had enlisted as an army medic in World War II, triggering a lifelong
interest in medicine. After the war, he received all his medical training in
Southern California and initially started his own private practice in metro
Los Angeles.
When Dr. Kerlan and Dr. Jobe joined forces in 1965, they combined two
very different and extreme talent sets. Dr. Kerlan’s tremendous
interpersonal skills married to Dr. Jobe’s incredible innovative surgical
insights; the art of medicine matched with scientific research; a body
ravaged and limited by disease joined with superlative, gifted hands. The
Kerlan-Jobe Orthopedic Clinic was born, and in the City of Angels, it was
a match made in heaven. The two men joined together to form a working
unit that superseded any one man’s gifting.
Dr. Kerlan could work a room. I have never met a person who, when
questioned about the man, didn’t tell me a side-splitter. (Dr. James
Andrews is the unquestioned king of sports medicine in the world today.
While still at the Hughston Clinic in Georgia, Dr. Andrews came to Los
Angeles for visits in the ’70s with Dr. Kerlan. These visits left a deep
impression on Dr. Andrews, and he told me, “Dr. Kerlan was THE MAN!”
He held me by both elbows when he said it, so important was it for me to
understand that statement.) Frank Jobe was the down-to-earth, matter-of-
fact foil to Bob Kerlan—his straight man. No less dedicated to his patients
or his craft, Dr. Jobe was a once-in-a-lifetime surgical innovator, scientist,
and visionary. While Dr. Kerlan was a jester and bon vivant, Dr. Jobe was
more literal and less hands-on (ironic, in that it would be Dr. Jobe’s hands
that would change the baseball world).
Tommy John is a person, a patient, a ballplayer. Baseball fans remember
him primarily as a player for the LA Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, and
New York Yankees, who underwent the most famous elbow operation in
history on September 25, 1974. In the field of medicine, syndromes and
conditions are almost always named for the physician who first described
them (infrequently, a disease is named for the location in which the
disease occurred, such as Ebola and Lyme). Thus, we know the names
Parkinson, Huntington, Hodgkin, and Marfan—the physicians who
describe the disease and not the names of the patients who suffered the
maladies. Almost without exception, the names of the victims are lost to
history, with the notable exception of Lou Gehrig. Every baseball fan
marcin
(Marcin)
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