Ochsner in Literature—nonfiction

• Alton Ochsner
• history
• Huey Long
• nonfiction
• nonmedical literature
• Ochsner Clinic
• Ochsner Medical Library
• Tulane University

The Ochsner institutions and their physicians have figured in works of literature, both fictional and nonfictional (Fig. 1). An earlier article described citations to Ochsner in works of fiction. This article enumerates and discusses its treatment in works of nonfiction. It will not deal with strictly clinical or scientific works.

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Figure 1.

New Orleans Charity Hospital, The Earl of Louisiana, Ochsner's

Important in this array are those works sponsored or sanctioned by Ochsner, which, while not representing any official “party line,” at least tend to provide Ochsner's view of events in its history. The first four works fall within this category.

1. Early History of the Ochsner Medical Center: The First Twenty-Two Years. Guy A. Caldwell, MD. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1965.

Guy A. Caldwell, MD, was one of the five founders of Ochsner Clinic and served as its first medical director. He provides a candid description how the Founding Five conceived of a group practice, a center of excellence, a medical court of last resort, and the Deep South version of the well-established famous predecessors—the Mayo, Cleveland, and Lahey Clinics. There is great detail of the opposition from the local medical community, culminating in the delivery of 30 pieces of silver to each founder on Holy Thursday 1941, presaging attitudes that would continue over the next several decades. Early on, the founders identified the need for their own hospital, especially when negotiations with Touro Infirmary for a designated Tulane-Ochsner Pavilion were blocked by the hospital's medical staff.

Ochsner Clinic grew rapidly in the late 1940s, as physicians returned from service in World War II. The only surplus military hospital available to Ochsner was at Camp Plauche, located beneath the Huey P. Long Bridge, and the first Ochsner Hospital was the famed “splinter village.” This perhaps fortuitous location resulted in the selection of a Jefferson Parish site for the permanent Ochsner Foundation Hospital, completed in 1954. This proved to be the major site of New Orleans' suburban growth over the next 30–40 years. The story ends with the construction of Ochsner Clinic as a wing of the Ochsner Foundation Hospital, a move from the Prytania site in uptown New Orleans, and the consolidation of all Ochsner activities on the Jefferson Highway campus in 1963.

2. Ochsner's: An Informal History of the South's Largest Private Medical Center. John Wilds. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

John Wilds had a career as a journalist with the Associated Press and The New Orleans States-Item. In retirement, he turned his hand to chronicling institutions, most notably Ochsner.

Wilds describes the growth and maturation of the Ochsner Clinic—Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation dyad from its founding in the early 1940s through the early 1980s. He begins with biographical sketches of, and personal insights into, each of the five founders. He identifies as important factors the attraction of patients from Latin America, the stabilization of the professional staff by expansion of the Ochsner Clinic partnership beyond the original five partners, the consolidation of facilities on Jefferson Highway, and the transition of leadership to a second, then a third generation of successor physicians.

The critical events during this era related to economics, science and technology, and changes in delivery systems. Although the medical profession was almost unanimous in its resistance to governmental programs, the arrival in 1965 of Medicare and Medicaid brought an enormous infusion of funds to private medicine and hospitals. At the same time, major developments took place in specialized care, high technology programs in cardiovascular surgery and invasive cardiology, advanced diagnostic and therapeutic programs on cancer care, and, later, joint replacement techniques and organ transplantation. These developments were reflected in Ochsner's educational and research programs. The increase in size and complexity challenged the managerial and governance structures at Ochsner to flourish in an ever-changing environment. The book ends at the time when Ochsner was initially addressing solutions in primary care, local and geographic expansion, and creation of insurance products. The chronicling of these aspects remains for the next volume of Ochsner history.

3. Alton Ochsner: Surgeon of the South. John Wilds and Ira Harkey. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

Ira Harkey was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who undertook the biography of Alton Ochsner. When he was unable to continue, John Wilds, who had just completed Ochsner's, was the logical choice to reorganize Harkey's notes and complete the work.

