Episodes

Name: Robert Montgomery, MD

Specialty: General Surgery. Transplant Surgeon.

Location: NYU Langone Transplant Institute. New York City.

Imagine losing your father at 14, losing your brother a decade later, and looking down the barrel of the same heritable heart condition that killed them both. Imagine learning in your first year of surgical residency that your continued existence will depend a new implantable device, called an ICD. A device so new, you will likely be the first surgeon in the world to have one implanted. A device that will allow your life to continue, but most likely put an end to your surgical career.

That’s exactly what happened to today’s guest, one of the nation’s renowned transplant surgeons, Dr. Robert Montgomery. Robert has performed over 1000 kidney transplants and his research has advanced the field in areas such as desensitization, multiple organ transplants, gene and cell-based therapies, and perhaps most famously, domino paired donations. And if that’s not enough, he is also credited in the Guinness Book of World Records for most kidney transplants performed in one day.

One more thing…Robert is also heart transplant recipient. A heart transplant performed by the very surgical team he hired, and currently leads as the director of the Langone Transplant Institute at NYU. Wondering about the Ave Maria intro music? Well, that’s Robert’s wife, world famous mezzo-soprano, Denyce Graves. Get ready for a wild journey of an episode. With said, let’s get started.

Name: Wendy Moore 

Specialty: Journalist and author 

Location: London, England 

Barbara Tuchman, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the WWI classic, “The Guns of August,” once observed, “The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.” Not only must history be recorded, it must also be examined and retold. For most of us, who are not professional historians, we approach history through the curation and re-telling of the past, mainly via books and documentaries. Perhaps we are not so different from our ancestors, and their oral traditions. History may be written by the victors, but it’s kept alive through the story tellers.

Today we are heading to London to meet with journalist and author, Wendy Moore. Like Tuchman, Wendy was also drawn to the period of “The Great War,” but in search of story many of you have likely never heard of. In a time when women in the UK, the US and most democratic nations were not even allowed to vote, there was a hospital called Endell Street. A hospital with women surgeons, women nurses, women administrators, and women staff. A hospital almost completely run by and run with women! A 573 bed hospital that performed over 7000 surgical operations and treated some 26,000 wounded soldiers, many with unprecedented battlefield trauma. A hospital led by two active suffragette doctors, one with a criminal record, having been sentenced to six weeks in prison for her protests.  A hospital that also treated Spanish Flu patients before being shut down and nearly lost to history…until now.