IN REMEMBRANCE
In Remembrance
JOHN CREECH JR, MD
October 1922 – August 2018
DR. JOHN CREECH JR.’S REMARKABLE CURIOSITY
Dr. John Creech was a work-a-day general surgeon at St. Anthony’s
Hospital after his training at the UofL School of Medicine and in
our residency under Dr. Rudolph Noer. He then did a fellowship at
MD Anderson and settled into general surgical practice and what
was a fairly routine job as plant doctor for B.F. Goodrich, which
was then located on the Standiford Field campus. Because the UofL
family unit practice had begun to do clinical work with inpatients
as St. Anthony in the early 1970s, we were occasionally asked to
see patients for them there. That is where I got to know John a
little better than you typically do when you change clothes besides
someone once a week in a surgical locker room.
I was surprised and delighted when he called me in early 1974
and said he wanted to talk to me about an unusual set of circumstanc-
es at his “plant doctor” job. There was a past history of employees
there and elsewhere with digital tenderness and resorption of the
distal joints on radiograph of the hand (acroosteolysis), possibly
due to vinyl chloride.
In essence, what John had done, working with Dr. Laszlo Makk
who was then Chief of Pathology at St. Anthony, was to recognize
a cluster of seven patients from the B.F. Goodrich factory who had
the very rare lesion called angiosarcoma of the liver.
Industrial toxicity was not even a social subject at that point in
time, but Dr. Creech had recognized an unusual clustering of patients
in one single building at the plant. To make a very long story much
shorter, more work was done to get monitoring practices arranged.
Carlo Tamburro, MD, who was a well-respected hepatologist from
New Jersey, was recruited to UofL faculty and the Brown Cancer
Center to continue a productive study of these patients and the
environmental and industrial implications thereof.
Like everyone else at the time, I learned the significance of vinyl
chloride and the potential carcinogenicity thereof. As I recall, the
company joined in, at the behest of its medical officer Maurice
Johnson, MD, with a vigorous search for causes and mechanisms
and was helpful in patient care and illnesses as a whole, which
followed. This is quite a different approach from that shown by
other companies, lost in a fog of tolerable ppm (parts per million). 1
This whole thing came to light because of Dr. Creech’s remarkable
curiosity. His contribution became an important milestone in the
historical industry of the Occupational Health and Safety Adminis-
tration. OHSA must work continuously at making work places safer
and less toxic to the workers, and in Louisville, Dr. John Creech’s
discernment and initiative sparked this endeavor. He deserves all
the credit for the imagination and insight, aided by Dr. Makk’s es-
sential pathologic workup and interpretation, for recognizing this
mini-epidemic. Their efforts sparked a nationwide search for ways
to severely limit exposure to this commonly used gas.
This serves as a constant reminder that there are many ways
doctors can contribute to society and this is a most unusual one,
but one that most appreciated by all concerned.
- Hiram Polk Jr., MD
Those interested in details should and background should see Deceit and
Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution by Gerald Markowitz
and David Rosner, pages 174-193. Univ. of California Press / Milbank
Memorial Fund; October 7, 2002
1
Jan 1975 issue Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences ( Heath,
Falk, and Creech)
2
Dr. Creech was a GLMS member for 62 years.
FEBRUARY 2019
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