Appropriately for a biography, this work describes Alton Ochsner the man rather than the institutions he helped found and lead to greatness. It tells how the young man from Kimball, South Dakota, became educated and made his way to Chicago, where he, the little country cousin, was to learn the art and skills of the surgeon from his famous relative: the Dr. Ochsner, A. J., chief of surgery at Augustana Hospital and inventor of the Ochsner clamp. Alton was prepared for a career in academic surgery, and, accompanied by his wife Isabel, was dispatched for study under the surgical greats of Switzerland and Vienna. He returned to a faculty position at the University of Wisconsin, and in 1927 was recruited by Tulane University as chairman of surgery, succeeding the venerable Rudolph Matas and initiating a career that would eclipse that of his noted relative.

The book covers in detail his work and techniques as a teacher, researcher, and clinician. It notes his early collaboration with his colleague, Mims Gage, and with his pupil Michael DeBakey, with whom he made the observations of the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. His famous patients Ben Hogan, Gary Cooper, and Juan Peron are recounted, as well as how he matured into an ambassador not only for both Tulane and Ochsner Clinic, but also for the nation and the causes about which he had a passion. The story tells of his personal life, family, tragedies, and joys. He continued as an involved contributor to professional and personal causes until the end of his life, at age 85.

4. A Brief History of the Six Clinic Group Conference. Frank A. Riddick Jr., MD. New Orleans, LA: Ochsner Medical Institutions, 1994.

The Six Clinic Group had its initial meeting in 1955, and has continued annually over the ensuing 52 years. The membership has remained unchanged, and the Group has resisted expansion in an effort to preserve its sense of camaraderie. The medical and lay leadership of Cleveland Clinic, Henry Ford Hospital, Lahey Clinic, Lovelace Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and Ochsner Clinic meets in an informal setting for two and a half days each spring to address issues involving these leading groups, the dynamics of practice, and innovations. While resource persons from outside offer keynotes or provide insight on special topics, a major segment of each meeting is always devoted to learning from each other. This book details the founding and maturation of the conference, with listing of agendas and anecdotes about the meetings and strong individual leaders in the initial 40 years of the Six Clinic Group.

5. New Orleans' Charity Hospital: A Story of Physicians, Politics, and Poverty. John Salvaggio, MD. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

New Orleans allergist-immunologist John Salvaggio, MD (1933–1999), was a noted clinical investigator who spent his career in the institutions surrounding New Orleans Charity Hospital. He moved from the faculty of the Louisiana State University School of Medicine to Tulane Medical School to assume the Henderson Professorship of Medicine and later to chair the Department of Medicine. His history of “Big Charity” is thorough and readable and reflects his devotion to the institution, warts and all.

Salvaggio describes the contributions of Alton Ochsner and Guy Caldwell to Charity's teaching programs. He also notes the roles of Mims Gage and of C. Thorpe Ray, who moved from his role as chief of cardiology and director of education and research at Ochsner to become chairman of medicine at Tulane Medical School. He records the participation of George H. Porter III, MD, President of Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation, in multipartite discussions during the 1980s on the role of Louisiana's public hospital system in provision of care to the underserved.

6. Huey Long. T. Harry Williams. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.

T. Harry Williams, an eminent historian and author, was the Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University. His Huey Long is viewed as the definitive work on the important and controversial Louisiana politician; it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Williams' biography includes an account of the tension between Long and Alton Ochsner, recounted in greater detail in the next section.

7. Tulane: The Biography of a University 1834–1965. John P. Dyer. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

John P. Dyer was a professor of history and the dean of University College at Tulane University. He created a loving, carefully chronicled account of the major institution Tulane had become, including its important role in New Orleans health care. Wilds and Harkey, Salvaggio, and Dyer each detail the recruitment of Alton Ochsner to head the Department of Surgery at Tulane in 1927, all emphasizing its importance.

Another event, occurring in 1930, had great impact on Tulane, LSU, Charity, and ultimately Ochsner Clinic, still a decade in the future. These three books, as well as Huey Long, all treat it in some detail with only minor differences about what happened, why it happened, and its implications and effects, depending on the subject of each book—Alton Ochsner, Tulane Medical School, Charity Hospital, or Huey Long. This event was the cancellation of Alton Ochsner's clinical privileges at New Orleans Charity Hospital. The setting had many polarizing features. The New Orleans power structure and social establishment, including members of Tulane's board of directors, ranged from strenuously to virulently anti-Long.

