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A Conversation with David O. Williams, MD
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This issue Dr. Bhatt converses with David O. Williams, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard University School of Medicine, and cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.
Deepak L. Bhatt
David O. Williams
Williams obtained his medical degree from Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia and completed his internship and residency in medicine at Hahnemann Hospital, which was followed by a cardiology fellowship at the University of California, Davis.
Williams has written or co-written more than 250 papers in peer-reviewed publications and has served on the editorial board of several journals, including the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions, Circulation (associate editor), Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions (senior associate editor) and the American Heart Journal.
What are your hobbies outside of practicing medicine?
Dr. Williams: My No. 1 priority outside of practicing medicine has been my family. My kids are now for the most part out of the house, but nevertheless my wife and I are very supportive of them. I also enjoy playing golf. I’ve been involved with athletics since I was a kid, as my dad was a pitcher briefly with the Detroit Tigers. During college, I played a lot of sports, including football, lacrosse and baseball at the varsity level. Now, I run and play golf. If you ask my wife, golf consumes my summer weekends. I particularly enjoy playing with my boys. I find the game a good way for men to relate to each other.
Who has had the greatest influence on your career?
Dr. Williams: Three people in particular: William Likoff, MD; Leonard Dreifuss, MD; and Dean Mason, MD. All three were former presidents of ACC and were very influential in leading me along the path to becoming who I am today. Early on in my training, it was looking like my professional ambitions were going to have to take a backseat to the Vietnam War. I had orders to report to Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam when I got an eye inflammation, which put that on hold. In the time that followed, I needed to get a fellowship, so Len Dreyfuss called Dean Mason and got me a spot at the University of California, Davis. A year later, the military examined me again and said enlisting me would be too risky, so I never went into service. As a result, I got placed on a fast track at UC Davis. After a year and a half of fellowship, I became chief of cardiology at the VA hospital of the UC Davis Medical School, which was pretty unusual seeing as I hadn’t even finished my fellowship yet.
What was the defining moment that led you to your field?
Dr. Williams: I read an article by Andreas Gruentzig, MD, of a single case report of the first angioplasty in The Lancet in 1978. Shortly after reading the article, I picked up the phone and called Gruentzig and asked him if I could visit. The next week I was on a plane going to Switzerland, which was one of the first times I had ever been out of the United States. That fall, I did my first angioplasty at Rhode Island Hospital, and became the fourth operator to do an angioplasty in the United States. At that time, the procedure was very crude and risky, with about half the patients going to the OR as emergencies. Nevertheless, I thought it was a good procedure and eventually became an interventionalist.
Have you ever been fortunate enough to witness or to have been part of medical history in the making?
Dr. Williams: There are very few of us still practicing medicine who were involved with angioplasty in the beginning. At the time, one of the things I wanted to do — and eventually was able to do — was to record the history of the procedure so that when those of us who were involved in the beginning are gone, there will be a record of what happened. The book, titled Journey into the Heart: A Tale of Pioneering Doctors and Their Race to Transform Cardiovascular Medicine, was published in 2007. Recording what transpired was particularly important because the procedure pioneered by Gruentzig is now everywhere, with millions of cases being performed every year. The procedure also triggered minimally invasive approaches for a host of other surgical procedures. Almost every operative procedure now is less invasive and I attribute all of that to Gruentzig, because it was the first non-surgical approach to treating a disease that was traditionally managed with surgery. The legacy of angioplasty is not just for patients with CAD, but for all these procedures that are now being done in a less invasive way. And that trend will continue.
What do you enjoy doing to relax?
Dr. Williams: Aside from playing golf, I enjoy the beach and the Jersey Shore. I was a lifeguard at Stone Harbor, N.J., and on the beach patrol during medical school and worked as a beach doctor. I made a lot of friends during that time and still go back every year with my family to visit friends from 50 years ago. Stone Harbor remains a very special place to me and the experiences are as vivid as if they happened yesterday.