The Life of Dr. C. Thorpe Ray

Born in Hutto, Texas where his mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse.

Graduated from University of Texas and earned his MD from University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Elected to Phi Beta Kappa & Alpha Omega Alpha.

Did his internship & residency in Texas.

Taught briefly at SMU before coming to Tulane in 1945 as instructor in the medical department.

Left Tulane from 1958 to 1967 to take a position as Chairman of Medicine department at University of Missouri School of Medicine.

Returned to New Orleans, Louisiana in 1967 to become Alton Oschner Medical Foundation's Director of Education & Research.

The following year (1968), Dr. Ray was named head of cardiology at Oschner.

Returned to Tulane in 1975 to lead the Department of Medicine until 1982; he was also Acting Chairman from 1987 to 1989.

Dr. Ray passed away on August 27, 1998 of complications from a stroke at North Austin Medical Center in Austin, Texas. He was 82.

But who was Dr. Ray?

He was remembered as a soft-spoken man who devoted his life to introducing several generations of students to the intricacies of medicine.

Dr. Ray's daughter, Dr. Marilyn Ray, a dermatologist at Oschner, described her father's style as "shade tree medicine - making a diagnosis as if you were outside, with no instruments to help you."

Dr. Mary Abell, a student of Dr. Ray - "He was magic. [Dr. Ray] could do what very few people can do - that is, stand at the end of the bed and show you things that most people wouldn't even take time to observe. For him, it wasn't the fact that he knew things, but that he could pass them on and get people excited about feeling that murmur or reading that EKG."

"Teaching the joy of medicine - what a good job you can do just using your God-given senses, your judgment, your reasoning, your interest." - Dr. Ray's motto

"Rules of Dr. Ray" to Mary Abell (and the rest of us):

1. You must not only hear, but listen to what the patient is saying.

2. You must not only look at the patient, but see the flags of disease.

3. You must hear the breath sounds, and hear the heart sounds in the context of their cause, not their loudness.

4. Most importantly, Mary, you must be patient with your growth.

A lesson from Dr. Ray:

Look at the whole station. Look at the rhythmic movement of the bed sheets. What do you think it means? It might mean that the patient is in congestive heart failure, that the heart is so large that you can see the gallop rhythm through the bed sheets. Or it might mean the bounding pulse of aortic insufficiency. You look at the way the patient perspires, the respiratory rate, the respiratory movement. You might have a patient who had an irregular respiratory pattern that no one had noticed because of either CNS damage or congestive heart failure. It's a type of breathing called Cheyne-Stokes breathing, and you really miss it if you don't stand back and look.

Dr. Ray's own lessons:

"He sat at the bedside for hours, listening to the sound of the patient, teaching himself the meanings of the various murmurs and pulsations of the human body. When he teaches this intuitive brand of observation to his students, he mimics the sounds, himself, if the patient's body does not oblige."

-- Dr. John Oschner, cardiothoracic surgeon