interview with david cline, m.d. interviewed on december
TRANSCRIPT
Interview with David Cline, M.D.
Interviewed on December 23, 2010
Interviewed for the Minnesota Psychiatric Society
Interviewed by Deane Manolis, M.D.
David Cline, M.D.: -DC Deane Manolis, M.D.: -OM
OM: I'm Dr. Deane Manolis, retired psychiatrist and chair of the Minnesota Psychiatric Society History Committee. Today is December 23, 2010, and we are at my home nearing the end of our series of oral histories of senior Minnesota psychiatrists. Dr. David Cline's and my project are sponsored by the Minnesota Psychiatric Society and funded by the Minnesota Historical Society. As we are nearing the end of the project, Dr. Cline and I thought that it would be good to interview each other, as we both have had long histories of psychiatric practice in Minnesota and thought that we could contribute to this project as well. So, I have Dr. David Cline with me today, a guest at my home, and we will begin the interview with him.
OM: Dr. Cline, welcome, and it's been a long road that we've been doing, with all these interviews, and it's been a great experience, I think, and so now, today, it's time to get your perspective on your life and your practice and some thoughts about psychiatry. As we've done before, we always start with a person's background, their early family life and how they developed their way into becoming a psychiatrist. Can you start?
DC: I can. Well, thank you for having me in, and I do appreciate working with you. You did spearhead this project and it's been a pleasure being your colleague in completing these oral histories.
I'll start way back with my family history. My grandparents were immigrants from Germany, my mother's family from east of Berlin near their Polish border, and came in about the late 1800s. They came to Minnesota and, along with another wave of German immigrants at that time, and my father's family came from Alsace-Lorraine area, which is along the Rhine River, just west of the Rhine River, and is an area that has been French or German or French or German over the centuries. It was German when they came; at least they identified themselves as German heritage, although the name was spelled Klein then. When I was back there I saw the cemetery full of Kleins, spelled that way, with church records that I saw also full of that name. They came in 1853 to northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, where my father was born. They were farmers, although my father was a teacher for a rural ... a one-room schoolteacher for a bit of time, back at the tum - well, maybe at the end of the 1800s. They moved up to Tomah, Wisconsin area, southwest of Tomah and Sparta, Wisconsin, and bought land there that is so typical of the land that they came from in Alsace-Lorraine, that it's not accidental, I think. They established farms
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there that are still in our family now, 130 years or 140 years now, and I'm very proud to be a "Century Farmer" of Wisconsin. My sister and I still have the land that they purchased. So that was the side of my father's family.
My mother's family lived in Austin, or near Austin, Minnesota, also farm family, and she wanted to be a school teacher and was, got qualified, the first in her family to go to college at all, for a two-year teaching degree, and came to the Norwalk-Tomah area, where my father was, to teach school. My father was on the school board and she came chugging in as a single teacher on the train from Sparta, through the tunnels of what is now the Sparta-Elroy bike trail. And there he was, and it wasn't love at first sight, I guess, but they got together eventually and married about 1921 or so, the early' 20s. My mother was an adventuresome woman. She had, we might say, sophisticated ideas about things. She wasn't just a farmer's wife. She took leadership roles, was the president of the Monroe County Republican Women's, organized a homemakers' club, organized a new babies club, of which my sister and I were new babies in, and all such things like that, and also built a really lovely home, really typical for farm homes in our area, a Dutch Colonial, with green shutters and a red roof and window boxes and pine trees in the lawn, and it really was an elegant place, and had running water and electricity in 1924, which was not commonly available in the rural areas. There was a generating plant that was used for electricity.
So, there it was, there was the setting that my sister and I came in, my sister born in 1933 and I in 1935. We're exactly two years apart, born on the same day, February 23. And so it was a very nice setting until July 27 th of 1938, when my father died, out in the oats field, combining oats, where he shouldn't have been. His doctor said -- You stay in bed. He couldn't stay in bed, because the oats needed harvesting and cutting, otherwise it would blow down and so he died under the great oak tree there on the Bell 40, we call it, and that was that. That, as it turned out, made a major impact on my life, although I really didn't realize it for a long, long time. My mother's free spirit sort of was unbridled. She didn't marry again. Her project was to raise my sister and I. So, we did everything that you could think of to do in growing up. Like, we went to music lessons early-on, my sister playing the violin and I played the cello, which was really a viola-the cello was too big for me, and my mother played the piano, and we were the Cline Trio, and go around and play for old folks homes and things like that. And then later, dancing lessons, and that included tap dancing and ballroom and ballet that was given in Tomah by a dance teacher from La Crosse, which is 40 miles to the west, and that's a bit of an unusual experience, too.
DM: For a farm boy!
DC: For a farm boy, right. I tried to not get teased by that, because ... [laughter] it was not a thing a real boy did. And then Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and, of course, a solid, I would say, religious training at the German-Lutheran church which was a half a mile away. In fact now, tomorrow night, on the 24th
, the very same program that I participated in as a boy will be represented, almost the same, tomorrow night at St. John's Evangelical Kirche, is the German title on that church. It doesn't change, and it has some beauty about it, not changing like that. Permanence.
