Legends in Urology.

I grew up in a medical family with a father and uncle as physicians, and two great grandfathers. In fact, I still have the saddlebags of my great grandfather who was a horse and buggy doctor in the valley of Virginia. So I never thought of anything but medicine. I attended Washington and Lee University, and my medical school acceptance was salvaged by Dr. Keith Shillington. He literally tied me to a desk to study organic chemistry, and after doing well, I was accepted to the University of Virginia for medical school. Those days were interesting. I applied to only two colleges and two medical schools. However, before attending Virginia, my father was able to get me a job as a scrub nurse at Richmond Memorial Hospital in Richmond, Virginia. While there I fi rst was impressed with urologists who often made a small incision after looking at a KUB on the view box, performed a quick fi nger dissection, asked for a Babcock and scalpel, extracted the stone, placed a drain, and closed. In contrast, the general surgeons often did an “exploratory celiotomy” for “abdominal pain”, looked around the abdomen for a while, usually removed the appendix, and then quit without a defi nitive diagnosis. In fact, I read Dr. Austin Dodson’s excellent textbook of urology before I entered medical school.