There was feuding between the dean of the Tulane Medical School and the director of Charity Hospital, Arthur Vidrine, MD, a Long appointee. The hospital, not the medical school, controlled the appointments of teaching staff as well as of interns and residents. Huey Long felt that Tulane should have granted him an honorary degree. Arthur Vidrine aspired to a professorship in otolaryngology at Tulane, whose dean and chair of surgery felt him unqualified for the post. Long believed that Tulane was an elitist institution that discriminated against the common folk who made up his constituency. He had therefore determined to establish a medical school centered on Charity Hospital, and did so by abrupt decree in December of 1930. He feared that the presence of the well-respected and well-established Tulane Medical School would threaten the success of the newly founded Louisiana State University Medical School. Dyer maintains that this was Long's chief motivation in Ochsner's expulsion. Williams believes that it flowed from Long's personality and proprietary interest in institutions he touched. He would brook no opposition to or criticism of his projects, Charity Hospital or the Louisiana State University Medical School, and he moved swiftly and ruthlessly to punish those who provided them.

The triggering event was the appearance of a copy of a letter Alton Ochsner had written to a colleague, Allen Whipple of Columbia University. Ochsner was in much demand and was receiving overtures from around the country, offering him professorships and deanships. His letter mentioned that he was despairing over the difficulties of accomplishing things in the heavily politicized environment of Charity Hospital. The purloined letter wound up in the hands of the Charity Hospital board, which made Ochsner's concern over political pressure a reality by firing him from his post at Charity at Huey Long's direction.

Ochsner was able to continue his professorial responsibilities by securing an appointment at Touro Infirmary, where Tulane controlled ten beds, and maintaining a presence there. Meanwhile, Mims Gage oversaw Tulane's interests at Charity with increasing difficulty, as the newly created Louisiana State University Medical School, headed by Huey's hand-picked dean, Arthur Vidrine, developed its clinical teaching services. Despite LSU's claims that it was a fully accredited Class A medical school, it had never been recognized by the accrediting agency of that day, which expressed concerns over the political environment at Charity and the caliber of the faculty in surgery. LSU proposed to address these by offering the chairmanship of the Department of Surgery to the accomplished practitioner Urban Mayes, MD, who agreed to accept, provided that there be a pledge of noninterference by politicians and that Alton Ochsner's privileges at Charity Hospital be restored. This was accomplished in 1932.

The two-year enforced exclusion from Charity Hospital had a profound influence on Alton Ochsner. He had been committed to the principle of full-time academic surgery, with limited consultative private practice and a role as teacher, mentor, and overseer of surgical residents in the operating room. Tulane Medical School required clinical faculty members to abjure private practice when they accepted full-time appointments. His stint at Touro brought Ochsner into daily contact with the community's practitioners and allowed him to develop a following as the surgeon of choice for wealthy New Orleanians. He became convinced that Tulane's destiny lay in developing a faculty practice and its own teaching hospital as insurance against future restrictions in access to Charity's beds. Tulane resisted the concept, fearing alienation of the clinical faculty who donated their teaching services. Tulane's somewhat grudging acquiescence for Ochsner and his colleagues to pursue the idea on their own led to the establishment of Ochsner Clinic in 1941. In a sense, Huey Long's spite laid the groundwork for the creation of Ochsner Clinic.

8. The Earl of Louisiana. A. J. Liebling. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.

9. Earl K. Long: The Saga of Uncle Earl and Louisiana Politics. Michael L. Kurtz and Morgan D. Peoples. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

A. J. Liebling was a correspondent of The New Yorker magazine who came to Louisiana to cover the gubernatorial election of 1959. His New Yorker articles from this visit form the basis for The Earl of Louisiana, which describes the antics and machinations of the colorful, if demented, Governor Earl Long. It is set against the backdrop of Louisiana politics in the era when the White Citizens' Councils, Long-style populism, and individual personal ambitions clashed.

Michael Kurtz and Morgan Peoples are historians at Southeastern Louisiana University and Louisiana Tech University, respectively, and are students of Louisiana politics. Their work is in standard biographical form, tracing Earl Long's path from cradle to grave.

