His father was a St. Louis police
officer, his mother a northside confectionery owner, and Carl V. Moore,
AB 28, MD 32, took a series of menial jobs to pay for his education.
Through-out his life, he held strong, basic values: hard work,
frugality, honesty, kindness. He always made time to talk to students,
and “he never forgot that a patient was a human being and not just an
interesting case,” said molecular biologist Oliver H. Lowry after
Moore’s death in 1972, days before his 64th birthday.
Moore joined the medical school
faculty in 1938 and stayed for his entire career, serving as dean, 1953
to 1955; vice chancellor for medical affairs, 1964 to 1965; and head of
his beloved Department of Medicine, 1955 to 1972. A pioneer in the
young field of hematology, conducting classic studies of iron
metabolism, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1970.
Yet teaching was his greatest
pleasure. In class, he stressed the importance of observation, recalls
Virgil Loeb, MD 44. “I’ll never forget it. He would insist on his
students looking at the patient’s blood and urine in the laboratory
microscope. It wasn’t enough to get a report that told you what the
problem was; you had to see for yourself.”
Carl Moore—teaching was his
greatest pleasure—preferred the personal approach.
His Saturday noon clinics were
models of clarity and compassion. He would emerge from the wings,
pushing the wheelchair of the patient whose case he planned to discuss
that day. Unlike other faculty, who relied on a house officer to
describe the history and physical findings, Moore did it all
himself—never ignoring the patient in the process. “He would stand
behind the chair, holding the handles, and present the case,
flawlessly,” says M. Kenton King, MD, dean of the medical school from
1964 to 1989.
No setting was off limits for
learning. As a young house officer, King was admitted to the hospital
with a terrible sore throat. Moore stopped by, shone a flashlight down
his throat and couldn’t resist another lesson. Excusing himself, “he
went into the bathroom, literally tore the mirror off the wall, and put
it down in front of me so I could see it too,” King recalled.
Day in and day out, he taught by
example. Once Moore came to the hospital in the middle of the night to
tell a terrified medical student that he did not, after all, have a
fatal form of leukemia. Another time Loeb and a lab mate were eager to
test whether a blood transfusion from a patient with low platelets
would reduce the recipient’s count, too. Moore insisted upon being the
subject —and wound up seriously ill for a day, though the research was
a success.
One morning, Moore visited City
Hospital, where a difficult case was being presented by a house officer
who confessed he did not know what was wrong with the patient, though
she had a blood disease. During his talk, Moore’s mind wandered, and by
the time the young man finished, Moore realized with a start that he
had heard little. Now it was his turn to speak, so he gently approached
the patient, asking her questions no one had thought to ask before over
the many years she had been ill. Eagerly she described previous bouts,
then Moore turned to the crowd and announced quietly, “She has
pernicious anemia.”
Perhaps Moore did not have the star
quality of his predecessor in internal medicine, W. Barry Wood Jr.,
another superlative teacher. “Barry Wood dazzled people, he was so good
at everything he did,” says King. “Carl Moore didn’t dazzle people—he
just made you realize he was a good doctor.”
Reprinted from Outlook,
summer 2003
