When Harlem Nearly Killed King (12 page)

By then, Emil Naclerio was an attending in thoracic surgery. Naclerio had been added to the department in 1950, shortly after Helen Mayer was recruited as an expert anesthesiologist. Mayer had trained at Columbia-Presbyterian and the University of Chicago. She was an expert in endotracheal anesthesia and respiratory physiology and would establish the residency program in anesthesiology at the hospital. She recommended to Maynard that he recruit Naclerio, a thoracic surgeon educated at Marquette Medical School in Wisconsin. He had just completed his advanced training in broncho-pulmonary surgery at Overholt Clinic in Boston. Upon his
arrival, he delved into that subspecialty with brio, becoming the hospital’s expert in that area, breaking traffic rules to reach the emergency cases that came in. So by 1951 the situation in the hospital was: Naclerio was now on staff as the enthusiastic new junior attending in thoracic surgery; John was a senior surgical resident; Maynard was chief of the division—a chief who, choosing to exercise his prerogative as the senior man in the division, did not come in for emergencies. And the other prerogative he chose to exercise was placing his name first on any paper describing breakthrough research that had been conducted in his division. So the issue at that point was, Should Naclerio’s name go second on the paper describing research conducted by Cordice, even though most of the work had been done by the more junior Cordice?

Cordice began observing other things about Maynard. Yes, he was a competent surgeon. He really knew his theory due to his practice of reading up on the latest in the surgical journals. But in Cordice’s opinion, Maynard couldn’t improvise in the operating room. There were reasons for this. One was that, though he was board certified, still Maynard was of the generation of surgeons at the hospital who, in learning primarily by working on patients they elected to see, had virtually no
required experience
with most cases that came through the hospital. This was routine for surgeons who learned the craft in the early days of development of the specialty with only a year or two in hospital internships, far shorter than the five years of training that became standard once residencies were established. As a result, when the American Board of Surgery was established in 1937, the practical examination for board certification
wasn’t as stiff as it became ten to fifteen years down the road when more was known in the field and more procedures had been developed. Thus by the 1940s standards were stiffer even though formal surgical residencies were already well established due to the fact that at the typical big-city hospital the residency house staff learned by performing surgery on any and every case that came through the doors. At the same time, the more senior you were on staff at such a typical big-city teaching hospital, the less likely you were to come in and observe emergencies.

“By the time I became chief resident, most of the attendings didn’t even want to scrub with me because I knew more than they did,” recalls John Parker, who became Chief Resident in Surgery at Harlem Hospital in 1950. “And the senior attendings never came in for emergencies. I can’t ever recall Maynard coming in for an emergency. I may be wrong on that. I’m just saying that I don’t recall him coming in.”

Cordice can’t recall any such time either. But because of the typical pyramidal hierarchy of the big-city hospital, when it came to who was going to be chosen head of a division or department, the guys who had trained in the old days were still given priority over graduates of formal residency training programs. Yes, Maynard did make the effort to learn more than most of the other senior attendings at Harlem Hospital. And he kept up with the latest developments
in theory
only. In essence, he did more than the typical surgeon of his generation to know as much as he could possibly know.

And he did take some interest in Cordice. After finishing his residency, John tried to obtain advanced training in thoracic and cardiovascular
surgery. It wasn’t until two years later that this happened. With the help of Maynard and Dr. Peter M. Murray, a gynecologist at Harlem Hospital, he secured a fellowship under the direction of Harlem Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. Then the following year Cordice received another fellowship to study the same subspecialty in France. Upon his return, he was finally able to break the racial barrier and get two more years of formal training at Downstate University Medical Center in Brooklyn.

With this experience under his belt, by 1958, when he finished his formal training, Cordice’s knowledge of cardiovascular and thoracic surgery was far superior to Maynard’s. And the same was true for Naclerio. Both men had been having fun in the operating room, often all day and all night. One night both were on call when a stab wound to the neck came into the emergency room (a very dangerous injury because it involves the trachea and the carotid artery). At the same time, a heart wound came in. The two surgeons had to decide which case to operate on first. They noticed that the patient with the heart wound had some blood pressure. So they tamponated it (meaning that they stopped the bleeding, rendering the case far less dangerous than the neck wound). The next day Cordice told Maynard about the two cases. Maynard asked which they operated on first, in effect, revealing his lack of knowledge of which was more urgent. Cordice told him they did the neck wound first because they suspected that the patient had a carotid injury that might bleed out. As time went on, these exchanges between Cordice and Maynard grew more and more frequent. Like Naclerio, he became vital to the division’s success.

Yet Little Napoleon had a difficult time coming to terms with this. That kind of thing was hardly unusual in the world of academic medicine. The younger guys were always becoming the victims of jealousy on the part of their elders. When Cordice returned to Harlem Hospital in 1958 as a junior attending, Maynard began limiting his horizons. One day the secretary of the prestigious New York Surgical Society, a surgeon named Jerry Lord, became aware of how good Cordice was in the operating room because after finishing his training, Cordice was also admitted to the staff of Columbus Hospital on 18th Street, where Lord was also on staff. Aubré Maynard was only the second Negro to be invited to join the society (the first had been Wright). After discovering how good Cordice was, and knowing he was on the staff of Harlem Hospital, Lord began wondering why Maynard hadn’t nominated him for the surgical society. A surgeon had to have three society members nominate him. And usually the chief of his department was one of them. So Lord asked Cordice about this. John responded that he didn’t know why Maynard hadn’t nominated him. One day at a surgical society meeting, Lord confronted Maynard on the issue.

