Medical School

At 93, Thomas Bourne Turner is almost as old as the 20th century, but he's certainly in a lot better shape.Dr. Turner is dean emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, a position so exalted in American medicine that it inspires awe in distinguished physicians not unlike the respect West Point generals command in old soldiers.Yet he is engagingly unaffected, unpretentious and egalitarian, qualities perhaps nurtured by his deep roots in Calvert County. He aspired only to be a country doctor when he left to study medicine.

Four years of medical school and a three-year residency left Dr. Jeanette R. McDaniel with a pretty good grasp of pediatric medicine.She felt at ease in a universe where tympanic reflex measurements and purified protein derivative tests are commonplace. The business side of medicine, on the other hand, was a mysterious, silently beckoning dark hole.Most newly minted doctors "haven't the foggiest idea about business," said Dr. McDaniel, who is in her early 30s and practices medicine in Ellicott City.

FROSTBURG - In his senior year at Frostburg State University, Jonathan Winter had to take calculus, a requirement of some of the medical schools he hoped to attend. He had not taken any math since high school trigonometry when "I wasn't very good at it," he recalls. Returning to math after years away would put fear into the hearts and minds of the best students. But Winter had come a long way during his years in college. He got an A in calculus -the same grade he has earned in every course he has taken at Frostburg State.

For senior running back Jonathan Rigaud, the decision to attend Johns Hopkins was easy. Having first heard in his junior year of high school about the winning combination of strong football and pre-medical programs that Hopkins offered, Rigaud saw the school as "the best of both worlds. " When the Blue Jays offered him the opportunity to play Division III football, Rigaud jumped at it. "I was considering going to Michigan or Miami just for academics, but when Hopkins came into the picture, I decided to come here.

A month shy of his 16th birthday, Ty Hobson-Powell made history Sunday when he walked across the stage at The Lyric as the youngest person ever to graduate from the University of Baltimore. Hobson-Powell gave up a fledgling basketball career when he began college three years ago, commuted more than an hour each way from his home in Northwest Washington after transferring last fall from Howard University and once completed 27 credits in a single semester while shuttling between classes at Howard, Montgomery College and the Internet.

While the latest update of the Baltimore Sun public salary database continues a long-running trend of university head coaches out-earning their academic counterparts, those who oversee academic medical programs aren't exactly suffering. Coaches Randy Edsall, Ralph Friedgen, Brenda Frese and Mark Turgeon filled out the top pay slots, making a total of just over $5.7 million in 2011 (the second of the two years covered by the update), but University of Maryland medical school administrators were not far behind: The remainder of the top ten earners comprised university staff, with an average compensation of $759,029 for the year in question*.

Dr. Ernst Friedrich Lepold Niedermeyer, who was a leading researcher, author, clinician and pioneer in the field of electroencephalogy and its use in epilepsy and other brain research, died Thursday of colon cancer at Gilchrist Hospice in Towson. The longtime Towson resident was 92. "He was one of the senior people in his field at his passing and widely respected. His textbook, 'Electroencephalography,' is the standard in the field," said Dr. Ronald P. Lesser, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Dr. George B. Udvarhelyi, an internationally known Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon who established the Office of Cultural Affairs at the East Baltimore medical school, died Tuesday evening at Roland Park Place of complications from a neck fracture. He was 90. "George Udvarhelyi was a colorful character who during his years there made remarkable contributions to the medical school at Hopkins," said Dr. Richard S. Ross, former dean of the Johns Hopkins medical school. "He was a cosmopolitan Middle European gentleman who was always impeccably dressed and drenched in fine cologne."

Soon after arriving at the MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland for his medical residency, Paul Jung quickly found he was doing as much dirty work as doctoring. Putting in as many as 90 hours a week, Jung schlepped paperwork, drew blood, wheeled patients to X-ray - all the while earning the equivalent of $10 or so an hour. And he says he was one of the lucky ones: His hospital has a reputation for being easy on residents. Now Jung, a research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University, is a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed yesterday in Washington that contends the system violates federal antitrust law. At the heart of the lawsuit is the National Resident Matching Program, which pairs the approximately 15,000 medical school graduates with hospitals seeking residents who spend as many as eight years refining their craft under the supervision of senior physicians.

Johns Hopkins Medicine faced a leadership crisis in 1996 when Dr. Edward D. Miller came in as interim dean of the school of medicine. The former dean and the former hospital president had feuded openly, leaving Johns Hopkins in limbo with no vision for the future. Within months, the school and Johns Hopkins Health System were merged and Miller became the first CEO and medical school dean in the restructured leadership. Miller brought calm and for the next 16 years oversaw a building boom at Hopkins, creating a system with an international division, six hospitals and more than 30 primary and specialty health care facilities.