Dr. Mario Ramirez is part of UT Health Science Center history. As a medical student in the 1950s, he fondly recalls Ma Hamilton’s boarding house on South Pauline, a place where you could dance to a nickelodeon and drink a beer. Ramirez is also a Texan, and, as he likes to say, “from the best of both worlds: orange and white UTHSC in Memphis and orange and white UTHSC in Austin, Texas, where the T stands for Texas.” Now 81 years old, he remembers his journey away from—and back to—his Texas home. It was a journey of inspiration and love.
This could possibly be the saddest story you ever read, but it isn’t. Far from it. It’s a story of courage, faith, and friendship that gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “a host of Volunteers.” It begins in 1971. Walter Chadwick, hero of the 1967 Tennessee–Alabama football game who wobbled the game-winning touchdown pass left-handed to tight end Ken DeLong, had just started a promising high-school coaching career in Smyrna, Georgia, near his hometown of Decatur.
Beloved Sesame Street character Big Bird once said “It’s no fun to be sick,” and he wasn’t kidding. Taking time off work for a doctor’s visit, getting poked and prodded, and maybe having surgery and a hospital stay is the last thing anyone wants. Of course, the expectation is that all this would happen in a sterile environment with the best medicines administered, all in a timely, unobtrusive way. But try to imagine that scenario without the assistance of a nurse.
Ann Bell, a retired UT Health Science Center hematology technologist and assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, is an expert on blood cells—and she has the literary credits to prove it. The Morphology of Human Blood Cells, the atlas she helped develop in collaboration with Dr. L. W. Diggs and Dorothy Sturm, is in its seventh edition.
Despite an occasional lull in the procedure and conversation about UT sports, the surgical team in the operating room at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital in Knoxville focuses on the task at hand: implanting an electronic device into the inner ear of an 11-year-old boy to help restore hearing to his left ear.
Teresa Harman Bell appears to have it all—she’s a professional pharmacist, a wife, and the mother of four. You would never guess that a car accident 17 years ago, while she was a UT Martin student, changed her and her family forever. Bell may be haunted by the disastrous car crash, but thanks to friends at UT Martin and in the Martin community, her good memories outweigh the bad.
As Debbie Ingram, UT Alumni Association president, travels to events, she solicits stories of how education has positively influenced the lives of UT alumni. Though their stories are different, Kayvon Sadrabadi and Paige Pettit credit education with altering their lives.
It was a hot Friday afternoon in a remote village in Belize, and the UT group there on a medical mission was ready to call it a day. But they knocked on one more door. That fateful visit could turn out to be a lifesaver for Atiliano Jones Jr., a 15-year-old with a tumor the size of a cantaloupe growing inside his head.
Clinical laboratory scientists—hospitals would be dead in the water without them. Patients would go undiagnosed and disease untreated if it weren’t for this profession. Medical technology has come a long way in the past 40 years, and UT Health Science Center professor emerita Brenta Davis was instrumental in making it happen.
June Montgomery, who served UTHSC for 37 years before retiring in 1973, passed away on February 25, 2007, at the age of 99. As director of the first UT alumni office in Memphis, he will be remembered for his style of stepping out from behind the desk and interacting with students.
Erin Moore graduated from the University of Tennessee last spring with an A+ in perseverance. Two years ago, in August 2005, Moore was starting her sophomore year at the University of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina aimed for the Gulf Coast. The university shut down, and Moore fled the Crescent City with a backpack containing two bottles of water, some saltine crackers, and two changes of clothing.
In a recent Memphis Business Journal “Healthcare Heroes” competition, the UT Health Science Center walked away with the lion’s share of the awards.
What happens in your mouth can affect your entire body. That’s Dr. Waletha Wasson’s message—a message she delivers far beyond the classrooms of the UT College of Dentistry. Wasson is one of the originators of Tennessee Smiles—a program to help citizens realize the importance of good oral health.
Appreciation for the arts and cutting-edge surgery skills seem worlds apart. But Dr. David LaVelle (Martin ’75, Health Science Center ’79) easily connects the dots. Once a cast member on the stage of UT Martin’s Vanguard Theatre, this talented orthopedic surgeon is equally comfortable discussing plays or describing an innovative surgical hip-repair procedure he performs at Campbell Clinic in Memphis.
A life can turn on one good deed, and Eddie Rowe believes he’s living proof. Rowe (Health Science Center ’69), a pharmacist in Kingsport, says he’d be “digging ditches today” if it weren’t for the kindness of former UT pharmacy dean Seldom Feurt. In gratitude for that kindness he speaks of, Rowe has put his money where his mouth is to endow a scholarship fund for pharmacy students.
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