Both works describe the events of the summer of 1959, which saw the flamboyant governor in and out of medical institutions and courts in several jurisdictions. A precise diagnosis was never established and certainly cannot be determined at this date nearly 50 years later. The governor had a history of impulsive buying (dozens of pairs of shoes) and whimsical bestowal of gifts (a bushel of yams and a live chicken) to surprised near-strangers he encountered. Possibilities include bipolar disease with manic outbursts or organic brain syndrome related to vascular disease. His behavioral aberrations reached a point of crisis in May 1959, when he launched into a near-incoherent and obscenity-laden tirade against opponents at a joint session of the Louisiana legislature. After an hour and a half, he collapsed and was confined to his bed in the governor's mansion. Long had earlier informed associates that he had been told he was not well and required surgery (prostatectomy) and that he had arranged to have this performed at Ochsner Clinic. Following the episode in the legislature, his estranged wife, Blanche, and his nephew, U.S. Senator Russell Long, arranged to have him committed to a mental institution. Governor Long was told he was being taken to Ochsner Clinic for surgery, but instead was sedated heavily and flown on a Louisiana Air National Guard plane to Galveston, Texas, where he was hospitalized in the psychiatric unit at John Sealy Hospital.

After two weeks there, he secured his release from the hospital on a writ of habeas corpus, promising to enter Ochsner Foundation Hospital on his return to Louisiana. The stay at Ochsner lasted just a few hours before Governor Long set out for Baton Rouge, only to be greeted with commitment papers to Southeast Louisiana State Hospital, a state psychiatric facility in Mandeville. The crafty Long shortly arranged to replace the head of the State Hospital Board with a crony who persuaded the board to fire the hospital director and appoint a non-psychiatrist physician friendly to Long, who was quickly released. Earl Long spent the remaining months of his term as governor in a quixotic, futile run for lieutenant governor. Ever the campaigner, Long was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1960 but died before taking office.

10. Managing Change and Collaboration in the Health System: The Paradigm Approach. Alan Sheldon. Cambridge, MA: Gelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, 1979.

11. Competitive Strategy for Health Care Organizations: Techniques for Strategic Action. Alan Sheldon and Susan Windham-Bannister. New York: Aspen Publishers, 1984.

Alan Sheldon is a British-trained psychiatrist. Now retired, he was a faculty member at Harvard University School of Business Administration and the Harvard School of Public Health, specializing in organizational behavior. Susan Windham-Bannister is an advisor on strategic planning. Alan Sheldon was a consultant to the Ochsner institutions in the late 1970s, charged with evaluating issues of ownership, governance, management, and organizational configuration in a changing and challenging health care environment.

From his stint at Ochsner came his description of “The South Clinic,” now a case study at Harvard Business School and the subject of Chapter 2 in Managing Change and Collaboration in the Health System and of the last chapter in Competitive Strategy for Health Care Organizations.

“The South Clinic” is a thinly disguised description of Ochsner Clinic and the Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation and their history, configuration, and challenges. The presentation is quite accurate, and the analysis and recommendations reasonable, if predictable. The implementation presented significant difficulties—some achieved over a 20-year span and requiring, in the words of a veteran observer of the Ochsner scene, “a few departures, retirements, and fancy uptown funerals.”

12. Code Blue: A Katrina Physician's Memoir. Richard E. Deichmann, MD. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006.

Richard Deichmann has been an internist at Ochsner since his return to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Before the storm, he was chief of medicine at Memorial (Baptist) Hospital in New Orleans. As a leader of the Disaster Response group, he reported to the hospital as Katrina approached, bringing his family to ride out the storm there. He anticipated that he would ensure that the patients were stable and safe, spend a windy night, and, after morning rounds, return home with the family to start the post-storm cleanup there. Over the years, that had been the norm at Baptist and every other New Orleans hospital, even after Hurricane Betsy. Katrina proved different.

