I am a Midwesterner, who grew up in Illinois, just outside of Chicago. My family was large; I am the 3rd son of six children and was always trying to compete with my two older brothers. I am the first of my family to attend college, so the family was surprised when my intentions to attend medical school materialized. I went to Illinois Wesleyan University, in Bloomington Illinois before attending Southern Illinois University in Springfield. I was always a bibliophile. I became interested in historical writings in college; the library in Bloomington had extensive archives on Abraham Lincoln. One little known anecdote about my college career bridging to medical school was that I joined a circus briefly before matriculation. Bloomington, Illinois has long been the seat of Circus flyers and the allure of being hurtled by a teeterboard was just too compelling prior to pursuing medicine (or perhaps it is an appropriate metaphor).
I became interested in surgery early in medical school and began to do significant research in transplant physiology. My first paper was on aseptic necrosis of the hip in transplant patients on steroids which was presented at the University of Michigan. I graduated with honors in surgical research and went to Connecticut for a general surgical residency. I became sidetracked by interacting with a group of outstanding urologists in Bridgeport during an elective rotation. That changed everything. I switched career pathways and matriculated to Albany Medical Center where I met my wife, Gail. The urologic training also allowed me to pursue other academic interests such as the history of science. Finishing training in 1988, I pursued a fellowship with George Drach in stone disease, while endourology was in its infancy. During the fellowship year in which George gave me intense latitude, I met a young general surgery fellow who introduced me to laparoscopy. I moved on to an academic position at the University of California, Davis in Sacramento, California. Here I could explore laparoscopic surgery intensively in a laboratory setting and began interacting with high end technologies such as robotic systems by 2000.
In the lab next to mine worked a young surgeon named Fred Maul who would later founded Intuitive Surgery. Also present was Hap Paul, a veterinarian with a vision to create an orthopedic robot which he called Robodoc. These were heady times when Ralph Clayman had just performed the first human laparoscopic nephrectomy. Our first child was born in Sacramento but I simply could not sustain our lifestyle in California and I had the opportunity to return to Albany, NY with my new family and a progressive private practice that encouraged my academic activities.
During my academic years at the university, I had the great pleasure of developing many lifelong personal contacts with individuals who have had a profound effect upon me. One such individual was Sakti Das. He was a mentor, a friend, a political ally who helped me become only the third urologist to gain membership in the American Osler Society. My love for historical and humanistic medicine has found a natural place amongst the Oslerians.
In addition, I have had the massive honor of having several publishers produce works of mine of the historical variety which truly have no real home in the urological literature at present.
The final chapter of my career has found me back in Tucson, Arizona where my academic career started. I have increasingly become affiliated with the AUA and the William P. Didusch Center for Urologic History over the past five years. I have come to know Rainer and Dorothy Engel and their brood at each subsequent annual meeting. My first love in history is books, and then comes artifacts - a bit different from Rainer's background. The museum is a treasure trove of urological artifacts and the library is in need of careful scrutiny and acquisitions.
I feel the great potential for the American Urological Association's museum at the Linthicum headquarters and hope to follow the paths already begun by those on whose shoulders I will stand.
With the mantra from Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpshicore, Thalia and Urania (the muses) I will try to continue and expand upon the mandate of my four predecessors.
"nanos gigantium humeris insidentes" [12 century quote attributed to Bernard of Chartres (dwarfs on the shoulders of giants), perhaps the source of Newton's much more famous quip to his rival Hooke on February 5, 1676].
Rainer Engel, MD, FACS, passionately and tirelessly served the AUA's William P. Didusch Center for Urologic History for 23 years as curator of the museum and subsequently AUA Historian.
Dr. Engel published on a wide range of subjects, including urinary diversion, hypospadias and urologic cancers. In addition to publishing medical research and case studies, he wrote numerous chapters in medical books and many urological history monographs and AUA museum publications.
