training, graduate medical education (GME), where they learn the art, science, and skills of their careers as doctors, a phase more intense than medical school and may take more than twice as long. New trainees and new faculty (see item eight) regenerate our department and our field. Joining us as residents (postgraduate level 1 or PGY 1) last month: Kyle Johnson from University of South Carolina, Katie Marchetti from UM, Roberto Navarrete from Wake Forest, and Javier Santiago from Baylor. Joining us as fellows are: Giulia Lane from the University of Minnesota and Jeff Tosoian from Johns Hopkins. Their starting month was intense, after undergoing extensive onboarding processes, but their time off in Ann Arbor and environs should be pleasant with long sunny days to enjoy the Summer Festival, Art Fair, Farmers Market, Purple Rose Theater, Metro Parks, Detroit Tigers, restaurants, Manchester United vs. Liverpool at Michigan Stadium, and regional explorations, among countless other opportunities. All too soon daylight will shorten, work will intensify, as the full academic season unfolds next month and 2019 lines up in the batter’s box.

[Above: Lake Michigan sunset, Esch Road Beach near Empire, August 18, 8:43 PM 2011. Below: Sunset & rainbow, Grand Haven, July 22, 9:15 PM, photo credit, Carol Spahlinger.]

Two.

The term Michiganders surprised me the first few times I heard it after arriving in Ann Arbor in 1984 but now, accustomed to it, I occasionally use it myself. Michigander is a demonym, although a favorite author, John McPhee, didn’t include it among citations of other examples, such as Mancunians, Minneapolitans, Providentians, Haligonians, and Liverpudlians [McFee. Draft No. 4. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. p. 173.] Sense of place matters deeply to most people, defining personal identity in large part. As much as Vonnegut deflated the notion of self-identification with organizations or geography, as for example being a Hoosier, pride of place memes are important. [Cat’s Cradle, 1963.]

In addition to its soccer team, Liverpool brings up memories of the Beatles, however pediatric urologists and pediatric surgeons of my vintage also think of Mr. Herbert Johnston (above with younger DAB, c. 1986), who practiced at the famed Alder Hey Children’s Hospital where innovations of safe prolonged general anesthesia advanced the range of pediatric surgery and urology. From its first public demonstration in 1846 until the mid 20th century, general anesthesia carried significant morbidity and mortality risks that increased with the duration of anesthetic time, so procedures had to be brief. With safe induction, tracheal intubation, controlled gas flow, and vital sign monitoring, surgical procedures grew in length and complexity. Blood gas, end-tidal CO2, and peripheral oxygen saturation measurement further enhanced safety and permitted extraordinary interventions including cardiac operations, organ transplantation, extensive cancer extirpations, and major bodily reconstructions. With operating rooms less tense and frantic, background music became commonplace and, given the popularity and sheer quantity of Beatles tunes, it is likely to hear them during surgery in operating rooms around the world today.

Soccer, or European football dominated many conversations in our department last month and in spite of the loss of his beloved British team the day before, Khurshid Ghani sportingly hosted a backyard viewing of the World Cup final between France and Croatia (below). Last weekend at Michigan Stadium, Liverpool defeated Manchester United 4:1 during their U.S. tour, jumping the Liverpudlian factor in operating rooms around the world from two-pronged to three-pronged when conversations turn to soccer, before or after, but never during “time-outs,” of course.

Three.

The Chang Lecture last month connected me to Joel Babb, an artist living in Maine. Having spent many childhood summers in Maine I jump at the chance to reconnect there, obvious demonym notwithstanding. Joel’s depiction of the first successful renal transplantation, on display at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, was featured in our Chang Lecture, and Joel was very generous with permissions and digital files. He created the painting with the help of its principle innovator, the late Joe Murray, a close friend of my former professor at UCLA, Will Goodwin [Above: Joel Babb, self-portrait with dog, Ruskin. Below: Joe Murray visiting UM, c. 1990.]

The First Renal Transplantation shows a large team of two operating teams and consultants necessary for that landmark event in 1954. [Below: study for First Renal Transplantation, Joel Babb.]

