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The history of a life or the history of an institution can be obliterated in an instant. When the last person who remembers is gone, their experiences are lost — unless, of course, that person thinks to record them.

Maurine Twiss, the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s first public information officer from 1955 until 1978, was in a key administrative position during the formative period of the institution and during the turbulent civil rights era of the 1960s.

Luckily for generations hence, she sat down with the late Dr. Robert Currier in 12 free-ranging conversations that he recorded and his wife, Marilyn, transcribed. Those transcripts have formed a memoir of those years, Pressure from All Sides, the University of Mississippi Medical Center in the 1960s.

The project wasn’t without its challenges. Twiss, who was to write the history of UMC during her retirement years, had finished the first chapter when her chronic vision problems worsened, and she could no longer read resource material.

In her long history as a journalist and medical writer, her preferred method of writing was by typewriter, alone in a room, having read and re-read material (much of which she had written herself) before committing words to paper. She could no longer do that.

But Barbara Austin, her successor as director of the public affairs division, urged her to record her memories of the 1960s. She resisted, skeptical about memory as history.

Currier, a faculty member since 1961 and former chair of neurology, joined Austin in urging Twiss to commit to paper her memories of that decade. Finally, Twiss relented to a series of taped conversations with Currier, which took place on 12 Wednesday mornings from mid-January through mid-June of 2001. Currier died in 2003 after a long illness.

As she writes in the foreword, “We didn’t claim to record history, a far more precise exercise than ours. We wanted to give life to the bare facts, so we recalled what we and others felt and thought and did in the same 10 years leading up to and into the so-called Civil Rights Era, a time of tumult and profound change.”

The book describes the very early years of UMC, the struggles between the Medical Center and the Central Medical Society, and a close look through Twiss’s eyes of the first Medical Center director, Dr. David Pankratz.

She vividly describes Pankratz and his successor, Dr. Bob Marston, who led the institution in its successful compliance with the Civil Rights Act. She describes how the administrative staff took down all the “white” and “colored” signs during the middle of one night with knives borrowed from the kitchen.

Twiss also recalls working with Dr. James D. Hardy in the media frenzy that followed when his transplant team put a chimpanzee heart into a man dying of heart failure. She and Currier talk about Dr. Arthur C. Guyton and his importance to the early development of the Medical Center.

When Twiss and Currier developed a rhythm and pattern for the conversations, Twiss would begin with an opening statement to which Currier would respond. His questions and Twiss’s memories guided the discussions. “And he often added significant comments and information that he remembered,” she said.

As reluctant as she was to this new way of recording events, she admits, “It did seem important that someone who lived through the period put it down in writing as a first-person account. And it is a bit of history that should not be forgotten.”

Twiss did have the opportunity to edit the manuscript, and she’s not the first interviewee to shudder at a verbatim transcription. “There is nothing more alarming than the spoken word,” she said. “And Marilyn very patiently put in all my corrections in a series of revisions.”


August 2007

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