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I really had a wonderful childhood, growing up there, in a pastoral setting, one-room schoolhouse. My mother was great on, also, that we should get a good education, and was fixed on the idea that we shouldn't miss any school, so both my sister and I did not miss a day of school, ever. There might be a little stretch in there like, well, maybe we went to a schoolsponsored conference here or there, but that sort of counted as a day of school, but like, even, I remember having the mumps - I know I had the mumps! And I went to school anyway - Well, you can go to school, don't worry about that. Just go. And so that was an item that she wanted us to have. And I think I learned a lot of lessons there about perseverance and don't just sto~go forward, hang in there, and be active, participate.
High school was at Tomah High School, and those were wonderful days, too. A small community, we took a lot of pride in our school, we had good sports teams. I played football and track and did OK in those sports, but mostly music and debate and dramatics and choral work were the extracurricular activities I did, and 4-H Club was also a big item. It was a lot of fun being in that group. So when I graduated in 1953 from Tomah High School, as did my girlfriend, Wanda, who is now my wife, we thought we'd had the best of all possible worlds in that environment. Though come to find out, we get to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I wasn't all that ... [laughter] I was an A student in Tomah, but I was not at the university. I had to learn how to study really well.
Another really formative thing happened when I was a junior in high school. Tomah Memorial Hospital got a grant that were available to build local hospitals, and they built one, and on this particular April or so afternoon of 1952, on a Sunday, they had an open house, and they wanted students from the high school to sort of demonstrate stuff. I was asked to be one of the demonstrators, and to do that they wanted us to dress up in the then-new green surgical scrub suits and kind of open the doors and say - "Come on in here and there and see all this." I did that with great relish, but later with some embarrassment, because when there's a void I have a tendency to fill in the gaps with whatever seemed plausible. [laughter] And here's an example: In the delivery room there are these stirrups where women put their knees so they can push. Well, I didn't know what those were, so I thought-Ah, I can see a knee fits in there. I suppose this is if you're going to have knee surgery. [laughter] Well, no one told me until later, but all the women snickered. They knew I was full of baloney. [chuckles]
But that being aside, the thing that happened that day was a kind of a major change. That experience sort of jelled an idea I had been thinking of before - Should I be a farmer or what else should I be. I decided that day - I want to become a physician. It was just like that. I know it was a romantic, foolish, childish sort of influence, but I just fell in love with the idea. I suppose the image of what a physician was, or what I thought a physician was and what I'd known of physicians that I had been associated with throughout the year, which is another point.
See, I was born in ' 3 5 and then in 1941 the war started, and our home was fourteen miles away from Camp McCoy, Fort McCoy now, and my mother wanted us to have a broadening experience and be part of the action, so she opened our house, this house I explained to you, to officers and their wives to stay, while they were preparing to go overseas. And the first couple that stayed was Captain Neilson, and he was a neurosurgeon, trained at Harvard at the Mass General Hospital, and his wife was a graduate from Smith College, very refined, elegant people.
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That was a model - now I would have been around six or so - a model of - now here are the people to be like. An officer, a physician, a sophisticated, educated wife, and knows about botany, and she'd take us on walks and show us things in our woods, where a beautiful spring ... there were a lot of springs ... and show us that, and it sort of planted a seed of that, which then matured on this particular day in 1952, and then I wanted to be a physician.
Well, I'd been heading toward farming then, and had not taken any Latin, which was required, kind of, to be a pre-med student, and so I needed a year of Latin so I could take the second year of Latin in my senior year. So, I took a crash course, sort of, a six-week summer program at Shattuck School, in Faribault, Minnesota. It was then called Shattuck Church Military Academy. That was also a wonderful summer of study and learning. I was testing myself to see if I could learn anything, retain it, to show what it takes to get into medical school, because that was the question, and I got a B in the course, which wasn't the greatest, but it wasn't a C either, and I had encouragement from that to go forward. Then my senior year I really studied hard in high school and got mostly A's, until the spring, when I fell in love. [chuckles] So then I was off to the University of Wisconsin, headed towards pre-med, towards medical school, and then ... which I finally made OK, but it was hard work, I mean I really had to work hard.
DM: Did you take three years ofpre-med?
DC: Four. I didn't get in after three years. I didn't have the grades to do that, so a fourth year ...
DM: And Latin was required?
DC: Well, Latin was sort of a recommended thing that you should take before you enter pre-med. Greek and Latin medical terms was a required course to enter medical school, you should have that, and that was taught by Dr. Howe at the University of Wisconsin, wonderful teacher. But then, [ neither] physical chemistry nor calculus was required, but botany and zoology and organic chemistry ...
DM: Physical chemistry was always a stumbling block for a lot of pre-meds.
DC: And psychiatrists, perhaps. [chuckles]
Well, as it turned out, there in college, I was better at the psychology area of things than I was at chemistry and physics area of things. So, I sort of found that my natural talents were better there.
DM: So you went on to medical school at Wisconsin then, too?
DC: Right. I got admitted to Marquette and to Madison, and really loved Madison, so stayed on.
DM: And medical school was a good experience? ...