In a hospital bereft of electrical power, access to technology, air conditioning, and communications, the initial challenge for Deichmann and the other physicians was meeting the medical needs of patients, The widespread flooding that came the day after the storm left Memorial an inaccessible island jammed with some patients, but many more non-patients. The challenges for the physicians shifted from providing patient care to managing the logistics of evacuating the building. Code Blue tells how this was accomplished in the face of complete breakdown and discord at every level of government. It is a tale with many lessons and a tribute to Memorial's dedicated professionals.

Ochsner is mentioned as a milepost on the evacuation route westward. It is noted as the practice site of the author's wife, child and adolescent psychiatrist Cecile Many, MD, and is the institution to which Deichmann and his colleagues at Audubon Medical Group decided to move their practice post-Katrina.

13. Aspiration and Achievement: The Story of the American Society of Internal Medicine 1956–1981. William C. Felch, MD, and Clyde C. Greene, MD. Washington, DC: American Society of Internal Medicine, 1981.

The authors, each a past president of the American Society of Internal Medicine (ASIM) who succeeded to the editorship of The Internist, the journal of ASIM, compiled a readable account of the founding and flourishing of ASIM in its initial 25 years.

ASIM was created when the American College of Physicians made the decision to remain a strictly scientific, educational organization and not to become involved in socio-economic issues, aspects of medical practice, or advocacy on behalf of its members in these areas. ASIM filled the void created by that decision. The two organizations amalgamated in 1998. The book details the issues, positions, politics, meetings, and planning sessions of ASIM in a more colloquial style than is usually encountered in organizational histories. Ochsner's Frank Riddick was a trustee of ASIM from 1970–1976 and is mentioned in several anecdotes in the book.

14. Marched the Day God: A History of the Rex Organization. Errol LaBorde. New Orleans, LA: School of Design, 1999.

Errol Laborde, a New Orleans publisher and Carnival buff, has prepared a readable and lavishly illustrated history of the Rex Organization. It provides listings and photos of the Kings of Carnival, including Alton Ochsner, 1948, and John Ochsner, 1990. Also included in the rosters and depiction of the annual Rex Courts are a dozen or so offspring of Ochsner Clinic physicians who served as maids or dukes.

15. Fair Grounds: Big Shots and Long Shots. Bob Roesler. New Orleans: Arthur Hardy and Associates, 1998.

Bob Roesler is the former sports editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He has written the story of the historic New Orleans Fair Grounds race track, the jockeys and characters that frequented it, and the magnificent thoroughbreds that provided the raison d'etre for the Fair Grounds before invasion by the slot machine. Among the horses noted in the book is Dr. Riddick, a chestnut Virginia-bred gelding owned by Albert M. Stall, New Orleans oilman and long time chair of the Louisiana State Racing Commission, who named the steed after his Ochsner physician. Dr. Riddick had a 10-year racing career beginning in 1977, during which he won major stakes races at tracks across the country.

16. Friends, Enemies and Victims. Louis J. Roussel, Jr. New Orleans: privately printed, 1997.

This is the autobiography of Louis J. Roussel, Jr.— “Mr. Louie”—(1907–2001) who rose from origins on a farm and sawmill in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, to streetcar operator in New Orleans, to oil drilling, real estate, insurance, and banking magnate. Mr. Louie provided generous financial support to Ochsner throughout the years. He was a close friend of fellow Lafourche native Francis E. “Duke” LeJeune, Sr., MD, a founder of Ochsner Clinic, and the book contains numerous mentions of LeJeune and his participation in investments and joint ventures with Roussel.

17. Deadly Relations: A True Story of Murder in a Suburban Family. Carol Donahue and Shirley Hall. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

Deadly Relations is the story of River Ridge resident Leonard Fagot, a decorated World War II Marine and New Orleans attorney, written by two of his daughters. He was a domineering, controlling parent, accident-prone or worse, who lost a hand in a shotgun blast and an eye in a single-vehicle accident. Both events were followed by protracted litigation against insurers and manufacturers. Two of his sons-in-law, each heavily insured in his favor, died violently—one in a fall while installing electrical wiring on the Fagot property, the other from a gunshot wound inflicted by Fagot. After his conviction on second-degree murder charges, Fagot disappeared and his body was discovered in the trunk of his car, with a gunshot to the head.

