Photo by Steven St. JohnTribune

Tribune

Physician Art Kaufman (left) visits with a patient at the University of New Mexico Family Practice Center. Kaufman, who helped develop the family and community medicine department at UNM's medical school, is one of 20 people whose portraits make up "Unsung," an exhibit paying homage to longtime medical school faculty members.

Jack Melville

Jonathan Abrams depicted by artist Jack Melville.

Jack Melville

Albuquerque artist Jack Melville painted this portrait of Art Kaufman.

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If anyone knows how to accelerate heart rates, it's Jonathan Abrams, once chief of cardiology at University of New Mexico Hospital.

Faced many years ago with perking up a lecture on exercise and the cardiovascular system, Abrams arranged for a fit young woman to run nude through his UNM medical school lecture hall.

"It was during the streaking craze," Abrams, 68, said. "She was naked as a blue jay, and she ran across the front of the room and disappeared. Everyone just about fell out of their seats.

"I got some complaints, but only from those who had missed it."

Abrams' show-and-tell lecture was an isolated incident, but it's indicative of the fresh and spirited approach to teaching medicine that has been a hallmark of UNM's medical school since its founding in 1964.

The hospital has, throughout its evolution and name changes, always been the main training ground for UNM medical school students. But UNM's med students were not confined within the hospital's walls or the school's lecture halls.

Trailblazing methods such as putting first-year students with patients and sending med students into rural New Mexico communities grew out of the experiences and vision of a corps of longtime faculty members, including Abrams.

His portrait is one of 20 displayed in "Unsung," an exhibit honoring 19 men and one woman who are among pioneer medical school faculty members. All were hired before 1980 and are still practicing and teaching medicine today.

The vibrant, colorful portraits, painted by Albuquerque artist Jack Melville, are displayed in the hospital's fifth floor art gallery through Nov. 30.

Melville named the exhibit "Unsung" because he was struck by the humility of the doctors he painted.

"It's a nice crowd," Abrams said of the old guard. "The fact that a lot of them are still here, still working, means they are committed and not just out for the big bucks. It speaks very well of their dedication."

Abrams is the longest-practicing full-time faculty member at the medical school.

Two other members of the old guard represented in the exhibit are Art Kaufman, 64, who helped form the school's family and community medicine department, and Patricia McFeeley, a nationally known forensics authority who earned her medical degree at UNM before joining the faculty.

Kaufman, who grew up in New York City, came to New Mexico in the early 1970s to work at Jemez and Zia pueblos as a field officer for the Indian Health Service. He took lessons learned at the pueblos with him when he joined the UNM faculty in 1974.

"What I learned at the pueblos was that communities have strengths you can build on," he said. "But when we train in hospitals and work in our own clinics, we don't see those strengths. We just see people coming in with diseases."

Kaufman spearheaded a 1979 experiment that sent UNM medical students into New Mexico's rural communities, such as Hobbs and Crownpoint, to work with patients. It became standard practice at UNM.

"They would get an immersion in a community where they could see physical problems and the strengths and weaknesses of a community," Kaufman said. "And then they'd come back to campus for more advanced study."

McFeeley, who grew up in Denver, entered the medical school in 1970 and graduated in 1972. Back in those days, she said, female students made up 10 percent or less of UNM's medical school classes. Now, female students make up half or more of classes.

"I'm just guessing, but I think that back then people who were giving career advice discouraged women from going into medicine," she said.

That was not a problem for McFeeley. Her father was a doctor. So was her mother and grandmother and aunts and uncles.

"I actually postponed going to medical school for a year to make sure that was what I wanted, to be sure I wasn't just following along," she said.

The associations she developed at UNM changed her life in ways she could not have predicted.

Instead of going into pediatrics or internal medicine as she had planned, fellowship training with James Weston, a UNM faculty member and the state's first chief medical investigator, led her into a career of forensic pathology.

"I liked it because it was so hands-on," she said of forensics, which is the application of medicine to legal matters, such as criminal investigations. "You were solving problems right away."

McFeeley has been a member of UNM's pathology department since 1977 and has served as the state's chief and assistant chief medical investigator. She has performed thousands of autopsies, which is about as hands-on as it gets.

She laughed about artist Melville's colorful and imaginative depiction of her and the other doctors in the "Unsung" exhibit.

"I told him I didn't know what to wear for the portrait," she said, "and he told me not to worry about it because he was going to change all the colors anyway."

McFeeley said one doctor so much liked the purple tie Melville created for him in his portrait that he is contemplating getting one like it.

Not all members of the medical school's pioneer faculty are included in "Unsung." But Nancy Whalen, a staff member with the hospital's pediatric cardiology unit and guest curator for the exhibit, said she hopes other portraits will be added and that the hospital will find a permanent place to display the collection.

As it is, "Unsung" is a tribute to the people who took the UNM medical school from a program that graduated 19 doctors in 1968 to an institution that now boasts 300 students in the first through the fourth years and more than 500 in resident training.

Abrams said that's not bad for a facility whose resources are taxed because it is a working county hospital as well as a teaching hospital.

"Is it Harvard or Duke or the University of Washington?" Abrams said. "Certainly not. But we've done pretty well for a medical school growing up in the desert."