DC: Not at the beginning. It was hard, like pre-med. Then Wanda and I got married after my first year, and that was a big thing, to be married. Our son then came on the way, Nicholas, and I'm going to medical school, and at the same time the farm that I left - I got interested in that, and I,
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with my best friend, we mounted a major dairy farm effort, had maybe a hundred cows ... maybe not, that's too many - maybe 60-70 cows - expanded the bam and this and that. I was really invested in that whole operation, maybe even more than medicine. So I was kind of tom. It was a difficult time. But after those pre-clinical years, then I really learned the discipline. All that romantic notion of what doctors do got really brushed aside [chuckles] and the hard core of knowing what a symptom means and what else the differential diagnosis, and what would you do, and really sort of pounding that into my head so I could spit it out on the moment's notice. That discipline, I finally learned that and could do that ...
OM: Were you pointing towards psychiatry toward the end of medical school?
DC: Yes, I was, until - in Wisconsin you go on a preceptorship, a three-month program, everybody does, during their senior year, out-state, to see what it's like out there. I went to La Crosse, to the Gunderson Clinic and Lutheran Hospital, and that was a wonderful experience, because there weren't any residents or not many residents, and you got to do a lot of stuff and it opened up a whole world of family, the Gunderson family and there were 36 physicians in this clinic, and it was over Christmas and the first of the year, and there was sort of the feeling of togetherness and us being part of a medical community. I really kind of fell in love with it, and I fell in love also with the hands-on, do stuff, and that was surgery. I thought, oh, I know what my life is going to be. I'm going to come here to La Crosse for a rotating internship, then a year of general surgery, and then I'm going to go off to some nice, fancy place, hopefully Harvard, or Mass General Hospital, and get orthopedic training, and come back and be an orthopedic surgeon here on the staff of the Gunderson Clinic in La Crosse. And that would be a good life, 'cause I was near the farm, my farm, and these were nice people and it was a good community and so good to be part of that.
OM: So what happened?
DC: So what happened? [laughter] Well, first of all, I did that. I did take the rotating internship and the year of general surgery, but even though, see, what I was counting on was that ... most of the physicians at the clinic were trained in the Harvard program. The Gundersons were, and they recruited a lot of other people to come there, and I was thinking, oh, they'll help me get in. Well, I didn't get in. I didn't have it. So, then I began to re-think, well, what are you really up to here? Aren't the motives a little bit questionable? So, I then began to think, and my mind then went back to psychiatry, which really had fascinated me a lot in medical school. And this thing was a little detour away, and experience, worthwhile. I really learned how to doctor, how to be a physician, how to treat emergencies, and I had good hands, really, and the only thing that would have been competitive for psychiatry would have been vascular surgery, because I really loved doing this fine work with vessels and so on. But that would have taken another seven years at a place like Minnesota, and I thought - Oh, can I do that?
The general surgery stuff was not so interesting any more. It got kind of - Oh, dear, I'll give the gall bladder to somebody else to do. The thrill of it wore off. And in that time, this was the 60s now, early 60s, psychiatry was just coming in, [President] Kennedy's mental health clinic movement, and people became attracted to psychiatry and so it was said the best and the brightest of medical school classes went in ...
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OM: It happened in [at the University of] Minnesota as well.
DC: You remember that, you remember that era. In fact, incorrectly, it was said that, well, anybody can be an internist or whatever, but it takes a special kind of person to be a psychiatrist. To be able to get into somebody's head and really understand what they're ... feel with them ... tune into their issues and be empathetic with them ... remember that? Remember that was such an important thing to be able to do, then, and so that had quite an appeal for me.
So then I finished up the surgical year there, and then went to Wisconsin in '64 to '68 to first get general psychiatry and then child and adolescent psychiatry.
OM: OK, so you were there '64 to '68.
DC: Yup.
OM: Were you in the military then?
DC: No.
OM: You didn't ...
DC: Well, I was in the military. I joined the National Guard right out of high school.
OM: So did I!
DC: Oh, did you really?
OM: Yeah-in the Minnesota National Guard Band ...
DC: Oh. I'll talk about it next hour. [laughter] Yes, yes, it was join the National Guard, you do eight years, and then your military obligation is completed.
OM: But they changed the rules.
DC: Yeah, I know, they did. They did. Right.
OM: Did you have to do any active duty?
DC: I'm not sure what kind of a joke it is, but they said that President Bush - the second, George W. - joined the National Guard so he didn't have to go to - I guess Vietnam, was it? Well, you know, I had that same thought. I joined the National Guard so I wouldn't have to be active duty. And that really worked until the Persian Gulf War started in 1990. I had remained in the Guards.
OM: Oh, so you'd never gone active ...
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DC: I'd never been to active duty that whole 35-year period of time. The Guard units that I was in were hospitals or evacuation hospitals or medical stations, and it was always with the company of physicians from the medical center that I was at, at Wisconsin or La Crosse, and it was easy. If you just showed up and did a reasonable job you would be promoted. There wasn't a really good reason to not go there, until, as they say, the call to duty at Thanksgiving of 1990.
DM: That must have been a shock for you.
DC: That was a shock. That was knee-wobbling, scary, I might lose my life or I might become infirm or disabled.
DM: How old were you at that time?