Joel sent us other examples of his work including the first face transplant in the Western Hemisphere, and a book by Carl Little, Nature & Culture, The Art of Joel Babb. [University Press of New England, 2012]

Medical care, initially a simple one-to-one expression of human empathy, has expanded to team-based efforts that blend science and the art of humanism. The balance is asymmetric according to teams, individuals, and locations. Organizational culture largely determines the blend, varying from day to day and hour to hour, as is true for most human efforts. Intrinsic to the humanism of medical care are principles of equity and kindness, although these are susceptible to submersion by political and economic milieus, whether based on consumerism, capitalism, socialism, or any other “ism” other than humanism. Some new meme of universal humanism is an existential necessity for our species, but it is expressed far too weakly and

drowned out by larger themes of place and personal identity. That new meme must somehow embrace deep respect for all places and identities, but it seems sadly faint just now. Four.

Place, whether urban space or landscape, has been a dominant part of Babb’s work and his surgical paintings seemed, at first glance, a departure. Sense of physical place gives familiarity and security, whether pastoral landscape, city, neighborhood, occupational, or particular health care location – operating room, ICU, emergency room. The human need for relevance makes us seek that sense of place in teams, although exaggerated sense of place, is destructive, leading to smugness, self-importance, or xenophobia. In the sense of teams, then, as place, Babb’s surgical paintings are really no departure from theme.

When sense of place is disrupted, particularly for reasons beyond an individual’s control,

the disturbance must be unimaginable for those of us naïve to such grim experience. An astonishing statistic appeared in a recent book review in The Lancet by Jennifer Leaning: “One out of every 113 people in the world is either an asylum seeker, a refugee, or internally displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).” [The Lancet. 390:2136, 2017.] The book at issue, Refugee by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, brings a new category of refugee into play in increasing numbers, the climate refugee. It seems that we owe it to ourselves, as a species, to secure safety of place – the idea of home - through our governments, and to mitigate it as best we can when we encounter its disruption. This should be a cardinal responsibility of the civilization we maintain for ourselves and build for our successors.

Disturbance of personal homeostasis threatens the most immediate sense of place, namely bodily place. Loss of limb, organ, or essential function carves away a person’s ultimate and closest geographic identity, the individual physical and mental place of self. The immediate human corporal reality, physical integrity, is our most fundamental place and we locate ourselves, we see ourselves most literally, in the image of our own faces. The face is the most essential part of identity, evidenced by facial recognition by self-learning algorithms. Loss of face, once an exaggerated figure of speech, is the penultimate reduction of “being.”

Joel Babb’s painting of the full face transplantation (above) demonstrates an extraordinary realization of human imagination and civilization, the capability to replace a human face. That painting carries his work across the spectrum of the human experience of place, from landscapes, to cityscapes, and then to the core visible essence of ourselves and its new mutability with full facial transplantation. For the story behind the face transplant, Joel referred me to an article by Raffi Khatchadourian. The patient, Dallas Wiens, was electrocuted in a boom lift when he contacted a high voltage line while painting a church roof in Fort Worth. [Transfiguration. The New Yorker. February, 2012.] Five.

Imagination and reality go back and forth, and it is sometimes difficult to know the priority of chicken or egg. Human imagination has been wildly in play since our earliest days, as with the Lowenmensch chimera (above), a figurine from the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000 years ago) of a lion head on a man’s body, found in a German cave in 1939. One wonders what that artist was thinking while fashioning the figure, what god or superhero was imagined in the work. The Sphinx at Gaza, a more recent reverse example, with a woman’s head on a lion’s body.

The imagined miracle of transplantation is a related theme, wherein body parts could be

exchanged. Saints Cosmas and Damian, twin Arabic physicians and Christian martyrs, practiced in the third century Roman province of Syria, now the town of Yumurtalik in Turkey. The story of their transplantation of an Ethiopian’s leg to a white man was their big miracle (above). Details are sketchy, histocompatibility uncertain, but positive outcome must be inferred, otherwise how else could the miracle be explained?

