Larry R. Kirkland, MD, 1937-2020
During my first week at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1959, I met my freshman classmate Larry Kirkland (Figure 1a). After being with him for only 5 minutes, I felt that we would be good friends.
Figure 1.
(a) Larry Kirkland, Gerald Looney, and Robert Lathan at Johns Hopkins, 1961–1962. (b) Bob and Larry by the car, July 1961.
Larry was born in Columbus, Georgia, and in high school his basketball team went to the state championship tournament, which was one of his favorite memories. He was a starter and his team was in the semifinals but lost the finals. He went to the University of Alabama initially on a basketball scholarship and graduated with a degree in chemistry. He especially loved an English course on Shakespeare that he took there.
After our early weeks at Hopkins, Larry and I joined the Pithotomy Club fraternity; we had both been members of Kappa Alpha and Phi Beta Kappa at separate colleges. At medical school, Larry was athletic and played on a basketball team, and he and I played some golf.
Shortly after we met, we went to a baseball game in Baltimore. On the bottom of the ninth inning, the Oriole player hit a home run to win the game. Several of us were standing up to cheer, but Larry was sitting and almost asleep. He said this had happened before. I suggested that he be checked out at Hopkins. He consulted with the head of neurology there, who said he had a classical case of narcolepsy and should start taking Ritalin daily. (Narcolepsy is a chronic sleep disorder characterized by overwhelming daytime drowsiness and sudden attacks of sleep. Occasionally narcolepsy can be accompanied by a sudden loss of muscle tone—cataplexy.)
Larry and I moved to an apartment in a “row house” behind the hospital for our second year of medical school. In 1961, we spent an elective quarter at Guy’s Hospital in London and then spent the next 10 weeks in Europe. In England, we had frequent weekends all over the country but had still not been to Scotland. With no money left, we had to hitchhike to Edinburgh. On the way back to London, Larry found his “dream” car in Coventry, England—a used 1947 MG-TC (Figure 1b)—for around $500 and asked his father if he could loan him the money. The car became Larry’s single most loved possession. He drove the car in Europe, and we canceled our plan with Eurail.
We had a great time covering France, Italy, Greece, Austria, Germany (including East Berlin—the day the wall closed), the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. Larry drove the car about 90% of the time and had no problem with narcolepsy. The car would go only about 45 mph. When we left the Riviera into Italy, the Italians jumped up and cheered and thought we were English—so they said. Larry’s favorite life memories were of his months in England and Europe.
After we graduated from medical school, Larry moved to Birmingham for an internship and residency in medicine at the University of Alabama from 1964 to 1966. In November 1966, he married Lyn Blanton from Shelby, NC, a dietician. They spent 4 years in the US Army Medical Corps, mostly in Germany. In 1970, the Kirklands moved to Atlanta and Emory University Hospital, where he began a fellowship in cardiology at Crawford W. Long Hospital. Later he became the first medical director of Emory’s Employee Health Clinic from 1975 to 2000.
In 1976, Larry fell from a ladder reaching to the roof while restoring an old house, possibly a result of a “seizure” from cataplexy. He became paraplegic from the spinal cord injury. After recovery and rehabilitation, he was able to work again in the Emory Clinic and continued for 24 years until he retired in 2000. He managed his disability with dignity and great resilience.
Larry loved working with medical students, especially for their first clinical experience. He was an inspiring teacher and patients loved him. He had multiple talents and had many interests in life. He was a gifted writer who wrote some book reviews for JAMA. He was a lover of Shakespeare and could quote long passages from the tragedies. He was an expert in medical history, and after our freshman medical history course at Hopkins by Dr. Oswei Temkin, our class nicknamed Larry “Oswei.” Larry also collected antiquarian books. He was a fan of Turner Classic Movies, Alabama college football, and the Atlanta Falcons. He collected favorite quotes from old movies. He was a proficient woodturner and also a tinkerer, frequently repairing broken small appliances for friends and neighbors.
He also admired Dr. Alfred Blalock, the prominent head of surgery at Johns Hopkins, who was from Culloden, Georgia. He and I worked on a poster project on Dr. Blalock for the Georgia Heart Association. Larry frequently told me that he thought the two smartest physicians of all time were Dr. Roland Ingram, his fraternity brother at Alabama, who was later a pulmonologist at Harvard and Emory, and Dr. Victor McKusick, whom he worked with at Hopkins, who was head of medicine and later the “father of medical genetics.”
Larry had narcolepsy all his life, but his symptoms were mostly controlled with low-dose Dexedrine until his last few months. His other medical problems included coronary artery disease with stents, transient ischemic attacks, chronic urinary tract infections, frequent deep venous thrombosis, anemia of chronic disease with low proteins, and multiple decubiti.
Despite being wheelchair bound for over 45 years, Dr. Kirkland had a full, engaged, and accomplished life, defying all odds of life expectancy for people with such a medical history. He was able to live such a long life, to 82 years, through the amazing support of his caring wife, Lyn. She loved him and said Larry was easy to live with.
In recent years, Larry took pride in serving on the board of the prestigious John Ramsey Award and Great Ideas Tour for the University of Alabama, a scholarship to recognize academic excellence and community service. His involvement leaves a legacy that will live on and benefit future generations of students.
—S. Robert Lathan, MD
Piedmont Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia
E-mail: rlathanmd@att.net