“How dare you tell me whom I should recommend for nomination to the surgical society!” Maynard is said to have replied. A month later he walked up to Cordice and told him he wasn’t ready to be nominated for the New York Surgical Society.

On September 20, 1958, this was the man Cordice, Naclerio, Mayer, and Leo Maitland, Chief Resident of Surgery, waited for as Martin Luther King, Jr., lay on an operating room gurney awaiting
removal of the letter opener that Izola Curry had plunged into his chest. Though Maynard had established the Division of Thoracic Surgery, Naclerio and Cordice knew more about what to do. Still, Maynard was now chairman of the entire department and accountable for anything that went wrong. The two surgeons decided what to do in light of this. They would wait for his arrival before opening King’s chest. Then, when it was time to actually remove the letter opener, they would leave that to Maynard in what would amount to a ceremonial gesture of respect for their chairman. Little did they know this wouldn’t be the story the rest of the world would hear.

TWELVE
saving king

WORD OF WHAT
happened to King made its way onto the newswires, spreading across the country, and causing Southern racists to laugh out loud with glee that “one of his own people” had apparently done in King. J. B. White, a Bainbridge, Georgia, coal dealer, immediately began taking up a collection among friends to send to Curry as a legal defense fund. After Curry was handed over to police, she was taken to Harlem Hospital, where the prostrate King identified her as his assailant. Upon seeing King, Curry once again spewed epithets against Negro preachers, accusing King of causing her to lapse in her Catholicism. After her identity was confirmed, she was driven to the local 123rd Street Precinct for booking on charges of felonious assault, then temporarily locked up until being transferred to the East 67th Street stationhouse, which had facilities for keeping women.

Meanwhile, as the hunt for Maynard continued, a crowd of thousands gathered in front of the hospital. About forty people walked into the emergency room and offered to give blood to save King. In an inner operating suite, Governor Harriman comforted King, who had been moved away from the notables who were gathering in the outer area of the operating suite. The surgeons from Mount Sinai, Columbia-Presbyterian, Bellevue, and New York Hospital remained in the outer suite discussing with one another what they would do in the same situation, talking with staff members who wouldn’t be part of the operating team, while Cordice, Naclerio, Maitland, and Mayer remained inside the inner sanctum waiting to see if Maynard would be found. Over an hour had passed and still there was no sign of him. Using his authority, the governor could have had King moved to another medical center. But the surgeons in the suite convinced him that this wouldn’t be wise.

Meanwhile the French film that Maynard had been watching at the Plaza Theater on 59th Street—
La Parisienne
, starring Bridgette Bardot—was finally over. Afterward, on this Saturday he was scheduled to make rounds at another hospital where he was on staff, a private facility named Manhattan General. Maynard retrieved his car from a parking garage and made his way there. Upon walking into the hospital lobby, the administrator of Manhattan General rushed up and told him he had to make his way to Harlem Hospital because a person of great importance had been rushed in with a stab wound to his chest (apparently he avoided telling Maynard who it was so as to ensure Maynard wouldn’t become nervous while making his way back to the hospital).

Maynard drove north up the FDR Drive along the banks of the East River, turning off at 135th Street. From there it was a straight shot to the hospital. He arrived to a front entrance so packed with onlookers that he couldn’t get through. He informed the police officers present who he was and told them to maintain crowd control. They formed a flying wedge and quickly got him through the crowd while telling him that the patient awaiting his arrival was Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon reaching the operating suite, Maynard waded through the crowd of notables into the inner operating sanctum, only to confront the stern countenance of Governor Harriman sitting on a stretcher flanked by his security men.

“Where have you been?” Harriman asked him with annoyance in his voice. Not far away King was lying on a stretcher, silent, prepared for surgery, with his eyes closed, the letter opener protruding from his chest. Maynard assured the governor that everything was under control, that while he was being located, King hadn’t been neglected. After this he made a preliminary examination of King and assured him that everything would be fine. Then he went into a room and consulted Cordice, Naclerio, Mayer, and Maitland, who brought him up to speed on the situation. Maynard greenlighted the surgical approach they had decided to take, then he returned to the outer part of the operating suite and talked to the surgeons from other hospitals as well as to reporters. The other surgeons immediately began offering their advice on how to proceed. Though like the rest of the staff he was miffed at this intrusion, Maynard remained calm and reiterated to all present that this was a Harlem Hospital case and that his
team was accustomed to this type of trauma. Then he invited some of the more notable surgeons to scrub and observe the operation.

While Maynard was doing this, Naclerio, Cordice, Maitland, and Mayer went ahead and scrubbed, administered the anesthesia to King, and opened his right chest the way they had opened numerous other chests before King’s. They made what was called a curving intercosto-chondral (spangaro) incision, which didn’t require removal of any of King’s ribs, just an incision between the third and fourth interspace between the ribs. This incision was extended by a second one that would leave King with a cross-shaped scar he would joke about for the rest of his life (though to others it would appear to be shaped more like the letter T). Then they ligated the right internal mammary artery, inserted a rib spreader, spread the area between the third and fourth intercostal space, and viewed the aorta and vessels branching off of it. The entire opening procedure took about ten minutes. At that point they couldn’t see the tip of the knife point, but they could feel it with their fingers coming through the inside of the manubrium, the top bone of the sternum, located in the middle of the chest where the left and right sides of the rib cage meet. They marveled at the strength of Curry to plunge a letter opener through this thick bone designed to protect the heart and aorta. Just as they expected, the tip of the letter opener was lying right at the point where the innominate artery branches off from the aorta. It was lying right in the crotch, close enough that the infamous line King would utter many times afterward could have been true: Had he sneezed violently enough, there’s a good chance he would have drowned in his own blood.