The enduring meme of chimerism, returned with the zitiron, a mythical “merman” illustrated in Meydenbach’s natural history encyclopedia of 1491 (above: Wikipedia). The figure of a man-fish is suited up with armaments for battle. A more appealing chimera is The Little Mermaid story of Hans Christian Anderson in 1837 that reverberates in The Little Mermaid Statue, on Langelinie Promenade in Copenhagen, having survived vandalism, decapitations, and a 6-month sojourn in Shanghai. The story echoes again in Ron Howard’s 1984 film, Splash, with Daryl Hannah. [Below: Edvard Eriksen statue in Copenhagen, 1913]

As imagination informs reality, laboratory chimeras and body-part transplantations are now commonplace facts of life. I recently ran into colleague John McGee in a hospital corridor

and noticed his chimeric lapel pin, the logo of his transplantation society. [Below: Dr. John Magee with pin.]

Six. Challenged by modern medical practice in technology-intensive specialties such as urology, residents and fellows may wish they could splice several contradictory heads on themselves to balance empathy and science, kindness and detachment, to better serve their patients. Our trainees can become adept at transplantation and making laboratory chimeras, but fundamental traits of humanity are more difficult to acquire and perfect.

Just after sending the May edition of this column, I came across a Piece of my Mind in JAMA by the well-known medical oncologist Marc Garnick, an oncologist who became a patient, reeling from bladder cancer and then confronting non-Hodgkin lymphoma the following year. His concluding paragraph captured my aspiration for our profession.

“The patient-physician relationship is unique among any other human experience, something to be understood and appreciated. By filling in the gaps and tending to the patient’s broader needs – not just those pertaining to diagnosis and therapy, but the

fuller context in which treatment occurs, all of us – patients, physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, staff, and humanity – stand to benefit.” [Garnick. JAMA. 319:2079, 2018.]

This relationship is embodied in conversation that may merely begin and end with an initial “History and physical exam” moment, but might further develop over days, weeks, or years of a relationship. Whether limited to a single encounter or developed over time, that conversation has the potential to yield practical therapeutic value and even spiritual meaning to both patient and physician. I don’t mean to overstate or understate the idea of the conversation. It can be a mundane exchange of facts and desires from a patient, eliciting understanding and perhaps therapy from the provider. Yet, even at the simplest level, it is built on integrity and trust. If more ensues, so much the better. Seven.

Chang Lecture notes. We began this series of talks in 2008 to honor Dr. Cheng-Yang Chang, who initiated a pediatric urology focus here in Ann Arbor. His father, Ku-nien Chang was a famous artist of the landscape literati style in China and Taiwan, and over 80 of his works are rotated through exhibits at our UM Art Museum, in the Shirley Chang Gallery. The lecture series was a particular enthusiasm of my term as chair and, expecting a successor, it seems suitable to conclude this series of talks, with great appreciation to all those who supported it with their interest and presence. In its way, the Chang Lecture series has fulfilled some part of our obligation as a university in offering things to public audiences – public goods.

Some shout outs are in order. Emily Soto has catered this event from the start. In the audience with many friends, colleagues, and members of our department were 2 former Medical School Deans, Allen Lichter and Jim Woolliscroft. Bob and Janet Bahnson came from Columbus with George and Tina Skestos (below: Bob, George, Janet, Tina). George, three-time UM degree recipient, has the only Maize and Blue box at The Ohio State Horseshoe Stadium. Bob is former chair of urology at Ohio State, and Cheryl Lee, Nesbit alum 1997 is current urology chair. Hamilton and Lilly Chang joined us from Chicago, and Ted Chang and Mary Gallant drove from Albany.

Our most distant attendee was Otto Lin from Hong Kong, industrial and systems engineer, although I suspect his main purpose in Ann Arbor was to visit his daughter, Associate Professor Ann Lin of the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy (below).

Eight.

Art Fair. With a new season of GME beginning in July we initiate our first major academic events during the Art Fair, starting with the Chang lecture on Art and Medicine late

Thursday afternoon and then Duckett and Lapides lectures and teaching sessions on Friday morning, while the administrative staff simultaneously holds professional development training. Then, for most people, the afternoon is free as a sort of yearly “birthday present.” In this way, we drastically close down all but the most urgent clinical operations in the interest of education and recreation.