DC: Well, 1990, I'd have been 55.
DM: Wow, to go to active duty ....
DC: Yeah.
DM: Well, anyhow, let's bounce back to where you left your career. So you finished in '68. How did you end up in Minnesota?
DC: I frankly did not want to leave academia. I wanted to be an academic and I would have ... I really wanted to stay at Wisconsin, but they said to me, wisely, Miller, the chairman, said, David you've been here too long. You should leave.
DM: [chuckles] OK.
DC: [chuckles] That was good advice. But it was very hard. We got very attached. I get attached - to my home, my land, and to Madison, and to the University of Wisconsin, and to all of Wisconsin, actually. I get attached, and I didn't want to, but he said - You've been here long enough, you should see another part of the world. And so, as it turned out, a position opened up at the University of Minnesota. Actually, on the day that I came up to visit, just to see what was up here, I knew there wasn't [sic] any positions at the university, and I want over to the university to see the child division and John Duffy was the acting interim chair of child [psychiatry], and we went to lunch at the Campus Club, and on the way there we met somebody who said -- Oh, have you heard the news? And, well, no-What's the news? Well, Bill Luckey has just resigned from the faculty. That would have been in April, May of 1968. Boom, lights went off. There is a position open, is there not?
So, after lunch John took me in to see Dr. Hastings, Don Hastings [chair of the psychiatry department], and we kind of got acquainted, and I ended up getting an offer to come here. Not in child psychiatry, it was sort of a position in adult and child, and had an office right next to Bert Schiele's office there in 6th floor of [the ]Mayo [building]. Oh, I was so happy to have that. I thought that was very fortunate.
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DM: How long did you stay at the U?
DC: I stayed full-time for seven years and then I went to the VA Hospital [Minneapolis] for seven years in medical education and was the medical director of the regional medical education center.
DM: I was trying to think - That's kind of why our paths never crossed, because I started in '68 too, in the Twin Cities, but I was on the purely private practice path, and so we didn't know each other in those years. I didn't realize you were out at the V A, either. So, you were there for seven years?
DC: Another seven years, and then started private practice in '83 down at the Medical Arts Building and then later at Willow Street Center, connected with Abbott Hospital.
The academia thing was another ill-fated dream - well, a dream that became ill-fated. I was really not built for academic [life] as it is. I had the vision of becoming, or wished I could have become, what we perhaps too remember as really clear-thinking, erudite, smart people who knew a lot of things and could talk about symptoms and diseases in sophisticated ways. [This was] my ideal of a professor, a real professor that had also published a lot of important new information. As it turned out, I could do it but it would have cost an arm and a leg, it turns out in the end. I did make the big jump to associate professor at the university. I worked hard for that.
DM: By the time you left there, Bill Hausman was the chair, wasn't he?
DC: Right.
DM: Any particular reason you went to the V A from the U?
DC: Well, it was sort of still connected to the medical school and I kind of didn't want to leave anyway, and this was still sort of an academic position, though at kind of a lower grade, and it was available, it just came available as it was time for me to leave. I kind of thought, I'm not going to be able to make this ...
DM: Did you make associate professor by the time you left?
DC: Oh, yeah. Well, I'd been associate professor, actually, made it in three years, in good time. But then I kind of stalled out. I got a lot of administrative stuff, running the residency programs, and teaching the second year medical students and running a unit, and we had a special program that involved family therapy and group therapy and using a lot of para-professionals to do the main work that was organized by Starke Hathaway, [PhD psychologist], who was a mentor of mine while I was there, expanding that role, just a whole lot of stuff that I got swamped and couldn't get really to. I would have to do research on Friday night and over the weekend, and further be away from my family, which already was too much. Too much. That's sort of a regret I have about this whole thing is that I was so busy with building my professional career that I didn't spend enough time with my kids and wife.
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DM: I know the feeling.
DC: It was like, your children are growing up and you've missed out, and you know what it is going to take to go the next level if, in fact, you can. So I thought, well, do something.
DM: So you went to the V A.
DC: ... went to the VA. It was a medical education program for V A personnel, doctors in the Upper Midwest areas.
DM: Teaching them about psychiatry?
DC: About anything. I was in charge of any medical, physician type of program. My job was to arrange it. I was an arranger. To set up a program, a continuing medical education-like thing for - What's cancer? What's new in cancer treatment? What's new in high blood pressure?
DM: So that wasn't even in psychiatry.
DC: No. No. It was a straight education arranger, you might say ...
DM: Coordinator.
DC: Coordinator, yeah. Events planner - make it a lower-brow level. I was still faculty. I was still associate professor at the university and kind of connected with the Department of Psychiatry. Ed Posey was chair then.
DM: So, you really felt at some point that you wanted to get back to clinical work, and how did that come about?
