Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to JBJS Ortho Corps. Listen as members of the Ortho community, residents, surgeons, educators, staff and patients share their stories about the experiences and people most important in their lives and the lessons they learned along the way. OrthoCorps is an audio archive inspired by StoryCorps and independently organized by the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Well, thank you for joining us and if you could just introduce yourself and let us know where you're from and where you did your training through medicine.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: Well, hi, I'm Mike Chapman and I started life in the tiny, rural, remote town of Newberry in the Northern Peninsula of Michigan, and in 1949 my dad moved us to California, which was a great move on their part because it gave me access to the University of California system where I did my undergraduate work receiving my bachelor's from the University of California, Davis in 1958.
From there I went to UC San Francisco School of Medicine and then followed that with an internship at San Francisco General Hospital and completed my Residency in Orthopedic Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco in 1967.
I followed that with a three month mini fellowship in total Joint Arthroplasty at the Royal National Orthopedic Hospital in London, England, which included visits to Charlie's Place up in Wigan.
Following that, I remained in Europe and served in the U.S. army Medical Corps from January 1968 through December 1970 as chief of Orthopedic Surgery at the Hospital at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe in Southern Belgium, and then Chief of Orthopedic surgery at the 33rd Field Hospital serving the 3rd Armored Division in in Wurzburg, Germany.
After that I joined the faculty of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, where I was the Assistant Chief to Ted Bovill in the Department of Orthopedics at San Francisco General Hospital and joined up with the team and their level one trauma center there from 78 to 79. I did an NIH Fogarty International Research Fellowship in the EO Davos Research Institute in Davos Hutzilund, and during that year I was recruited to become the Chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery and Chief of the Orthotrauma Service at the University of California Davis Medical center in Sacramento, California, where I served as chair for 20 years, retiring in 2000.
And that wraps it up.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: What got you interested in orthopedic trauma?
[00:03:29] Speaker D: Into the job at San Francisco General, which at the time was one of the country's first Level one trauma centers.
We were Just swamped with trauma.
And so, you know, it just naturally evolved from there.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: So were there specific mentors who influenced you? And how would you say they did?
[00:03:56] Speaker D: Well, it would have to be Ted Boville. That's Edwin G. Boville Jr. 10 was the.
He had been in private practice in San Francisco, but had always been on the consulting staff at San Francisco General and then got talked into dropping his private practice and going to work at this large city, county indigent hospital in San Francisco.
And Ted was just a marvelous mentor.
He was the ultimate gentleman, really knew how to work with people, was very much an egalitarian, and he was a superb surgeon, taught effectiveness and efficiency in surgery, and was just a role model for the high ethics and dedication to patient care.
So he was my role model.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: What lessons would you say your work life has taught you?
[00:05:04] Speaker D: Well, that's an interesting question.
Maybe what I ought to do is put it this way.
If I were to give advice to a young academic, orthopedic traumatologist, what would I say?
And these are the lessons I've learned.
Strive to achieve and maintain a good life work balance that's essential for your loved ones, your family, and essential for you to avoid burnout.
Secondly, having good mentors can save you from making a lot of mistakes and can certainly play a big role in helping you achieve your goals.
Thirdly, there are lots of different routes to academic success, but if I had to pick one, it's identify an important unanswered question and then put together the team necessary to answer that question.
And if the question's important enough, you know, who knows, you may win a Nobel Prize.
And then I would advise get involved in leadership, because that opportunity greatly expands your horizons and your life experiences.
And I'm always asked the question, well, how do you get involved in leadership? Well, that's easy.
You do it by volunteering to do a job for an organization, and then doing a good job.
And recognition of your contributions will lead to leadership opportunities.
And then once you get to be a leader, keep in mind that the success of a leader is measured by the success of the people that he or she is leading.
So those are the lessons I've learned.
[00:07:02] Speaker C: Great.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: What would you say that you're proudest of?
[00:07:09] Speaker D: Well, that would have to be the founding of the Orthopedic Trauma Association.
That was a serendipitous event.
And, you know, fortunately I got to play a fairly significant role in that.
And when I looked at what the OGA has grown into today, it's flabbergasting I mean, it's got to be the most successful subspecialty association in orthopedics today.
I'm president, of course, but that's what I think.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: Would you say there's anything that you regret in your career?
[00:07:49] Speaker D: Not a thing.
I have no regrets. I have no regrets about my personal life, the recreational and life that I've led, nor the professional life. Not an ounce of regret.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: How has your life been different than you imagined?