Ochsner was the site where he was initially treated for his shotgun wound. Attempts to save the mangled hand were unsuccessful and led to amputation of the hand. The book notes that a surviving son-in-law was a student in Ochsner's Radiologic Technology Program.

18. Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus: The Story of an Underground Medical Laboratory. Edward T. Haslam. Albuquerque, NM: Wordsworth Communications, 1997.

19. Dr. Mary's Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans, and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination, and Emerging Global Epidemics. Edward T. Haslam. Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2007.

Edward T. Haslam grew up in New Orleans, the son of an orthopedic surgeon on the faculty of Tulane Medical School.

The Mary in the title of both books is Mary S. Sherman, MD, an orthopedic surgeon and distinguished bone pathologist on the staff of Ochsner Clinic. A native of Chicago, born in 1913, she was recruited to Ochsner Clinic by Guy Caldwell in 1952. She was deeply involved in Ochsner's residency program in orthopedics, and founded what is now named the Mary S. Sherman, MD, Bone Pathology Laboratory. She chaired the Committee on Pathology of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. In April 1964, she was brutally murdered, and her body and apartment on St. Charles Avenue were set afire. Her murder remains unsolved.

The frontispiece of Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus proclaims it a nonfiction work; however, some readers may find “fable” to be a more accurate description. Haslam has taken myriad events—the leftovers of former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison's probe into the Kennedy assassination; the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans; Mary Sherman's murder; anti-Castro sentiment in New Orleans Cuban community; the Bay of Pigs fiasco; John F. Kennedy's assassination; Alton Ochsner's leadership role in the Information Council of America (INCA), an anti-Communist group; a statement from someone that David Ferrie, a Garrison suspect, once kept white mice in his apartment; the fact that Tulane University had a primate research center in St. Tammany Parish; and the appearance of the AIDS virus in the early 1980s—and has created a single unitary conspiracy/cover-up theory tying all these together.

The subtitle of Dr. Mary's Monkey is the capsule version of Haslam's theory, which runs somewhat like this: Alton Ochsner, fierce anti-Communist and cancer expert, is enlisted by the CIA to create a virus that causes cancer, so that this can be given surreptitiously to Fidel Castro to rid the Western hemisphere of the Communist menace. Ochsner directs David Ferrie, an ex-airline pilot and a non-scientist, and Dr. Mary Sherman, a cancer researcher who works for him (at Tulane, perhaps at the primate center) each to start working on altering viruses (borrowed from Tulane, or, alternatively, diverted from Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation's animal lab in the 1963 move from Prytania Street to Jefferson Highway) to cause cancer. At some time, the two labs are consolidated at a secret site, determined by Haslam to be the U.S Public Health Service Hospital (then called the Marine Hospital) on State Street at Tchoupitoulas, where a high-powered gadget (presumably a linear accelerator) was located. A laboratory accident there creates an explosion which claims the life of Dr. Sherman. Those in charge of security transport Dr. Sherman's body to her apartment and attempt to cover up the nature of her injuries by stabbing the body and setting it afire. The explosion causes further mutation of the virus and disseminates it beyond the laboratory into the community, from which it appears a decade later as the HIV virus, initiating the AIDS pandemic. The scope of this article does not allow for detailed refutation of what this author finds to be the preposterous claims, underlying misinformation, skewed presentation, and flawed conclusions in this scenario.

Haslam presents a long chapter on Alton Ochsner, the factual components cited from Wilds and Harkey with embellishments from the author. There is a fairly full entry on Dr. Sherman, largely from a 1993 Gambit Weekly article written by Don Lee Keith.

Mary Sherman was a valued colleague and a superb physician. She was not a virologist at all, nor a basic scientist in cancer research. In this author's opinion, none of Haslam's speculations concerning Dr. Sherman have validity or credibility. As Dr. Sherman's colleague, it is my belief that she deserves better treatment than she receives in these two books.

The treatment of Ochsner and its physicians in nonfictional literature ranges from the historical to the personal to the paranoid. Those who encounter other mentions and discussion of Ochsner in the literature are invited to contribute them to the Ochsner in Literature Collection at the Ochsner Medical Library.

• Ochsner Clinic and Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation