Interview
Spencer B. King, III, M.D., Part III


Dr. King This week concludes a three-part interview with Spencer B. King, III, M.D., who currently heads the Andreas Gruentzig Cardiovascular Center at Emory, which will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of PTCA with a live demonstration course on April 18-20, 1997. Next year Dr. King will serve as President of the American College of Cardiology.

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Q: People started hearing about angioplasty when Gruentzig began his demonstration courses in Zurich. What was the initial reaction?
King: The first reaction was disbelief. I heard about the first demonstration course from a friend of mine who had been there, who had been to the course, who came back telling me stories of blowing up arteries and everyone becoming so emotional. There was hugging and kissing among all the physicians involved and I said, this has got to be strange! This is not what I'd think would happen. So that was the reaction: disbelief. And the way people were convinced was simply to go see a demonstration, see what happened and see the result.

Andreas Gruentzig doing a case during Emory course Q: How did the courses work as an educational tool?
King: I can't think of any technology that has been shared with as much vigor as balloon angioplasty. And through the media of television, as Andreas did it. Those meetings in Europe were so astounding to people, to see someone working in a high-risk situation, such as dilating a patient in front of a live audience of peers who were sitting there watching you do it. And the astounding thing to me was to see someone applauded probably more so for his failures than for his successes. I mean, everybody was in there pulling along with him to get this done. And he saw the teaching value of that, not just to teach the technique but to teach the potential hazards — he really did control how it went through that meeting.

Dr. King on headsets, during a course Q: And you continued the courses here at Emory?
King: I mean the idea of having a live demonstration of things, that was very primitive at the time. So when he came here our commitment was that we would continue the courses. So a lot of our work was trying to facilitate that. We had this nice auditorium many people have been to in the administration building at Emory. One thing was we had to have closed circuit television. We ended up laying coaxial cable from the cath lab direct into that auditorium, putting up two rear project TV screens and setting up the whole system for doing live demonstrations, so we could begin at the end of 1980.

We worked together to build a television system that's been emulated a lot of places, so I think that the teaching of this technique has really revolutionized medical education at that level. Now you see many programs who have taken the medium of television to explain things that aren't easily explained through the printed media. You can read a journal article about a lot of things and understand it fully, but there are many areas of medicine that can't be fully communicated that way. I believe he did more to utilize that than anybody.

Dr. Gruentzig, just after a case Q: I attended some of the early courses and the atmosphere was quite intense.
Of course, Andreas was the consummate teacher of angioplasty and everyone came. I mean, you know, you say that we put on such a fantastic educational experience that everyone wanted to come and see it. I told Andreas at the time that really people came not to just sit there and watch paint dry, watch somebody laboriously work in the lab, but they came for same reason they came to stock car races in the South. They came not to watch the cars go round and round, but waiting for the crash.

Of course there were crashes, in those early days. I mean things were difficult and the success rate of angioplasty was not as great. And when you have that situation and you have the maestro Andreas performing, you know, the excitement level is quite high in that arena. It's like going to watch Michael Jordan play basketball. So people came for that reason.

Emory Hospital But I guess the overriding reason was, this was the ticket — to do angioplasty. I reflect back on that, now that we're in an era of formalized training, formalized Boards, and requirements and volumes and everything that people are having put on them. In those days, you know, you got your little chit that you'd been to the Emory course and you'd been there for four days. You'd seen some angioplasty, walked in your hospital and your hospital was happy to have you and said "Okay. Hang up your shingle and get to work."

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