Courtney M. Townsend, MD, knew early what he wanted to be. Very early.
“When I was 5 years old, I decided I wasn't going to be a cowboy or a fireman. I would be a surgeon,” he said.
By the time he arrived at The University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) as a medical student in 1965, surgery was still very much the plan. What Townsend didn’t yet know was that UTMB would broaden that plan, introducing him to research and academic medicine and ultimately becoming the place where he would build his career.
“I had a wonderful time as a medical student at UTMB,” Townsend said. “It was really the only place I wanted to go, and I was fortunate to be here.”
What he remembers most clearly is the environment at UTMB.
“UTMB was then, as it is now, an institution without boundaries,” he said.
Students interacted easily with residents and faculty, while faculty members collaborated across disciplines. Much of that collaboration happened organically. Many unmarried medical students lived in fraternity houses, where first-year students routinely shared meals and downtime with students further along in their training and even residents. Nursing students joined them for lunch.
“There was a lot of collegial interaction in a natural kind of way,” Townsend said.
The result was a built-in network of mentors, colleagues, and peers and an early lesson in teamwork that followed students into their careers.
“There was great peer support,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily stated or advertised; it just happened.”
A change in plans
That collaborative culture also introduced Townsend to a side of medicine he hadn’t anticipated.
At the end of his second year, students had several weeks available to gain practical experience. Townsend expected to spend the time working in a hospital. But when he discussed his plans with Truman Blocker Jr., MD, former chair of surgery and the first president of UTMB, Blocker pointed him in a different direction — one that would ultimately shape his career.
“He said, ‘That’s a waste of your time. You’re going to do that the rest of your life,’” Townsend recalled.
Blocker steered him instead toward laboratory research supporting the developing kidney transplant program at UTMB. Townsend began studying lymphocyte function and immunosuppression and discovered an interest in research and academic medicine.
“I never thought about that,” he said. “But by the end of those 10 weeks, there wasn’t any question in my mind what I was going to do. I was still going to be a surgeon, but I was going to be involved in laboratory investigation.”
That path eventually led Townsend to surgical oncology and a fellowship at UCLA. When he left Galveston in 1974, he had no expectation that he would return. After two years at UCLA and another two fulfilling a Navy commitment at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, he began considering academic positions around the country.
Coming home to UTMB
UTMB was one of those opportunities.
“And it was more comfortable to come back here,” Townsend said. “One, I knew everybody here. I knew where the bathrooms were.”
There were more substantial reasons, too. Townsend saw an institution with strong leadership, familiar mentors, and opportunities to build the academic career he wanted. He returned expecting that another opportunity might eventually take him elsewhere, as was common in academic medicine.
It never did.
“I never found a place that I thought would offer me what I could have at UTMB in terms of the ability to do things that I wanted to do,” he said. “I never found a better place to go, and I’ve never, never regretted that for one minute.”
Today, Townsend sees medical students and residents as “junior partners,” an approach that echoes his own experience as a student surrounded by people willing to teach and support him.
One of those people was Sally Abston, MD, the first female surgical resident at UTMB and later a surgeon with the acute burn service at Shriners Burns Hospital for Children.
“She taught me and many other people not only how to take care of her patients but how to care for her patients,” Townsend said. “And she was the finest doctor I’ve ever worked with.”
Passing the torch
Medicine itself has changed enormously during his career. Townsend has watched advances once considered extraordinary become routine and diseases that once filled surgical textbooks become treatable without surgery. But he sees something familiar in the students entering medicine today.
“They still have the passion for doing what it is we do,” he said. “And what doctors do is take care of other people. It’s the finest way you could ever spend your life. And they seem excited about that, so I think they’re going to be just fine.
“The future in terms of medicine, in terms of the quality of the people, the medical students, the residents, the physician assistants, the nurses — they’re all as good as they ever were. And obviously, we know more, there’s more information out there available, but their commitment to caring for people is no less than it ever was.”