Dr. Mani Menon
speaker
122 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Dr. Mani Menon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
These were all people who worked in the automotive industry. Detroit had the highest concentration of industrial robots in the world. What they felt is they had seen the power of the robot in welding and soldering and screwing in areas where the hand couldn't get into.
What they felt is that they came here because they trusted me and I had told them that I was very well trained in open surgery and they said, well, if you think this robot is going to help you, we've seen how it helps us. What do we have to lose?
I don't know the part of the first surgical training at Johns Hopkins. It's like 99% true. They may have had somebody who filled in when there was an unexpected vacancy. I don't think so. I think that's also true.
In a nutshell, I was and continue to be a wimp surrounded by strong women who told me what to do. I grew up with my mother. My father had died when I was very young. And she idolized her uncle, who was a prominent physician who had died. And she wanted me to become a physician. So I became his physician. Came to the United States.
I was a general surgical resident at my medical school, JIPA, in Pondicherry. And there was a change in administration, and I fell out of favor with the new chairman of the Department of Surgery. So once again, being a wimp, I decided that I would flee India and come to the U.S. I came to the U.S.
to become a neurosurgeon, and then I rapidly realized that urine was more appealing to me than CSF and became a urologist.
Yes, yes, yes.
I was 24. There was no match there. So you applied and you went wherever you got it. And I was accepted in the middle of the year, in January of 1973, to the Episcopal Hospital in Philadelphia. I was delighted to get into the Episcopal Hospital. It was a major teaching affiliate of Temple University.
It had a reputation for training excellent surgeons, but much more, it was a community hospital that had a neurosurgical residency embedded within its facilities. a GME, when I thought this would be my best chance of getting into a neurosurgical residency. So that's how I ended up at Episcopal. It was a cultural shock to me. Episcopal was in the middle of Philadelphia's worst neighborhood.
I didn't have a car, and in order to go home, I had to take the subway, I think it was called the L, and then take a bus. It would take me two hours to get home, and then at four o'clock in the morning, I had to get back to be there for rounds at six. I think I was chased a couple of times and yelled at, but I never actually got the privilege of being mugged.
I had, when I first landed, they gave us intern squatters, which were right across the hospital. And I was not used to locking my doors, and so I left the door open. And next to my room was the chief resident. And I think my first week when I was back, I found that somebody had broken into the apartment, broken into the chief resident's quarters and stolen his TV and everything else that he had.
No computers back then. And they didn't have to break into my apartment because it was open. They came in and they found that I was sleeping on the floor. I had nothing, so they left me $5 and walked away.
I don't know that there were racist undertones. I think it cut both ways. At Episcopal, it had traditionally been a hospital run by foreign medical graduates. I think 80% of the internal medicine residents were FMGs, as we were called. Not so much the surgery department, but the chief resident was from Mexico.
And the hospital had just started to turn, the GME program had just started to turn, and most of the surgical candidates had become American medical graduates. And when they became American medical graduates, we took two residents a year, they didn't want to take call every other day. So I think a plan was hatched, let's get another person to fill in the spot. Since he or she is coming in January,
He would not be eligible to go through the program in July, and this will kind of help the call schedule. So I felt that I was looked at a little bit more critically than somebody who had gone to medical school in the U.S., which I was willing to accept because, you know, after all, there was an unknown quantity there. When I went to Hopkins, it was interesting.
I started at Hopkins as a PGY-3 because I had done my general surgery at Episcopal and in India. As a PGY-3, I was a first-year urology resident. And I'd go to the emergency room, very busy emergency room at Hopkins, and the security guard would check my ID because, again, as you alluded to, Hopkins had never had an international medical graduate in any of the surgical programs.
I mean, I didn't look at it like he was just doing his job. It was a he. They were always he's, the security guards. But then the other thing happened too. I felt that all the residents around me and all the other specialties felt that if I was good enough to get accepted at Hopkins, I must be pretty special.
And so I was completely accepted, maybe even treated more charitably than if I had been just a Harvard medical student. They had plenty of those, but they never had a gypna student there.
How would you reflect on that? Oh, it changed me completely. When I came from India, I was simply told, listen to what your professors say, and you were considered a good resident if you were simply able to parrot what they said. Whereas Walsh and I started at the same time. I mean, I started as the lowest of the low, a one-year fellow in urology. I wasn't accepted into the full program.
And Walsh started as the department chairman at that point. But, you know, I was the first person he hired, secretary, bottle washer, resident. Because I was, by definition, the weakest possible resident that they could have hired, they matched me with the strongest possible senior resident.
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