DC: In spite of all these efforts that took a lot of strenuousness from me, the thing that I was naturally good at was talking with patients, being with patients. It was like a great fit. It always was. It always has been, and it just came so easily, and it became so enjoyable, and finally, it gradually dawned on me - Why don't you do that? [chuckles] Why don't you do what you're good at, what's easy and fun and enjoyable, rather than paddling upstream? So finally I got the courage from talking to many people, perhaps not you, but other people in private practice - Lee Beecher, I know for one, and other people who encouraged me and said - You can do this, it will work, they'll come to you. I'd think - Who will come to see me at eight o'clock on Monday morning? And it turned out like lots of people would. People were needy of child psychiatry, in particular. So [I] finally braved it and left the V A and practiced a solo practice, by myself, in the Medical Arts Building from '83, and then joined Dexter Whittemore at Abbott, the Abbott Child -Adolescent program at Willow Street when that hospital was child-adolescent.
DM: It's the old Eitel Hospital.
DC: The old Eitel Hospital, right.
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DM: So you and Dex then practiced together for quite awhile?
DC: Quite awhile, yes. That was '87 that we connected there, and that went well into the '90s. I think maybe the late '90s, even. We moved to the main hospital, to the Wasie Building [at then Abbott-Northwestern hospital], and had our offices there on the 4th Floor.
DM: That's after they closed Willow Street?
DC: After they closed Willow Street, right.
DM: So, you said that you thought -- Why weren't you doing something that you were good at, that you were kind of a natural. How did that feel then, as time went on, doing that, compared to
. ? your prevIOUS ... .
DC: Loved it. Loved it. My word ... the lesson here, everybody, is find what you love and do it. And sort of cut the stuff that doesn't fit for you. In some ways I wish I'd have done it ten years earlier, really- although those other experiences were good.
DM: Interesting ... I'm sure that stood you in good stead when you had to go to active military. You had a lot of administrative experience and so forth. So in 1990, at age 55, you got called up. [chuckles]
DC: Yup.
DM: And you went to the Persian Gulf.
DC: Right. The 13th Evac Hospital, the Wisconsin unit-I was there at the beginning of that unit, way back.
DM: So you stayed with the same unit, even though you were in Minnesota?
DC: Right.
DM: You went to the National Guard once a week, did you go once a week down there?
DC: It was one weekend a month and then two weeks in the summer. But I would be allowed to do what is called equivalent training, and that could be going to a medical conference, like hourfor-hour match, or doing some other self-development, or I'd have to go over to Wisconsin to attend a drill at River Falls.
DM: So by the time you went active, what rank were you?
DC: Colonel.
DM: Colonel, full colonel? Wow.
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DC: Full colonel, 0-6.
DM: Impressive.
DC: Yeah, it was.
DM: How long were you on active duty?
DC: Five months. What's so dear to me is that we formed for our initial training at Fort McCoy, which is like fourteen miles from where I grew up, and I ran those roads when I was a little boy and my mother was a Gray Lady during World War II, and I knew that place, so it was like coming home, sort of, like - Now my tum. I met some really close people there, other physicians, that had been in the unit but I really hadn't got to know. So, it was an experience I thrived on. That whole four months of duty.
DM: Did you actually go over to the Persian Gulf?
DC: Yeah, shortly after Christmas, or no, New Years, maybe around the 7t\ 8th
, before the war started. We flew to Frankfurt, to Rhine-Main Air Base, and then a flight directly to Saudi Arabia, and [near Bahrein] ... , I believe, it was, where we landed, and then we billeted in the towers, which name I can't remember now, where we sort of formed up, waited for our equipment to come, and we were there when the war started and got Scud-missiled [ground-to-ground missiles from Iraq] when we were there. That was scary. Learned to put on the gas mask, the gas protection gear, what's called MOP gear, and you'd get into it within a few minutes, you could be safe, you could have security, because gas was a big ... that was a major threat.
DM: Amazing ... So, what happened to your practice back here when you had to go?
DC: I just gave it away to Dexter and to Tim Gibbs and who else was there? Al Serposs, and I think, some others. Yes, they took it over for me. And I should add very quickly when I got back they gave it back, and I was up and running within two weeks of it, and this was in late Mayor early June.
DM: Well, I remember you wrote an article for the Minnesota Psychiatric Society newsletter when you were overseas, I remember that. Or was it Minnesota Medicine?
DC: I actually did both. One was a letter to the Psychiatric Society. I'd been the editor of the newsletter. I had to resign [chuckles] because I was going away. We did some research studies and that's what may have appeared in Minnesota Medicine, or the bulletin of the Menninger Clinic is, I remember, one ... we studied the gross stress reaction to combat in American troops, or Allied troops and compared it with troops from the [Iraqi] Republican Guard and the Iraqi forces who had been captured and taken prisoner and were in our hospital, our evac [evacuation] hospital, with wounds that were recuperating, that needed [to] get medical care. [The evacuation hospital was in Hafar-al-Batin, Saudi Arabia, near the border with Iraq and Kuwait.] We had a group of 20 or so, I think, of them. We used translators to see what their stress levels were by questionnaire kind of thing, and found that we're very comparable in levels, but theirs was much
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higher than ours. They literally were told - You get out of that foxhole and we're going to shoot you. They were praying for the tanks to come and - Don't run over us! They were really lovely people. Before, in our billets, GP Large [tents], remember those? We'd be talking - What would you do if, and one was - Can you kill somebody? Because the medical officer did have a pistol, the on-duty officer. If somebody came over the berm, could you shoot him? We talked a lot about that and said - Oh, yeah, I sure could, if he had a gun and he was going to shoot us or my friends, you darned right I'd kill them. But after we had this encounter with these prisoners, got to know them, I was so glad I didn't have to do that. That would have been a difficulty to come to terms with.