The John W. Duckett Visiting Professor began in 1997 in honor of a foundational figure in pediatric urology and friend and mentor to me as well of Michigan Urology. John had passed away unexpectedly and we began this series in his honor. Doug Canning of CHOP was our first Duckett lecturer and this year Rosalia Misseri, of Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis, spoke about “Closing the loop: lessons learning by the pediatric urologist caring for the adult spina bifida patient.” The Lapides Lecture began in 2006 and this year it was given by Hadley Wood of the Cleveland Clinic, who has defined the field of urologic congenitalism. Her talk was “Applications and pitfalls in the use of video urodynamics in adult congenital neuropathic bladder.” Robust discussion with residents and faculty in attendance was robust and enhanced by the fact that Drs. Misseri and Wood had met the residents and fellows over the dinner the previous evening, while the Chang Lecture group had a simultaneous event at another site. [Above: Friday afternoon at the Art Fair. [Below: Hadley Wood with Rosalia Misseri and husband Morton Green, pediatric anesthesiologist at Riley.] Appended is a list of Chang speakers.

Peggy Duckett and George Drach, of Philadelphia have been with us from the start of this academic/Art Fair convergence. George and Peggy announced their engagement here in Ann Arbor to us on Jim Montie’s deck during the third Duckett Lecture season. George gives socioeconomic, philosophical, or practical talks during our Friday sessions, and this year spoke about the Urological Knife. If any readers want to know what that’s all about, he is available to

give the lecture again.

[Above: Martha Bloom, George and Peggy.] Nine.

Bomalaski Scholars. In 2014 Dave Bomalaski (Nesbit pediatric urology fellow 1996) and his wife Sue (above) generously endowed a recurring scholarship for a resident to explore a career in pediatric urology. Julian Wan presented the award this year to Lauren Corona, PGY 3 (below 2 pictures). Previous Bomalaski scholars were Duncan Morhardt (Nesbit 2017), who is starting fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital, Courtney Streur (Nesbit 2018), and Ted Lee (Nesbit, 2019), who will follow Duncan to Boston in 2 years.

Two new faculty join us this year, both in the pediatric division – Courtney Streur and Bryan Sack (below). After training in Birmingham, Alabama, Courtney joined us for a 3-year fellowship with a masters degree in health services research. Bryan trained at Medical College of Wisconsin and then fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital. [Devin & Courtney, Bryan & Melissa.]

Michigan Urology now has 7 pediatric urology faculty, 6 in endo-stone, 6 in neuropelvic reconstructive urology, 3 in sexual reproductive, 4 in general urology, 5 in community urology in Muskegon at West Shore Urology, and 13 in uro-oncology, 4 faculty in our fulltime research cadre. Six faculty cover VA positions and we have multiple joint faculty with other departments, as well as a number of adjunct faculty

Ten.

Diversity enriches nightscapes Michigan, Maine, and all other places in a multitude of ways. Tree frogs and lightening bugs are distinctive sounds and sights of Ann Arbor summer nights, starting up in June and disappearing around September. In the dark winter months, I’ll be longing for them to start up again. Diversity makes the natural world work, a fundamental fact obvious to any scientist or any other rational thinker. The most prominent living spokesperson for biodiversity, E.O. Wilson, has visited Michigan as convocation speaker for our Life Sciences Institute (2004) and to receive an honorary degree (2009). I recently spotted this new portrait of him at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. [Above: by Jennie Summerall, 2006]

I hear frogs most summer nights. The chorus frogs, genus Pseudacris, comprise a genus in the Hylidae family named according to their sounds (“false locusts”) and the Northern spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer) may be the noisy males I hear, advertising their social interests by means of their ancient social media. The Linnaean system of classification divides life into kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, geni, and species. Wikipedia explains that the order of frogs and toads, the Anura, is divided into three suborders: the Archaeobatrachia, Mesobatrachia, and Neobatrachia. That last suborder (neo=new, batrachian = frogs) accounts for most anurans and consists of over 5,000 species, some of which live in trees, the so called arboreal frogs. Many frogs around here belong to the Hylidae family. Wikipedia lists twelve frog species among the amphibians of Michigan, including the Cope’s gray tree frog (Hyla chrysoscelis) and the Gray tree frog (Hyla versicolor). The American green tree frog (Hyla cinerea), extensive throughout the southeast, may be emigrating north as climate changes. These are popular pets, although they don’t do well with frequent handling.

