EX Trucker James Crudup: (A Black Man) Trains Doctors for Microsurgery

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March 23, 2006

Surgeons learned skills from ex-trucker

James Crudup Award revered at med school

By Gary Pettus
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FOREST — At the University of Michigan medical school, there was a room you entered, like the secret chamber of Oz; it could make you rich and famous.

Waiting behind the door was a wizard: a soft-spoken ex-truck driver with the trace of a stutter, a Mississippi accent and a pair of magical hands.

James Crudup, who never went to college, who was never allowed to operate on a human, was the best surgeon in the medical school. And he could make you one of the best in the world.

Dr. Sherman Silber of St. Louis, a world-famous urologist, says of him: "He made me what I am."

But, outside the medical field, few people have heard of James Crudup, even in the state he calls home.

"When I found out what he had done, I said, 'my God, this is fascinating," says Dr. Edgar Smith, a former University of Mississippi Medical Center administrator. "Absolutely fascinating.' "

Now 79 and retired, Crudup has been back in his hometown of Forest for 17 years, working in his yard, tinkering with his '46 Ford, and never regretting his fate as a maker of fortunes greater than his own.

"It didn't bother me that I was training these doctors who were going to make a lot of money," he says, fiddling with a pair of old microsurgery glasses that once peered into the kidneys of rats.

"I grew up in Mississippi back when you couldn't walk down the street, when you had to go to the back door to buy a hamburger. I was glad to have the job.

"I also wanted to make sure doctors got the right training. One day I might be on the operating table, and I wanted the best."

Each year at the University of Michigan medical school in Ann Arbor, the best are honored in his name: The chief resident with the outstanding record for research in surgery claims the James W. Crudup Award.

"I'm struck by the reverence with which people speak his name here," says Amy Yamasaki, a video producer for the school.

"Yet very little is known about him." Yamasaki has the cure: She's shooting a documentary on Crudup's deeds for the school.

MOTHER, MIDWIFE

If it were a made-for-TV movie, it might open with Tommie Crudup delivering a baby in the night.

"My mother was a midwife," James Crudup says. "As long as I could remember she delivered them - white, black, Indian.

"I never heard my mother say she lost a baby.

"I got my talent from her."

Or it might open with Crudup's father Jonas Sr. slinging wood onto a wagon drawn by horses named Bunny and Grace.

"My dad hauled wood, sunup to sundown, and I helped," Crudup says. "I learned to work from him.

"I work everyday. I've messed around and bought a tractor," says Crudup, whose neat lawn could have been trimmed by a surgeon's knife.

"I can drive anything."

As a young man, he drove a truck into his future.

After a short stint in the Army, he'd returned home in '46 to finish at Scott County Training School.

He found a wife, Juanita, then found a job. Some of his family had moved near Detroit, he says. "So I went up there and got a job driving a truck for a brick company. There weren't many jobs around here."

But the job that gave him new life started with a place for the dead: "My brother Jonas Jr. worked in a morgue at the medical school," Crudup says. "When things looked bad for the brick company, I looked for a new job. Jonas helped me get one in a lab."

It was a lab where dogs, cats, rats, pigs and calves were cut open for research. Crudup cleaned the instruments: pipettes, clamps, forceps, knives.

"I couldn't stand the sight of blood," he says. "But I needed a job. You can get used to anything."

There was something, though, that he'd never accept: "I stuttered. That's why I didn't go to college. People made fun of you.

"I had a brother who stuttered too. One day he was annoying my sister while she was washing the dishes, so she whopped him in the mouth with a soap-dish rag. He never stuttered again.

"I tried to get her to hit me, but she wouldn't do it."

One day at the medical school, he met a doctor who had a stutter. "A bad one," he says. "That encouraged me to get rid of mine.

"I learned that, if I couldn't say something, to just change it to something else. I still hesitate sometimes. But I almost cured myself."

TRANSPLANTS

He could do whatever he put his mind to, and particularly his hands. He watched the doctors coming through, transplanting organs in animals. He thought, "I believe I can do that." He learned terms from medical books. Vena cava, aortic arch. He practiced on the bodies of animals destined for the incinerator. It was as natural to him as rewiring a house.

A doctor who ran the lab found him out. He put a knife in Crudup's hand.

"Then he started sending residents to me," Crudup say. They were told, 'See Jimmy. If he can't teach you, you have to go.' "

By the time Sherman Silber found him, Crudup was already a legend.

"He could do shunts, liver transplants, much faster and with healthier results than any of the surgeons," Silber says. "And there were damn good surgeons.

"I went to him and told him what my problem was."

Silber wanted to be a surgeon. "But I wasn't good with my hands," he says. "I had a huge amount of insecurity about it. Jimmy was a prodigy. But he was kind."

Crudup taught him how to use his hands, he says.

"Then it went further."

Silber wanted to study transplant rejections, but the best subjects for this were inbred rats, animals with tiny organs and vessels - too tiny for the clumsy instruments at hand at the time. "I asked Jimmy if this was possible," Silber says.

"He thought about it for a minute, and said, 'Yeah, I think we can do that.'

"He made his own instruments. We basically pioneered microsurgery together."

In 2005, an Alabama woman, Stephanie Yarber, had a baby; 10 years earlier, her ovaries had shut down. The birth became possible because of a transplant of ovarian tissue donated by her identical twin.

Silber was the surgeon.

Now at St. Luke's Hospital in St. Louis, Silber is a renowned fertility expert; he's a pioneer in reverse vasectomies.

"I wouldn't have the techniques or tools to do that without Jimmy," he says.

CANCER SUPPORT GROUP

In Mississippi, his story might not have emerged if Crudup hadn't developed cancer. He's a member of a prostate cancer support group at St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson.

"He started talking to me about fixing his car," says Robert Teague, who counsels the group, "about how it relates to surgery. Surgery in rats. I thought, 'He's putting me on.' Then the story came out in bits and pieces. But I had to pull it out of him."

In a back room of his spotless home on Old Mississippi 21, there are a handful of certificates and plaques proclaiming Crudup's contribution to the careers of some of medicine's best and brightest. They hang above a chair the medical school gave him at his retirement party.

"I don't use the chair too much," he says with a smile. "My wife sits in it at the window to look at the squirrels."