Medical School

The wife of a Union Memorial Hospital doctor was charged with fatally stabbing her husband in the neck early yesterday at his North Baltimore apartment, according to city police and court documents.Dr. Vinesh Patel, 26, died of multiple stab wounds to his neck and chest that he suffered in his bedroom. His wife, Dr. Alpna Patel, a 27-year-old dentist, was charged yesterday with first-degree murder and use of a deadly weapon. She was being held in the Central Booking and Intake Center without bail and could have a bail hearing today.

In the amphitheater of the great teaching hospital, a 6-foot-5 executive with silver hair and a serious suit was talking renewal: a new cancer center in the fall, a research building by 2003, a new enterprise in Singapore.When the father of a girl with leukemia denounced the pediatrics center as cramped and decrepit, Dr. Edward D. Miller was ready with yet another plan for the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions: a $150 million Children's Center, with all the latest amenities."We have an insatiable appetite for things new," Miller told those gathered at his monthly town meeting.

This doesn't make sense. Melissa Sparrow is nervous?True, this is a big day. She will be matched with a hospital to begin her residency, the next step in her goal of becoming a pediatrician.But why worry? She's one of the brightest students at one of the best medical schools in the country -- Johns Hopkins. Any hospital would welcome her.The problem is, Sparrow wants to remain in Baltimore. Specifically, she wants to complete her three-year residency in pediatrics at the Hopkins hospital.

Dr. Arthur George Siwinski, a retired oncologist and surgeon, died in his sleep Sunday at the home of a son in Westminster. He was 94.Dr. Siwinski, formerly of Roland Park, also had been a head and neck surgeon. He retired from the practicing medicine in the late 1960s.He had lived for several years in Indian Rocks, Fla., before he returned to Westminster in 1997.From the early 1970s until retiring a second time in 1980, he traveled the country as a member of the Joint Committee on the Accreditation of Hospitals, which evaluates hospitals.

The University of Maryland's School of Medicine prides itself on being a national leader in training blacks and other minorities to become doctors.But that reputation -- and the admissions policies of Maryland and many other universities nationwide -- is under legal attack. A 37-year-old white man, Robert Farmer Jr., has sued the medical school and its officials, accusing them of illegally refusing him admission in favor of less qualified minority applicants."If your family is involved in crime, you can get into med school with a 2.5 [grade-point average]

Some mental cases need hospital settingAs a practicing psychiatrist in Maryland, I was not surprised to read about the tragedy that took the life of police Lt. Owen E. Sweeney. I don't want to sound alarmist, but unless we change our procedures to hospitalize and keep dangerous mentally disturbed persons in hospitals, we can expect more of this to happen.It is practically impossible now to hospitalize a mental patient in Maryland hospitals, both public and private. The same is also true when it comes to keeping a mental patient in a hospital.

JOHNS HOPKINS' pre-eminence in all aspects of medicine -- breakthrough research, academic excellence, delivery of health care -- is buttressed anew by a structural change that puts the dean of the School of Medicine in charge of its world-renowned hospital, thus drawing these two great institutions closer together.As revolutionary changes sweep through the profession, forcing physicians and hospitals to confront financial hazards, the new organization chart represents an attempt to preserve the Hopkins tradition that has made it great.

Dr. Roger O. Egeberg,93, the government's top health official during the Nixon administration, personal physician to Gen. Douglas MacArthur during World War II and a former medical school dean, died of pneumonia Friday at his Washington home.He was heading the University of Southern California's medical school in 1969 when President Richard M. Nixon named him assistant secretary for health and scientific affairs in the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare.As a special consultant to the president on health affairs from 1971 to 1979, he was a strong supporter of health care reform.

WITH THE imminent departure of Dr. James A. Block as president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the way is clear for historic change in the high command of the world-renowned medical institutions in East Baltimore.Before the year is out, a single chief executive officer will be named for the hospital and the medical school, both with newly designated chief operating officers. This will be part of the virtual merger of two proud and separate entities into a combine designed to flourish in the fiercely competitive health care market.

In an article in Wednesday's editions about restructuring a the Johns Hopkins medical center, The Sun incorrectly identified the previous institution at which the president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System worked. Dr. James A. Block was president of the University Hospitals of Cleveland before he came to Baltimore.+ The Sun regrets the errors.Senior trustees of the Johns Hopkins medical complex said yesterday that they will make one person responsible for all medical matters there, in the latest effort to end the bureaucratic infighting that has plagued the East Baltimore center.

