Seeing 'Jesus' from Below #4

The gift of friendship with Sheldon Korones, MD, radically (i.e., down into the root) altered my approach to spirituality and ethics in the mid-1980s and continues to anchor my attempt to be authentically ‘with the world face to face’ within the medical education/practice sphere. Dr. Korones was one of the first generation of academic physicians who in the 1960s pioneered the formation of the neonatology specialty. In 1968 he left a lucrative private pediatric practice to establish an intensive care unit for critically ill newborns at Memphis’ Charity Hospital.

I came to our first meeting expecting to be oriented to the ethical strains peculiar to the care of critically ill newborns. We quickly found our way to a much deeper and more profound place as we shared our stories. After a few meetings, Shelly invited me to spend a six-month sabbatical at his side. I discovered a physician seasoned in the struggle to be humane toward disadvantaged and vulnerable patients. As a wall-hanging reminds him and every person who enters his office --

“Some children may dance to the joyous music of the lyre, while elsewhere other children only cling to existence. They are all ours.”

After completing his pediatrics residency in 1954 at Boston General Hospital, Shelly and his wife Judy moved to Memphis where he joined a medical school friend in a private pediatric practice. He faced a severe social contrast. He spent his mornings at Charity Hospital; his afternoons at his private (“carriage”) practice. His morning patients – poor and/or black-skinned babies – were dying in infancy at twice the rate of his afternoon patients – privileged white-skinned babies. Memphians, as was true across the South, remained entrenched in discrimination and in injustices when he made the decision in 1967 to leave private practice in order to devote himself to his Charity Hospital patients.

An eight-year-old white-skinned boy, after noticing a black-skinned girl in an exam room, could question Shelly – his doctor -- innocently, “I didn’t know you treated animals here.”

Medical students and residents, while rounding with him at Charity Hospital, would repeatedly express disrespect for their indigent patients by asking Shelly, “How should we treat a private patient with this condition?”

White-skinned parents would tell Shelly, “I’d rather our baby die than be taken to that ‘nigger’ hospital.”

A fellow physician, from whom he expected support, could whisper to Shelly, “It’s too dark for me on this side of the restaurant.”

Philanthropists would tell Shelly, “You’ll never raise money from this city for those
babies.”

The contrast ate at Shelly’s conscience. As did a noble theme first planted in him by his grandfather -- Nachman Gogel -- in whose shadow he was raised on New York City’s Lower East Side.

Shelly’s instinct to respond to crushing oppression formed from this oft-repeated childhood scene. It’s 1930. Six-year-old Shelly is nestled in front of a Fada Radio, listening attentively to the day’s episodes of Jack Armstrong. The stubble-bearded Nachman locks the dark green doors of his nearby blacksmith shop. Walking around the corner, he climbs a flight of steps to the landing of a modest five-room ‘railroad flat’. Shelly eagerly meets his grandfather in front of the dining room buffet. With unequal strides, they make their way to the living room where Nachman settles into his chair. The stocky lad begins his nightly ritual. Pulling off the heavy work boots and socks, Shelly runs his fingers over each foot’s single chunk of nailless flesh that had once been separate toes. Shelly prods Nachman to repeat yet again the painful memories always just a thought away. Conversing in Yiddish, they reenact an old Russian proverb that says, “A child’s education begins with his grandfather’s education.”

“Papa, tell me again what happened to your toes.”
“My son, Cossacks chased me. I hid in the forest for a long time. My toes froze off in my shoes.”

With these few words, Nachman’s attention would drift to 1880s Czarist Russia, to the peasant village of Mogilyov. Jewish parents in the hundreds of villages like Mogilyov stopped at nothing to keep their boys from being snatched by the marauding Cossacks who enforced the Czar’s harsh conscription laws. Conscription for Jewish boys meant more than military service. It meant to be brutally stripped of their identity. In far away military schools, they were severely beaten, forced to violate dietary traditions, and even denied food. One freezing winter night, young Nachman Gogel suffered severe frostbite in the woods while hiding from the Cossacks.

The year 1968 is remembered more often for the death of noble themes than the birth of noble themes:

• January - The Tet Offensive shatters reassuring interpretations of the Vietnam conflict.
  
• February - The Turner Commission releases its warning that two separate and unequal societies -- one black and one white -- remain entrenched in the United States.
• March - President Johnson announces he will not seek reelection.
• April - Martin Luther King is fatally wounded on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. Riots leave over 100 cities in flames.
• June - Robert Kennedy is fatally wounded on the night he wins the California primary.
• August - The processes of democracy virtually collapse at the Chicago Democratic convention.

Overshadowed by such disheartening headlines, Shelly announced 1 July 1968 to the medical school and to the city his intention to create at Memphis’ Charity Hospital an intensive care unit for critically ill newborns. The scenario still looks quixotic. A physician with an uneasy conscience who dared to dream. A city polarized and embarrassed. A medical school and city hospital with neither plan nor funds for newborn intensive care. Skeptical local philanthropists before whom Shelly peddled his vision in vain. And yet three years later -- with the support of the local media, a persistent reporter, some diligent nurses, an encouraging Pediatrics Department chairman, a new Charity Hospital board, a strategically placed Children’s Bureau official in Washington, a courageous rabbi, a few faithful friends, and an unwavering family -- The Newborn Center had been established.

The story unfolded under Shelly’s direction for thirty-six years. Critically ill babies received state-of-the-art care, regardless of socio-economic or ethnic distinctions. They were referred to by names or personal pronouns rather than by bed numbers, disorders, or illnesses. Even the sickest of the babies were given every plausible chance to defy the odds.

One night in 1979 Shelly was on call when a baby, asphyxiated at birth, needed to be transferred to The Newborn Center from a town in Mississippi for intensive respiratory therapy. In route the ambulance had an accident, killing the driver but leaving the baby unharmed. Another ambulance delivered the baby to The Newborn Center. Making his way through the nursery shortly after the baby had been stabilized, Shelly initiated conversation with the baby’s nervous rural southern grandmother standing beside the incubator.

Korones: “Somebody up there must like this baby.”

Grandmother: “Oh yes, wasn’t it lucky that a doctor came by when the accident happened?”

Korones: “No, the luck was that the baby didn’t need a doctor.”

Grandmother: “I guess you’re right. You’re such a fine Christian person.”

Korones: “No, I’m not a Christian.”

Grandmother: “You mean you take care of babies at all hours of the night and you’re not a Christian?”

Korones: “No, I’m Jewish. We love babies too.”

Embarrassed and confused by her innocent assumption, the slow speaking grandmother shuffled out of the unit.

Though not as unprepared as that grandmother, the approach to spirituality and ethics I brought to my friendship with Shelly had no well-defined place for the relationship that formed between us. Shelly and I have now spent hundreds of hours together – in the intensive care unit, in his office, or at his kitchen table -- reconstructing his professional biography . . . and sorting through my search for a healthy center. He has never flinched as I have chronicled my efforts to ‘see from below’. In the center of the inner circle of individuals who have comprised my most intimate ‘community’ stands a Jewish physician for whom I have utmost respect and appreciation. I quickly realized my approach to spirituality and ethics had to be thoroughly reconstructed in order to celebrate and nurture our friendship/fellowship without restraint or diminishment.

In my office hangs a photograph of a gentle hand cradling the tiny head of a prematurely born baby. The inscription on the back --

“Consummate comrade-in-arms, dear friend. Shelly.”

And so we remain.