The Strange Case of Tom Little
Page Four
Still, it took doctors two years to convince Tom to allow doctors to study him. It happened only after a young physician named Stewart Wolf was able to win Tom’s trust. That trust would make the two fast friends—and ultimately bring Tom to OMRF.
Dr. Stewart Wolf earned his medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1938, then headed north to train at Cornell-New York Hospital. While a resident at Cornell, Wolf met Tom Little. Immediately, the young doctor understood that Tom could provide a unique window into how the human digestive system functions. And he could do so while helping Tom.
That left but one obstacle: Tom.
“It took four months to create adequate rapport with the patient,” Wolf later wrote in his book, “Human Gastric Function,” which was largely devoted to Tom’s case. Tom, it seemed, was too proud to accept payment “merely” for serving as a research subject. So Wolf proposed a compromise. In the mornings, Tom would come to the lab without eating breakfast and submit to a series of experiments and observations, all with the goal of improving his quality of life. In the afternoons, he would work as an assistant and handyman in the lab.
The arrangement would help Tom preserve his self-respect. It would also give him the job security that had eluded him in his working life. “Finally,” wrote Wolf, who died in 2006 at the age of 91, “Tom was convinced of our interest in and solicitude for his welfare, both physical and economic.” He accepted the deal.
For a decade, Tom reported to Cornell every weekday. Wolf was particularly interested in how the mind and body interacted, and he focused on the ways in which Tom’s stomach changed with his emotions. During World War II, Wolf put Tom’s case on hold to run a 1,000-bed hospital in the southwest Pacific. Wolf’s colleagues continued to work with Tom in his absence, and when the young physician returned, he and Tom picked up where they’d left off.
In 1953, Wolf joined OMRF as its first supervisor of clinical medicine. The foundation’s newly opened research hospital represented a perfect site for Wolf to continue to care for Tom while also exploring his unique physiology. So for the remainder of Tom’s life, he made pilgrimages to OMRF twice a year.
The relationship between the two men was complex, both intellectually and emotionally. Though younger by nearly 30 years, Wolf took on the role of elder in the relationship, acting in some ways as a father figure and confessor to his patient. “Stewart felt responsible for Tom,” recalls Dr. Kent Braden, a retired Oklahoma City neurosurgeon who served as a resident under Wolf. “They were close friends in addition to their working relationship.”
Wolf cared for his patient with a compassion and thoroughness that Tom had never experienced. Yet Wolf’s work as a researcher required him to delve into the effects of trauma on Tom’s digestive system. To this end, Wolf stepped out of his role of caregiver.
“Dr. Wolf was quite an actor,” says Dr. Bill Hood, a physician who worked with Wolf at OMRF. “They kind of had a love-hate relationship. Tom was devoted to Dr. Wolf, but then he’d get furious with him because he’d purposely antagonize him or make him depressed, just to see what would happen to the lining of the stomach.”
Wolf would play-act, with Tom’s stomach as the audience. When enraged, Tom’s stomach lining would become a deep red and tighten. When relaxed, it was pink and wrinkled. If frightened, Tom’s stomach would turn white. And if depressed, digestion slowed to a near stop.
The studies, says OMRF President Stephen Prescott, might seem unorthodox by today’s standards. “But that was a different era. Researchers did not have the sophisticated research tools they do now. For instance, scientists didn’t have the luxury of longitudinal, blinded tests involving hundreds or thousands of subjects. And their methodologies were often more direct, more oriented toward answering questions about basic human physiology than improving outcomes for an individual patient.”