Fireflies, the winged beetles I see most nights, are scientifically classified in the Lampyridae family of insects among the beetle order, Coleoptera. Over 2000 species of fireflies exist worldwide and the light they produce is a cold light, nearly 100% efficient in that it produces no heat. The light flashes are its social medium for courtship, warning, or predation. The predominant firefly in the eastern U.S. is the Photinus genus and its flashes bring males and females together for mating at night. The female lays eggs on or in the ground a few days after mating, and hatching occurs 3-4 weeks later. The larvae feed in the summer and hibernate over the winter, underground or in bark or other sites of refuge. Another use of the visual language

of fireflies is to warn predators that they taste badly and may be poisonous, due to the lucibufagins, defensive steroids similar to the cardiotonic bufadienolides in some poisonous toads. Some fireflies, notably females of the Photuris genus, mimic mating flashes of other species in order to attract and then devour the unlucky males that fly to them hoping for a different interaction.

Beetles and fireflies may be prominent contributors to Michigan nights, but they are only a tiny part of the rich web of life seen, heard, or unnoticed as we pass through these summer months. Tunes from open windows of cars and houses, patios, or block parties, drown out the tree frogs, just as outdoor lights or July fireworks obscure the fireflies. Seeing the cold light flashes from my porch and hearing music in the air from a neighbor begged the question whether that beloved musical group had a spelling problem. In 1957 John Lennon’s first group, the Blackjacks, became the Quarrymen, so named after their high school, Quarry Bank. Paul McCartney, age 15, joined Lennon in July and in the following March brought along George Harrison. By January of 1959 the other original Quarrymen had left the group and the three remaining guitarists, then attending Liverpool College of Art, briefly took up the name Johnny and the Moondogs for gigs. Art school friend Stuart Sutcliff joined as a fourth guitarist in January, 1960, bringing a new name for the band, the Beatals, after Buddy Holly and the Crickets. They became the Silver Beatles in May and by August, they were simply the Beatles. Sutcliff left the band in 1961 after its second Hamburg period and Ringo Starr joined in 1962. While the name of the Liverpudlian musical group may have had a link to insect nomenclature, the spelling variations remain unexplained, perhaps the educational fault of Liverpool’s Quarry Bank High School (now Calderstones School), pharmaceutical influence, or simply poetic license in Liverpool’s hot summer nights. Thanks for reading Matula Thoughts this August, 2018. David A. Bloom, M.D. The Jack Lapides Professor and Chair Department of Urology 734-232-4943 dabloom@umich.edu

Appendix: Chang Lecturers 2008 James Steward, DPhil, UM. 2008 Mysoon Rizk, PhD, University of Toledo. 2009 Joel Howell, MD, PhD, UM. 2010 Shinming Shyu, MS, EMU. 2011 Thomas Cole, MD, MPH, UNC, Contributing Editor, JAMA. 2012 Charles Yeo, MD, Thomas Jefferson University. 2013 Richard Prager, MD, UM. 2014 James Ravin, MD, University of Toledo. 2015 Pierre Mouriquand, MD., Claude Bernard University, Lyon. 2016 Don Nakayama, MD, MBA, Florida International University. 2017 David Watts, MD, University of California, San Francisco. 2018 David Bloom MD, UM. Last month's internal weekly "What's New" profiled: a.) Pediatric Urology Update, b.) Marketing and Communication Update, and c.) Adverse Childhood Experiences in Urology by Dr. Brian Stork [https://medicine.umich.edu/dept/urology/whats-new-july-2018]