DM: You mentioned Minnesota Psychiatric. As I recall, you were very involved with the Society of Adolescent Psychiatry, wasn't it? You were involved in the beginning of an organization, or how did that come about?
DC: Yeah, I and others, really started that. That was in April of 1974.
DM: So this is while you were still at the U?
DC: I was still full-time at the U.
DM: I always get the organizations mixed up. There's an Academy of Child Psychiatry
DC: That's right.
DM: This was different, this was a child and adolescent.
DC: Yes.
DM: And that was a new organization?
DC: Yes.
DM: It started in Minnesota?
DC: There were chapters all around the country[American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry] and we were the tenth or eleventh such chapter or state society that was formed, and I and [Clarence] Gus Rowe and Charlie McCafferty and Bob Wilson and Louis Flynn and Mike Koch, and others were the - Dorothy Bernstein also was part of that.
DM: So you joined the national organization?
DC: We formed up and we joined the national. Often, with the help of the Minnesota Psychiatric Society. We would co-sponsor programs that would have issues related to adolescence as part of the program, until sort of we got on our feet, and then we'd have our own independent ...
DM: So this was child and adolescent?
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DC: Just adolescent, this one.
DM: Isn't there a child and adolescent, too?
DC: Yes. [chuckles]
DM: So what you started was just adolescent.
DC: Just adolescent. The child one, I can say something about. That was started in 1971, and Carl Malmquist was the instigator. I was one of the original members of that but I didn't really
DM: How did you decide that you needed an adolescent society?
DC: That was the time, still, when societies were blossoming [chuckles] and people wanted to belong to it. What we said was that adolescents seem to be caught between child and adult, and there wasn't a whole lot of specific attention given to adolescent and young adult.
DM: As I recall, you had a number of members who were not child psychiatrists, but adult psychiatrists who were doing adolescent work, and so that's what this covered ...
DC: Exactly. The Minnesota Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the one started by Carl in 1971, was for board eligible child psychiatrists, child and adolescent psychiatrists, so that was exclusive in that way. This [adolescent group] would have opened the doors to others who just liked working with youth and young people. It went through college age. It was that group.
DM: Burt Abramson and Ron Berry were in that group, speaking of them.
DC: Yes. Burt was the president of it at that time.
DM: You've remained kind of active in the organizational things as well?
DC: With the Adolescent Society? Yes. The organization is still, we should say, thriving yet, but only once a year. In the last decade, fall-off of membership in all kinds of societies have been great, and a lot of them have just ended. But the Adolescent Society has just one meeting a year. It's in December. It's a very nice event, a black tie optional event, at the Minneapolis Club, and it's kind of a Christmas party, and it celebrates adolescents and the mixture of social and professional and entertainment. For example, we have singers, teen-agers who want to be opera singers come from Minnesota Opera Company and perform works for us that are of interest and related and adolescent-ish. For example, recently, they sing a section from the opera Hansel and Gretel, by Englebert Humperdinck, the "Evening Prayer," what Hansel and Gretel sing when they're lost in the woods, and it's a lovely, really, duet, by teen-agers. So it has a story about children and young people and done by young people. Then, the university has been - Chuck Schulz [chair, department of psychiatry] in the department has been interested in the whole activity, and he has supported this very, very much, and I'm grateful to him for it, including now
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bringing medical students who are interested in psychiatry to the gathering, this nice dinner and nice affair, as a means of showing them what psychiatrists do and to keep their interest in psychiatry, which has worked. It's come off well.
DM: You've been somewhat involved in the national organization as well?
DC: Of adolescent psychiatry? Yes. There will be an international meeting in Berlin next September, and I'm trying to put two proposals together for that meeting. But actually, I've actually been more involved in the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
DM: That's a national organization.
DC: That's the national organization of this other, the other group.
DM: That's people who are boarded in child?
DC: Boarded in child, right.
DM: And you've been involved with that.
DC: Yeah. Right when I came to Minnesota the Academy was very exclusive, and you had to be a blue blood, [chuckles] practically, to get in. But then there was a movement to open it a little wider, and I was in that group who would open the membership more. It was done through the Assembly of Regional Organizations. There was a group called that, and I was one of the first delegates from Minnesota to go to that assembly and help form up this group, which later I became chairman of in the late '70s, '79 to '81, I was chair of it. Then the whole Academy broadened out and it's really grown. For example, last year in New York we had 5,100 child psychiatrists coming to the meeting. I think there are around 8- or 9,000 total members in all.
DM: I know you have some other outside interests too, but focusing on psychiatry, any thoughts on your favorite time or your least favorite time, or your thoughts on the evolution of psychiatry as you've seen it over the years, or anything of that nature that you've thought about?
