'61 on Call
On the eve of the best-forgotten Yale game, two former Dartmouth footballers, class of '61, paid a visit to the campus as part of a new fellowship program started by their class. The visitors were Drs. Kenneth DeHaven and James McElhinney, and they did what the project intended them to do: talk with students about their careers and recent developments in their fields. Both now noted practitioners of sports medicine and orthopedics, DeHaven teaches at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, where he is regarded as a premier "joint man," and McElhinney practices in Denver, where he takes temperatures and rebuilds bodies for the Broncos and Colorado Rockies hockey team.
The two physicians followed a rigorous public and not-so-public schedule while at Dartmouth, offering several open programs for undergraduates and community members and then spending even more time with the Mary Hitchcock Hospital staff and Dartmouth Medical School students. According to their chaperon (and classmate and former teammate), Dr. Alan Rozycki, who is a member of the Hitchcock staff, the public sessions - "New Approaches to Safety and Injury Prevention," "Careers in Professional Sports Medicine and Sports Medicine," and "Violence in Professional Sports" -
were well received. Even more impressive, he said, was what took place at the hospital.
There, McElhinney and DeHaven spent Thursday and Friday conversing with the first- and second-year medical students about sports injuries, lecturing the pediatrics staff on "Athletic Injuries and the Adolescent," partaking of grand rounds (hospital argot for a departmentwide examination of patients) with orthopedists interested in "Tennis Elbow, Jogging Knee, and Other Overuse Syndromes," and demonstrating their arthroscopy styles in the operating room.
Arthroscopy is a relatively new technique in which the surgeon inserts a strawlike tube into the patient's knee; the tube, a scope of sorts, allows the doctor to see into the operating area without making a major incision. Arthroscopy is designed to combat ligament damage primarily, and it especially benefits athletes for whom a joint injury can mean months of therapy and recuperation. With successful arthroscopy and rehabilitation, an athlete can now return to action in two to three weeks' time. McElhinney, who has a considerable amount of experience with the technique, performed it in front of a television camera, which broadcast the operation to a roomful of Mary Hitchcock orthopedists. Many of these surgeons had yet to see the technique performed by an expert; as the old medical saying goes: see one, do one, teach one.
Between McElhinney and DeHaven, who in Rozycki's view is one of the world's foremost arthroscopy authorities, three patients went "under the tube." (The hospital's ex-chief of orthopedic surgery was one). Afterward, the visiting, doctors exchanged information and experiences in an informal shop talk with the orthopedic residents. The two experts even taught one another a few tricks, said Rozycki.
