Changing Perspectives: From Transplant Surgery to Diabetes Primary Care

Editor’s note: In the “Practice Profiles” department of Clinical Diabetes , we spotlight clinicians who have chosen to dedicate a significant portion of their time to the care of patients with diabetes. Suggestions for clinicians to interview in the future are welcome and can be e-mailed to levetan@juno.com. From as early an age as I can remember, I wanted to go into medicine. In fact, I can’t tell you just what started it, but by the time I moved literally into the shadow of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., at the age of 10, I was already certain that medicine had an appeal that I couldn’t find in any other profession.I was born in the rural town of Harmony, Minn., population less than 500, in the upstairs of an old house. My father, a Methodist minister, then moved us to an underserved area of North Minneapolis for about 6 years and then to Rochester, where I attended high school.I earned my bachelor of arts degree at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., and then attended the then-very-new Mayo Medical School.Several of Mayo’s great doctors had been role models for me at a younger age, and I had a great deal of respect for many of the physicians who worked there. It fulfilled a real ambition of mine to be able to return to Rochester to learn from them.When I was in medical school at Mayo, I met Alison, an English premedical student doing a research clerkship there. We fell in love and got engaged as I completed my Halsted (surgery) residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md. We got married a year later and moved to Sheffield, England, so Alison could finish medical school.I initially got a job doing transplant research in the …