DC: I guess my favorite time was when I was in private practice and when all of these organizations were thriving. The Minnesota Psychiatric and the Minnesota Child and Adolescent, and the Adolescent Society, all those ... a lot of gatherings of people and a lot of camaraderie and the practice itself was rich and good. I liked that very much. Part of that also was that I was a consultant down at the Wilson Center [residential treatment center in Faribault, Minnesota] for several years and that was a nice group of physicians to work with. Howard Rome was there and David Schalker and Gus Rowe and Charlie McCafferty and Bob Roddy. That was another nice experience, a pleasant time.
N ow about the evolution. Well, I see, first of all, medication ... ,
DM: First of all, you're still working about three-quarter time?
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DC: Four days a week.
OM: That's admirable. [chuckles]
DC: Well, thank you.
OM: Still is as fulfilling as it always was?
DC: Yes. I get tired easier now, but it is lovely. This morning I saw some wonderful patients who have these issues and I just love listening to them and hearing and reflecting with them about their lives and what the issues are and help them tell their story.
OM: I interrupted you. You were going to say about the evolution?
DC: What I've just said is sort of the evolution that I was sort of meant for, and with what comes right for me. I really like that. But I think most of psychiatry has not gone that way. They've gone to the fifteen-minute med [medication] check and checking out ifit's the right dose, its side effects, so on, and that kind of thing. That's not my idea of psychiatry. I should say what is my idea; it's that we are a profession that have the fullest of understanding of the human being and the nature of ...
OM: The whole patient.
DC: ... all problems, including the society in which they live in and the forces of the economy and environment and all that. I think of us as encompassing all of that and that we should be working in all those areas, and certainly inquiring in all those areas where our patients are at in those regard[ s]. That [most psychiatry] has shifted away from that, and I regret that that has happened, and I hope that we don't lose it entirely.
On the other hand, the medications that have come have certainly made a major change for patients and their well-being. That certainly is an advance that's quite remarkable for me.
OM: Compared to when you first started training?
DC: Yeah, then we had Thorazine, Stelazine, [for psychoses]and eventually, '57, Tofranil came out and then Elavil and the other tricyclics [for depression]. And Ritalin - Oh, D-Amphetamine was around in the '60s for hyperactivity disorder, but not much beyond that. Lithium came aboard, late '60s.
OM: Aside from being a psychiatrist, you have a lot of other interests. You have an interest in music, you have an interest in horses and polo, I learned recently. Tell us a little bit about that. What [sic] is your interest in Wagner come about? [laughter]
DC: [chuckles] There [sic] is such many stories about this. The Wagner story I'll start with. I think the exposure I had was the usual country boy exposure. At the wedding you'd hear Lohengrin's Wedding March: Da da da-da, da da da-da. When I graduated [finished] from first
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year of college, I went with my sister to New York City, because she was an exchange student and went to a special civics camp north of the city, and I went with her just for the adventure of seeing New York City. I wandered around by myself in New York City. I made my way down in Lower East Side of Manhattan and found a restaurant there, called Luchow's, which was a German-American restaurant. I wandered in there-it was during the noontime. Wasn't anybody else around, much, and I looked at the walls and there were these friezes, these murals of people with homed helmets and staffs and things like that and I had no notion of what that meant, and so I asked the German waiter - What is all this? And he looked at me with a glare and said - You don't know what those are? And I said - No, I don't. And then he paused for the right moment and says - Those are scenes from the operas of Richard Wagner. And I go - Oh, OK. And then he added this point. First note that this was 1954, and that's nine years after World War II and here's what his final statement was: Wagner's music started two world wars, and it's going to start a third! And he twirled around and walked off.
DM: [laughter]
DC: I was amazed at that statement and gullible, naIve enough to take it more serious than not. I thought, my, music that could start world war, that's got to be some thing. Someday I want to find out about Wagner's music, and I finally did in the '90s, finally got into it.
DM: So that came on later than ...
DC: It took a long time to fester. It came by an interest in survivors of World War II, namely Jewish children who had been hidden during the war and then made it through life, 50 years after the war - this was '94-'95 - and I was curious about that, and Dorothy Bernstein and I put on a symposium at the Academy with four surviving Jewish ... who were children ... and what had happened, how they'd done, and find out all about that. That was a really great, wonderfully received symposium, and then we thought - Well, what about the German-born children during that war who suffered fire bombings and loss and starvation and hunger and death and then the loss of their ideology at the end of the war. What did they have to say? So the next year we did a symposium on that group and had four people come. Out of that group came one great-grandson of Richard Wagner, named Gottfried Wagner, who was great-grandson of Richard Wagner, and he spoke about him being a German-born in 1947, and the fact that his family was pretty tied up with supporting the Third Reich. His grandmother, in fact, is said to have taken the paper for Hitler to write Mein Kampf when he was in prison in 1923, so he had a lot to say about his stained ... what he thought of as stained family background. Anyway, he, then, Gottfried, directed an opera in Dessau, Germany, the opera Lohengrin, that I went to see with a friend. Then, that was my really first exposure to real Wagner opera, and I just fell in love with it and I was, you might say, smitten with it, and just loved it ever since.
We ended up forming a Wagner society here in 1998. It's got around 50-60 members and meets regularly, and gets tickets to go to the big show in Bayreuth every year in August to hear the master's works in the house that he built. Wagner built this house just for his operas, and it's quite an experience.