The AUA awarded him The William P. Didusch Art and History Award in 1996 and honorary membership to the AUA in 2006. Both Rainer and Dorothy were honored by the AUA Board with an appreciation award in 2004 for their work in rebuilding the museum at the new AUA Headquarters.
Rainer's biography is best told in his own words, taken from a piece he wrote for the museum's website:
I was born the third of nine children in 1933 in a small town outside of Cologne, Germany. My early years were heavily influenced by World War II—bombings, troops marching through our city and bodies in the street—which left an indelible impression on me. After grammar school, I went to the Gymnasium in our town where I had the pleasure of learning Latin and Greek, subjects that I did not particularly care for. The one subject, ironically, that I truly loathed was history: a quagmire of dates and names that seemed to be totally unrelated to each other yet had to be memorized and spouted forth on command. My father was a teacher at this school, so he knew about my achievements—both positive and negative—long before classes were over and "discussed" them with me after school.
I decided to study medicine—with all of its Latin and Greek—after entertaining dreams of becoming an architect or sculptor. No one thing led me to become a doctor, but family friend-physicians and fond memories of time spent being patched up for play-related scrapes and worse led me to the hospital to make my living. I went to medical school at the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelm Universität in Bonn, which at that time was the provisional capital of Germany. While taking my final boards (a rather protracted, laborious, and intense torture), I decided with one of my friends that each night before the next exam we would go to the dumbest movie we could find. One night we ended up captivated by a movie called Dream Street of the World, and as we walked out, we thought, one day we will drive that street. After my internship in Germany, I decided to turn that dream into a reality. My friend and I saved enough to buy a VW convertible and at the end of our internships started on a six-month trip through the United States, including Alaska, traveling down the "Dream Street" of the world. It was then I realized that I wanted to remain in the United States.
Because of my visa, I had to return to Germany for two years. By that time, I had married Dorothy, a young blonde nurse, and after two years in Europe, the two of us returned. In 1970, I finished my urology residency at Johns Hopkins and became chief resident. I practiced at both Hopkins and Union Memorial and also Greater Baltimore Medical Center and Baltimore City Hospital. I joined the AUA in 1976. William W. Scott, MD, my professor throughout my residency, had become the curator of the AUA's Didusch Museum after his retirement, and one time during rounds leaned over to me and whispered, "Rainer, would you like to become the next curator?" I was stunned and excited – and I agreed. That year I began to work with him, and, in the spring of 1993, took his last exhibit to San Antonio, and it was there that the board officially approved me as curator of the museum.
Though I am retired now, I continue to teach at Johns Hopkins, as well as coordinate, prepare and execute exhibits for the museum and travel around the world gathering artifacts for the Didusch collection. And the "young blonde nurse"—my wonderful wife, Dorothy—not only condones my work at the museum, but shares my plans and works with me to make the museum great.
For more information on Dr. Engel’s work with the William P. Didusch Center for Urologic History, see the article published by the Washington Post titled Man Goes to See a Doctor...
Nobel Prize winner Charles B. Huggins, MD was born on September 2, 1901 in Halifax, Nova Scotia where he went to public school and college. He then went to Harvard Medical School, where he was the youngest student in his class, and graduated in 1924. He subsequently moved to the University of Michigan where he did his internship and began his specialty training.
He continued this training at the University of Chicago where he was offered a position as research assistant and, shortly thereafter, the directorship of the division of urology. Though his training had been in surgery, he accepted the offer and bought the Edward Keyes textbook Urology, which he literally memorized in a very short period of time.
Early on, he was interested in scientific research and, in the 1950s, began to relinquish his surgical activities bit by bit. Dr. Huggins was known for his curiosity, creativity and almost old-fashioned hard work, frequently coupled with his delicate humor. His first major research dealt with induced transformation of one cell type into another, transforming fibrous tissue into bone by implanting bladder epithelium in a different host site. Dr. Huggins wrote about this: the actual value of this spectacular experiment was to lead a young practitioner into the delights of discovery in the exciting world of research.