Raymond P. Srsic, a longtime Anne Arundel County pediatrician and professor of medicine whose practice spanned 50 years, died Thursday of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was 81 and lived in Queenstown. Dr. Srsic, the son of a saloonkeeper and a homemaker, was born and raised in Pittsburgh. He was allowed to skip his senior year at North Catholic High School and enrolled at the University of Notre Dame, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1948.

Dr. Charles A. Barraclough, a retired physiologist and neuroendocrinologist from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, died of cancer April 19 at St. Joseph Medical Center. The Towson resident, who lived in the Campus Hills community for more than 46 years, was 82. Born in Vineland, N.J., Dr. Barraclough was raised in Hammonton, N.J. He graduated from Hammonton High School and then earned a degree in biology in 1947 from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. After two years pursuing a music career, Barraclough earned master's and doctorate degrees in endocrinology from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

After watching every second of the Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning Hopkins 24/7 and Hopkins documentary series from ABC News, I did not think there was anything that TV had left to tell me about the making of and professional lives of medical doctors. But after seeing the final installment of Nova's 21-year project, Doctors' Diaries, which premieres Tuesday night at 8 on MPT (Channels 22 and 67), I now know I was wrong. It is not that producer-director Michael Barnes finds new emotions, themes or narratives that ABC's Terry Wrong didn't in his brilliant studies of Hopkins and its doctors.

The troubles at the University of Maryland Medical System started long before one-third of the board, including its chairman, resigned a week and a half ago. And it predates the dispute over how to replace outgoing Chief Executive Officer Edmond F. Notebaert, who announced his retirement in July. Tensions at the medical system have been building for years, and critics who now lambaste Gov. Martin O'Malley for intervening in the matter have it exactly wrong. The problem is not that the governor took recent action but that he did not step in much earlier when it was clear that UMMS leadership had become dysfunctional.

The nation's chief medical association apologized yesterday for decades of past discrimination against African-American physicians, when it effectively denied membership to many black doctors - which many believe has left a legacy of separate and unequal care. The American Medical Association released an article and commentary acknowledging discriminatory practices that, although ended decades ago, still affect medical care. For example, until 1968 it limited membership to doctors who were also members of a state-level affiliate - many of which were segregated.

For years it has been a quiet mystery in a glass case at the Walters Art Museum, where it rested a few feet from a 4,000-year-old coffin in what is known as the Afterlife Room. But yesterday the 5-foot, 2,900-year-old mummy traveled by truck to University of Maryland Medical Center for its first-ever CT scan to see whether scientists can learn more about it - including whether "it" is a he or a she. For the mummy and its retinue, the biggest challenge was the same one facing everyone negotiating Baltimore's midday traffic: getting there in one piece.

Dr. Thaddeus Edmund "Thad" Prout, a retired endocrinologist and first chief of medicine at Greater Baltimore Medical Center whose work helped get several potentially dangerous drugs withdrawn from the market, died of dementia Dec. 3 at Copper Ridge nursing home in Sykesville. He was 83. "It was a very impressive career, his doctoring, teaching and leadership. You don't have to look far around GBMC to see the imprint of his work," Dr. Thomas F. Lansdale III, an internist and current chief of medicine at the Towson hospital, said yesterday.

HAVANA -- As a little girl growing up, Erlyne Hyppolite wanted to be a doctor, but she always worried that an expensive medical degree was beyond her reach. Now the 20-year-old from Lanham is living in Cuba and on track to become a pediatrician in six years. And it isn't costing her a dime. Hyppolite is studying in the Caribbean country, which has been at odds with the United States for decades, under a Cuban government program that trains students from 29 countries to become doctors.

Ever wonder what your lungs look like? Or your liver? An exhibit opening this weekend in Arlington, Va., uses real cadavers to satisfy that curiosity with a fascinating and controversial tour of the human body's internal workings. Using a process called polymer preservation, scientists in China have taken the remains of unclaimed corpses, drained their fluids and injected them with plastic to display reconstructed bodies and body parts in full color and stark detail. Bodies ... The Exhibition allows visitors to touch plasticized muscle and organs and get an internal view of the body's complex network of nerves and tissues and the circulatory system.

One of the world's leading experts on the DNA of microorganisms that harm humans will head a new research institute at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, an addition that promises to thrust the university to the front ranks of the movement to apply genetics to medicine. Claire M. Fraser-Liggett, 51, a pioneering geneticist known for mapping the genomes of deadly microbes such as anthrax and cholera, will head the new center and bring seven or eight top scientists with her. School officials and outside experts agreed that Fraser-Liggett's prominence should help the medical school attract talented scientists and compete for research funding.