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OM: I remember seeing King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein. Of course, Wagner was his protege, as I recall.
DC: Yes, yes.
OM: But it was interesting to see Mad Ludwig's castle.
DC: He built it on the images of the operas that Wagner had written - Parsifal and Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger. Well, not Meistersinger, well other operas.
OM: I just learned recently that you're interested in polo, and used to be a polo player. Did that grow out of your having animals on the farm? Or was that something that just came on later, too? [laughter]
DC: I suppose there's a tie. I mean I had affinity with animals, kind of knew my way around with them. But what happened there was another seed experience. We came to Minneapolis in '68, and I think it was a year later, around July 20th or so, when we landed on the moon, '69.
OM: July 20th, I'm pretty sure it was.
DC: Of '69, was it?
OM: '69, yeah.
DC: Would it have been? Anyway, it was during our lakes summer festival.
OM: Aquatennial?
DC: Aquatennial, yes. And there was a polo match out at Fort Snelling polo field, and we were going out to see that game - [a] Sunday afternoon experience. As we were driving we were hearing the broadcast of our men landing on the moon, and we sort of stopped the car, right near the polo field, and heard that whole thing. Again, it was a kind of impressionable moment, then seeing the polo game, they sort of went together, this kind of excitement oflanding on the moon and these guys riding their horses like mad down the field, trying to push each other out of the way in order to get to the ball, and hit it. Oh, I thought, my, look at that, it looks like fun. So that, too, ... someday I want to do that. And that came true in 19 ... ' 89, '88, is when I finally got around to find out about it and got my family involved. We all were going to partake of that. So I played at the West End Polo Farm from that time until about 2001 pretty regularly every year.
OM: Well, let's see. We're a little past an hour, but any things that you wanted to add to this kind of portrait of yourself? Anything that you had thought about?
DC: Yeah, there's one thing. Arranging things has been ... I've done a lot of that.
OM: From your VA days?
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DC: Well, from the V A and always kind of arranging of activity, putting together something. One I'm still moved by and so happy I did was submit a person to win a certain award at the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. It's called the Catcher in the Rye Award. The award is from that little passage where the guy says - It's as if I'm standing in this field of rye and there are children playing all over in this rye field, and I'm the only adult, I'm the only one who's big, and there's a cliff on the edge of this field, and my job is to protect the little ones from falling over the cliff. So that's sort of the image of the Catcher in the Rye Award.
All right. On one trip to Bayreuth to the Wagner festival, I met a person, through Gottfried Wagner, my friend, who had been a kinder - a "train child," that's the English translation, and what had happened is that he was a Jew from Yugoslavia, and in a detention camp there in early 1939, already when Germany was starting to invade and put people here and there and so forth. This fellow, named Nicholas - I think Frank - was there, a young stockbroker from London, and he saw what was happening, and he said - Who is going to save these children? And he said -Well, I will. So what he did was organize placement for children to go to foster homes in Britain and to transport them by train from their native country, across Europe, across the Channel, into foster homes in Britain, Scotland, Ireland. He managed to get about 600 children out of detention camps.
DM: Was this before the war, or during the war?
DC: Before the war. This fellow that I met at the Wagner Festival was one of them, and he told me about that experience, and I thought, my, that is amazing, and I asked more questions about it and found out about this individual, and I thought there, if ever, is a person who should get this award, this Catcher In the Rye Award at the Academy. So, in 2006, at the meeting in San Diego, I put his name up to get this award, and everybody liked the idea. Of course, he was 98 years old then, and he was not able to travel, but he said he would receive it and sent us a newsletter accepting. So, I put together this plan to present him with the award. Now what had been done beforehand was that a special movie for this man, a "This is Your Life", had been created for him, a television program to talk about his life. He did not know what the whole thing was going to be about, so the television is about the person, saying, well, Nicholas, this is your life and do you recognize the person sitting next to you on the right side? How about on the left side? No, I don't. And they said, "Well, we are children who you sent on the kinder transport."
DM: They were able to do that at his home?
DC: They were all in his home in England. A whole 20-30 of them were actually there. This was a television, a DVD, so this was quite an emotional thing, as you could imagine. And so, in the presentation of the award we put together just this little snippet of this experience, after telling about what he'd done at this thing, and then that was quite moving to everyone who was there, but then to finish the thing, I arranged for three children themselves to come to the meeting to be part of the presentation, and one woman brought her daughter and that woman's daughter brought her daughter, so there was like three generations of survivors, all at the good work, the Catcher in the Rye work of Nicholas Winton. Winton was his last name.
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DM: What year was that?
DC: 2006, at the San Diego meeting. I think of that - I'm so glad that I did that. That was a real, I think, in terms of contribution to this general field of psychiatry that I outlined to you, is one of the nicest, or maybe the best thing that I've done.
DM: Well, very good. You continue to practice psychiatry; you've been an outstanding practitioner in Minnesota. We certainly enjoy hearing about your work, [it will] be preserved now for people to look at in the future. Thank you.
DC: Thank you for the opportunity to say these things.
[End of interview]
Transcribed by Carol C. Bender Wordcrafier 651-644-0474 [email protected]
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