His next research activity dealt with the relation of body temperature to hematopoiesis in bone marrow. This work, based on transplantation of bone marrow from a rat tail into the abdomen, resulted in one of the three gold medals he received from the American Medical Association.
As Dr. Huggins was asked by his patients about the function and purpose of the prostate, he realized that for both normal and diseased states, very few research papers existed. In the late 1930s (with his students Clarence V. Hodges and William W. Scott) he studied the relation between the endocrine system and function of the prostate gland, and later the control of inoperable prostate cancer. Until then metastatic pain had been treated by a radiation of nerve roots and through successively larger doses of alkaloids.
Hormonally-induced regression of prostatic carcinoma, and particularly the resolution of pain, was many times quite spectacular. "Humanity owes a great debt to Charles Huggins," said Paul Talalay, director emeritus of the pharmacology department at The Johns Hopkins University and a previous student and collaborator of Dr. Huggins.
In October 1966, Dr. Huggins received the highest decoration in the scientific world, the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, jointly with the virologist Peyton Rous. It honors the importance of Huggins' work and research that influenced other scientists and their research relating to the behavior of cancer cells. His discovery opened an era of rational chemotherapy of malignant diseases through manipulation of the endocrine regulation. He was able to demonstrate in 1951 that breast cancer was, like prostate cancer, dependent on specific hormones, and that advanced breast cancer could be influenced positively through hormonal manipulation. However only 30 to 40 percent of women with breast cancer responded positively to this treatment. Huggins, searching for a method to predict positive responses, convinced his colleague Elwood Jensen at the Ben May Laboratories in Chicago to develop a method to identify estrogen receptors. This has led to today's classification of breast cancer as estrogen-receptor positive or negative, an important prognostic and therapeutic marker.
The Ben May Laboratories at the University of Chicago were made possible through Huggins' contact with Ben May, a businessman from Alabama. After several years of discussions, Ben May agreed to support the Ben May Laboratory for Cancer Research (now the Ben May Institute for Cancer Research), which was opened in 1951 with Huggins as its first director, a position he kept until 1969, when Elwood Jensen succeeded him.
Dr. Huggins received numerous awards and honorary degrees and, in addition to the Nobel Prize received the "Pour L'Merit Order of the Federal Republic of Germany" in 1958. The AUA awarded Dr. Huggins the Ramon Guiteras Award in 1966. He was the last of the original eight faculty members of the University of Chicago, and died on January 12, 1997 at the age of 95.
William Wallace Scott, MD (1913 - 2000) was born in Kansas City, Kansas, on January 27, 1913. He attended the University of Missouri at Columbia for four years and supported himself by driving a cleaning and pressing truck for Vanity Fair and working in the Sigma Nu fraternity house. Early in college, Dr. Scott aspired to become an engineer. However, after working in the research laboratory at the University of Chicago during the summer of 1932 and being exposed to his older brothers—one a physiology student and the other a medical student, he was convinced that a career in physiology or medicine was for him. Consequently, he began medical school at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1934.
Dr. Scott received the Sydney Walker III Fellowship, which paid tuition for the final years of his schooling. This included graduate work culminating in a PhD in physiology in 1938 and an MD in 1939. After the first two years in medical school, during which he took all the electives in physiology and biochemistry, Dr. Scott decided to follow in his two brothers' footsteps and work toward a doctorate in physiology. His doctoral thesis was "The Physiology of Cerebral Concussion," and for a time he considered going into neurosurgery. However, after he obtained his medical degree and interned in surgery under Dallas B. Phemister, MD, a strange set of circumstances pushed him toward urology. Dr. Scott worked with Charles Huggins, MD and later became his resident and associate. Dr. Scott's experiences with Dr. Huggins convinced him that he wanted to pursue a life in urological surgery and research.
