Still Practicing at 87: California Radiologist Keeps Clinical Skills Razor Sharp
 |
| Harold R. Griffith, M.D. (circa 1955) |
Believed to be the nation’s oldest practicing radiologist today, Harold R. Griffith, M.D., was born at the dawn of the Roaring ’20s, a feel-good era that saw silent-movie audiences howling at the antics of Charlie Chaplin, high-heeled flappers shimmying to the “Charleston,” and American women of all ages celebrating their hard-fought right to vote.
The world’s first commercial radio broadcast wouldn’t crackle to life until three months after Griffith’s birth on Aug. 4, and the Model T wouldn’t hit the streets for another seven years. At the University of Munich, meanwhile, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen was boxing up his office and heading home for retirement, while “roentgenologists” in the United States were beginning to kick around ideas that would launch the American College of Radiology (ACR) in 1923.
When the ACR Daily News Scan recently learned of Griffith, we knew we had to get the inside story. The gentleman we found is a warm, witty, razor-sharp octogenarian who recently observed his 60th year in radiology. Retirement, he tells us, isn’t coming anytime soon.
From his ocean-side home in La Jolla, Calif., Griffith, 87, recalls growing up in rural southern Indiana shortly before Woodrow Wilson vacated the Oval Office for incoming Warren G. Harding. Griffith’s father was a Baptist preacher, and his mother was a musician who taught piano. In 1939 — during the depths of the Great Depression, no less — the ambitious farm boy set off to study voice and concert piano at Cincinnati’s Conservatory of Music, but hedged his bets by simultaneously pursuing premed studies at Indiana University. He traveled the 170-mile distance between campuses in his grandfather’s grey Dodge.
Chuckling, he recalls, “I wanted to sound like the big singers of the day, but one of my voice teachers said I sounded more like Rudy Vallee, whose thin, warbling voice I didn’t care for.”
The Depression’s hardships forged in Griffith a gritty determination to succeed, no matter the sacrifice. “Medical school was not very expensive, but I lived inside what was really a clothes’ closet that measured about five by eight feet and cost me $2 a week,” he says. “The slanted ceiling was so low I couldn't stand up straight, so I had to put my desk against the highest wall, and lean across to the desk while sitting on my bed to study.” A chair simply wouldn’t fit.
In 1943, after finishing premed, Griffith enrolled in the Army Specialized Training Program at Indiana University, which provided him free tuition to medical school in exchange for service in the Army Medical Corps. Harrowing stories from the battlefields of World War II gave Griffith and his fellow students every reason to burn the midnight oil. “The guys that flunked out of medical school would send letters back from Germany that said, “For God’s sake, study!”
“One [failed premed student] wrote to us and said: ‘They made us scouts, and made us run across this field full of mines. Three of us ran across the minefield and nothing happened. Then they motioned for the rest of them to come on across, and that’s when the Germans in the woods opened up, and just leveled them with machine-gun fire.’” That account, Griffith recalls, “made us all study a good deal harder.”
Griffith eventually abandoned his dreams as a professional musician, partly because of money. “I went to an alumni meeting at the Conservatory about a year after I left, and asked my friend, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m playing violin with the Cincinnati Symphony.’ And I said, ‘Man, that’s great!” And he quickly added, ‘During the week, I work down at the Shell station pumping gas.’”
In 1946, Griffith got his M.D. and began his 15-month rotating internship. In 1947, he chose radiology as his medical specialty. “I am not sure just what it was, but radiology sounded interesting to me. Looking at those pictures and seeing through them was an amazing thing,” he says. During the post-World War II period, radiology in the United States, he says, “was kind of an ancillary service. We were sometimes helpful, but they could get along without us. We had fluoroscopy and general films, but nothing invasive.”
After just 90 days of radiologic training, the young first lieutenant was shipped to Germany, and immediately assumed the duties of chief of radiology at the 120th Station Hospital in Bayreuth. “They used to call the boys who flew the biplanes in World War I ‘90-day Wonders,’ “Griffith observes. “Likewise, I was a 90-day wonder in radiology.”
Two years later, Griffith returned to Indiana — as a general practitioner. “It was demanding day and night work. For a year, I was the only doctor in the county. Lots of house calls. I’d get to a farm at midnight to visit a patient, and they’d have the dogs out. Using my medical bag, I could fend those old dogs off like a matador.”
In 1953, he passed his boards in radiology and instantly became chief of radiology at the VA [Veterans Administration] hospital at Indiana University. “There was a shortage of radiologists,” he explains of his rapid promotion. “I hated my job — lots of meetings and administrative duties.”
