Welcome To Our Center
The mission of the Eugene and Mary B. Meyer Center for Advanced Transfusion Practices and Blood Research is:
- To provide clinical services for patients who wish to avoid blood products for religious or other reasons;
- To perform research on non-blood based blood substitutes, developing new approaches for achieving hemostasis in bleeding disorders and studying the mechanisms of hematologic disorders that lead to transfusion therapy;
- To educate physicians, nurses, medical students and patients on topics relating to alternatives to blood transfusion.
Many have asked about the naming of our center. The ATP Center is named after two renowned Johns Hopkins’ faculty members. Eugene Meyer, M.D., served as Psychiatrist-in-Charge of the Psychiatric Liaison Service at Johns Hopkins Hospital for nearly three decades, beginning in 1949. In that capacity, he earned the esteem and warm regard of colleagues and students. According to renowned Hopkins geneticist Victor McKusick, Eugene Meyer “was one of the pioneers in investigating the interface of psychiatry and internal medicine.” As Professor of both Psychiatry and Medicine, Eugene Meyer used his insight into mental and physical disorders to make differential diagnoses of troubled patients on surgical and medical wards. “Prior to his program, the interest of psychiatrists in medical patients was minimal,” said Dr. Paul McHugh, Chair of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins.
The Psychiatric Liaison Service became a model, inspiring like programs across the country. Eugene Meyer’s students went on to become Chiefs of Service in a number of these. Throughout his life he remained open-minded and eclectic in his views, practices and research. Although a trained psychoanalyst, he quickly embraced new developments in the neuro-biology of mental illness and eagerly explored new treatment models such as short-term therapy. Harvard Professor of Psychiatry Leon Eisenberg called Dr. Meyer “a doctor’s doctor—highly skilled, compassionate and caring.” These qualities made him an outstandingly effective interviewer and teacher, able, in the words of Dr. McHugh, to make “that which can be so vague concrete, teachable and accessible to doctors.”
From 1963 until her death in 1981, Mary B. Meyer, M.P.H., taught and conducted research in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. She was acclaimed for studies that identified and analyzed health hazards to large populations. According to Dr. Neal A. Halsey, Hopkins Professor of International Health, her early study of the transmission of mumps “provided the foundation for the introduction and evaluation of the live attenuated mumps vaccine that is given to all children today.”
She was best known for her study that demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that maternal smoking harms the fetus and the newborn baby. According to Dr. George Comstock, Alumni Centenniel Professor of Epidemiology at Hopkins, “she played a major role, and perhaps even the major role, in persuading physicians that preventing smoking by pregnant women would result in a marked decrease in prenatal mortality.” At the invitation of Robert Califano, head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, she wrote the chapter on Pregnancy and Infant Health for the 1979 Surgeon’s General’s Report on smoking and health.
Dr. Alfred Sommer, Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene praised her skill as researcher and teacher. He called Mary Meyer “a true public health scholar…She not only exposed students to her insights and ideas; she stimulated them to think creatively, to work collegially and to become scholars themselves.”
The Eugene and Mary B. Meyer Center for Advanced Transfusion Practices and Blood Research aspires to carry on the tradition of these outstanding scientists: empathy and expertise in patient care, rigor and relevance in scientific research, skill and creativity in teaching—to the benefit of patients, nurses, and physicians throughout the world.
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