[00:08:10] Speaker D: Well, you know, I was the first person in my family to attend a university.
And I came from a very, very small town in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan, where if I had remained there, there would have been no opportunity to go on to higher education.
And fortunately my family, my dad was stationed out in California during the war, came back to Michigan and said, you know, I found a place where it doesn't snow nine months out of the year and moved us here. And what that did, of course, was opened up the opportunity to attend higher education here in California, which at the time was essentially free.
The tuitions were minimal at that time, so, you know, a lower middle class kid could afford to go through school at that time.
And the, what I didn't anticipate at all was the life that academic orthopedic surgery offered. In particular, getting involved in leadership.
And what that opened up for me was a whole life that I had not anticipated.
And the most important part of that, I think, well, other than everything that we've done with my colleagues here in the US is it opened up a huge amount of opportunities internationally and through the orthopedic colleagues that I've become close to in Europe.
My wife and I have built very special relationships with eight different families, actually two of them orthopedic traumatologists.
And that led to us deciding to learn how to speak German, which we do. Wow, that just opened all of these doors in Europe that I absolutely could not have anticipated both professionally and, you know, personally and recreationally.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: Are there any funny stories or characters from your career that you would like to share?
[00:10:32] Speaker D: Well, you know, I have one story. I hope we don't run out of time.
It's very interesting in when I was working at San Francisco General one morning on a Sunday, I was on call and I got this call on a Sunday morning from the resident. He said, mike, he said, you know, we've got this guy who just survived a 29 story fall and he's got two open femurs and two calcaneus fractures.
And I said, 29 stories, you know, I said, you know, that's not possible.
So what it was, there was this guy who was high on methamphetamine, and he rushed into the bottom of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, and he was holding a dollar bill. If you look at the backside of a $1 bill, it's got a pyramid with this big eye on the top.
And he said that he thought that. That I was calling to him.
So he rushed by the guard and roared up 29 floors with the police and the building guards chasing him.
And on the 29th floor, he jumped into a utility shaft. It was probably about, well, I would guess maybe 10 by 10 in size.
And he fell 29 floors. And we know he did because one of the guards on the seventh floor heard him go by.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
[00:12:02] Speaker D: And another one was standing on the bottom when he hit.
And he was conscious and was singing Camptown Races.
And so anyway, I went in, and when he drove his femurs out his thighs, he broke off six inches of femur, which actually was interesting. About a week later, the police brought me these two pieces of bone and said, you want to put these back? I said, I don't think so.
And so, you know, as you know, I think I was one of the earliest or maybe the first to do closed intramedullary bone grafting. And that was my first patient we did that on.
So we.
We went ahead and treated, you know, treated the open fractures, had them in traction, and then took them to the operating room, reamed them up to a big nail. I think we put down a 16 or so and then took all the reaming materials and shoved them down into the fracture site and then put an IM nail down.
And both of those healed solid.
And it was from then that I started using that technique.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Is there a specific orthopedic trauma device technique, procedure innovation that you have a connection with that you'd like to share?
[00:13:30] Speaker D: Well, in the 1980s, Dana Mute, a development group working with Homedica. Homedica at the time was producing predominantly prostheses, and they decided to get into the bone fixation business.
So Dana and Chuck Edwards and I were the surgeons that were involved in developing the Alto bone fixation system.
And it had a lot of very unique, interesting features. It was the, I think the first all titanium system had been produced by US manufacturer.
And that system persisted, I think, into about the early 2000s.
And then when Helmetica got bought out, the company that bought them out had a competing system.
And the Alda system didn't have much of a profit margin because it was so expensive to manufacture in titanium.
So they dropped our system and decided to push forward with their stainless steel system.
So the system never made it long term.
But I thought that there were a lot of interesting ideas that we came up with, and a few of them spilled over into some of the fixation techniques that are being used today. Oh, and by the way, I should say, nobody understands today how that guy survived.
There's a.
The current theory is that he may have done like a skydiver and spread himself out and created an air cushion in the shaft because it was fairly narrow, and that's how we survived, but we really don't know.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Amazing.
Well, our last question.
For generations listening to this years from now, is there any wisdom that you would want to pass on to them?
[00:15:35] Speaker D: Yeah, well, you know, I don't think I have any really unique advice to offer.
There's lots of places to seek that, but what I would say is that lofty goals are worth pursuing.