Griffith recalls that radiologists in the mid-1950s performed “radiation therapy and diagnostics.” Nuclear medicine was still primitive. Therapy was carried out by 250-kv therapy machines. Older radiologists, meanwhile, were still talking about the good ol’ days of flat glass plates covered with silver emulsion.
Without CT, MR, PET or sophisticated ultrasound, “we had little to make our diagnoses on,” he says. “A lot of it had to do with talking to the patient. Radiology always has been sort of a solitary occupation, but, in those days, we talked to the patient often and correlated symptoms and findings. Today, by contrast, radiologists may be only partially aware of the patient’s symptoms.”
In 1955, Griffith entered private practice in Fort Wayne. Griffith remembers “fussing with very little” paperwork in the 1950s. “It was mostly private pay. Some people had insurance,” he says. To this day, he doesn’t know the radiologic fees that patients paid. “I never asked, and I never knew,” he says. “I was one of those guys who sat there and did his work.”
But as a general practitioner in the late 1940s, he recalls: “The fee was $15 for a chest film. A barium enema might be $35. Films of wrists and such would be $10 for three views. Reimbursement was an issue, but not like it is now. This is one of the big problems with medicine today. By the time you do all the paperwork, you forget about the patient.”
Radiologists in Eisenhower’s America earned a respectable income. “I made something like $12,000 or $14,000 a year at the VA in the 1950s,” Griffith notes. “When I went into private practice [in 1955], it was $35,000 or so. But, you know, everything was lower in price then. Salaries, compared to the cost of living, probably aren’t a whole lot different today.”
“One of the big issues of the 1950s was trying to get the hospital to buy new equipment,” he says. “When CT came out in the early 1970s, we purchased a prototype for our office before anybody else. CT really changed everything. Until that time, we had been looking at maybe 10 or 12 nuclear scans of the brain a day, but the minute CT was available, that all disappeared. CT was a miracle, unreal.”
If the arrival of CT was titanic, Griffith was less than enthused with early MRI technology. “At ACR and RSNA [Radiological Society of North America] meetings, we would see these MRI units, but I didn’t think they would amount to anything. But with time, researchers developed them and, my goodness, today it’s better than an anatomic section.”
In 1974, Griffith and wife Eleanore D. Steward Griffith, Ph.D., J.D., traveled to India, where the 54-year-old radiologist worked for two months in the radiology department at Miraj Medical Center. “It was really old time,” he says. “They were still wearing red glasses before doing fluoroscopy in the dark. Eleanore assisted the doctor in charge of public inoculations, and they were both in and out of the leprosy hospital. The diseases we saw were unbelievable — often very, very advanced. We would see terrible cases of lymphoma where the nodes under the arm were so big, the patient’s arm was severely elevated.”
 |
| Harold R. Griffith, M.D., Eleanore D. Steward Griffith, Ph.D., J.D., and their dog Shival |
In 1985, at age 65, Griffith decided to retire. But several colleagues in Calif. prevailed upon him to help them out. A series of half-time stints followed, and today he works half-time in Hemet, Calif. as a “utility player.”
“Fortunately, I don’t have to work nights or weekends, so I have a wonderful job. I do CT and ultrasound. Our whole program is digital.”
He continues, “You know, it’s a challenge to keep up, at my age. But it’s good for the mind and body, and it’s also good for the patient. I love radiology, every bit of it. It’s so intriguing and exciting. There’s something new every day. When I go to work, I have to turn on a different brain wave. It’s almost like getting ready for a race. I focus and work at top speed, some days doing 140 cases a day.”
Griffith’s colleagues are grateful, and have provided Griffith with his own apartment within the department. “It’s rather intriguing to be able to get up each morning, and already be at work!” he says.
Off hours, Griffith shares time with Eleanore, stays fit, and enjoys combing the beach with his giant Schnauzer Cheval, but radiology remains his passion. “Among the five radiologists I work with, they just can’t wait to retire,” he says. “And I tell them, retirement is no good. When I first came out here, I walked the beach past these bikinied girls, but after a week or so, that got tiresome.”
With 60 years of radiologic experience under his belt, Griffith takes time to mentor junior radiologists. “I love to talk to them, I really do. The young radiologists I meet are so smart, they just amaze me. I tell them that, if they weren’t already a radiologist, my advice would be to become a radiologist.”
“My plan for the future is to continue to work as long as I can possibly work. I take courses, read the journals, take biweekly exams, and compete as often as I can with the young guys just to see how I’m doing. Thus, I see my future is doing radiology.”
With a wink and hearty laugh, the nation’s oldest radiologist adds, “My wife is very happy with that arrangement, and reminds me of the old adage: “For better or for worse, but never for lunch!”