Aside from his work on the prostate gland, Dr. Scott had an interest in renal transplantation. In the early 1950s he was the first—with Johan de Klerk, MD and H. William Scott, MD—to use cortisone in an effort to increase the length of survival of heterologous renal transplants in dogs.
In Dr. Scott's 1965 presidential address to the Mid-Atlantic Section of the American Urological Association, he spoke on "The Training of a Resident" (unpublished). Much of what he said was to point out that a year in research during a clinical residency was very worthwhile, regardless of whether the trainee subsequently pursued a career in academic medicine or private practice. It was extremely gratifying to Scott that 22 of 65 of the residents training during his tenure later went on to head departments of urology in medical schools here and abroad.
During his tenure, Dr. Scott gave 15 named lectures and participated in 25 visiting professorships. Among the lectures, he was most honored to give the Austin M. Curtis Memorial Lecture at Howard University, the first Nathan G. Alcock Lecture at the University of Iowa, the Ramon Guiteras Lecture, the Dallas B. Phemister Lecture and the Hugh Hampton Young Lecture. In addition to keeping busy with the affairs of the Brady Urologic Institute, Dr. Scott also served the faculty committees of the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health and Armed Forces in Washington, DC.
Scott received numerous awards. These included sharing the Gold Medal for Research in Prostatic Growth with Charles Huggins and Phillip Clark, presented in New York City in 1940 by the American Medical Association; the Distinguished Service Award of the university of Chicago in 1958; both the Barringer and Keyes medals of the American Association of Genito-Urinary Surgeons; the Ramon Guiteras Award* and the Eugene Fuller Triennial Award* of the AUA; and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Missouri. He served as president of the Mid-Atlantic Section of the AUA in 1965 and of both the Clinical Society of Genito-Urinary Surgeons and the American Association of Genito-Urinary Surgeons in 1974 and 1978, respectively, and was an honorary member of several of the sections of the AUA and of the British Association of Urological Surgeons.
Dr. Scott died in 2000.
Born January 20, 1914, Herbert Brendler, MD (1914-1986) of New York City, was the 79th AUA president after having served five years as AUA secretary. Dr. Brendler served on the editorial board of The Journal of Urology® and later became associate editor and editor in 1983. He served on the Residency Review Committee for urology from 1973 to 1979 and was also chairman of that committee.
Dr. Brendler was urologist-in-chief and chairman of the department of urology at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York from 1963 to 1982. He received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University and his medical degree from New York University (NYU). He obtained his surgical experience in New York and completed his training in urology at the University of Virginia and The Johns Hopkins University. Prior to going to Mt. Sinai, Dr. Brendler served in the United States Navy in World War II. He also served on faculties at Hopkins, NYU and Bellevue Medical Center.
Dr. Brendler was chairman of the Cooperative Study in Prostatic Cancer, Cancer Chemotherapy, National Service Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), from 1956 to 1963. He has also served as a New York section executive committeeman from 1965 to 1978, and subsequently, as the section's treasurer from 1966 to 1968 and as its president from 1969 to 1970. Dr. Brendler represented the New York Section on the AUA executive committee from 1971 to1977. He was elected secretary of the AUA in 1977; as secretary, he served as program committee chairman for the AUA conventions from 1978 through 1982. Under Dr. Brendler's leadership, the traditional format of the annual meeting's scientific session was re-designed to provide for both poster sessions and state-of-the-art lectures.
Dr. Brendler, also a diplomate of the American Board of Urology, held membership in the American College of Surgeons, the American Association of Genito-Urinary Surgeons, the Clinical Society of Genito-Urinary Surgeons, the American Association of Clinical Urologists, the American Medical Association as well as numerous other national and foreign medical organizations. He traveled extensively and served as guest professor and special lecturer at many national and foreign universities and medical organizations. Dr. Brendler was author or co-author of approximately 150 scientific publications.
Dr. Brendler died in 1986.
