Location: Maryland, United States

What is your current project and at what stage is it?

A biography of Helen Brooke Taussig (1898–1986), pioneering children’s heart doctor and 20th-century global patient advocate. It will be published in 2023 by MIT Press. A gracious but willful Bostonian, Helen took the best job available for a woman doctor in 1930, caring for dying children. The observations she made in her Baltimore, Md., children’s heart clinic culminated in modern heart surgery. She didn’t stop there. Her story unfolds amid world wars, the rheumatic fever era, and the rise of data and technology to replace the doctor’s touch. Compassionate and contentious—saint and holy terror, intimates labeled her—Helen’s goal was to prevent unnecessary suffering.

Who is your favorite biographer or what is your favorite biography?

Robert Caro. His habit of returning again and again to primary sources and situating himself in the subject’s environment to glean meaning or truth reveals his respect for his subject and makes him a great storyteller. Biographies I most admire are Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff and American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson.

What have been your most satisfying moments as a biographer?

• Meeting the brother of the first surviving “blue baby,” and finding letters from Helen in boxes of memorabilia that he had saved for decades.
• Learning that Helen’s strict methods for rheumatic fever patients, including repeated blood tests and months and even years of bed rest, actually worked. Treatment in the pre-antibiotic era was largely futile, but by matching names on thank-you notes Helen received in the 1970s to decades-old patient records, I was able to show that some patients who followed her dictums lived nearly normal lifespans.
• Interviewing women doctors who knew Helen and who led their own remarkable lives.

What have been your most frustrating moments?

Framing the book for a general audience. I tried using the story of a controversial portrait of Helen by the artist Jamie Wyeth that her friends hid for nearly 50 years. I envisioned parallel stories of the search for truth by scientist and artist. The structure collapsed under the weight of the portrait. Happily, Helen’s last surviving close fellow, a woman doctor a generation removed who unveiled the portrait, emerged as the ideal person to help tell her story. After much cajoling, she agreed. The biography begins in her living room.

If you weren’t a biographer, what dream profession would you be in, and why?

I had a dream profession! It fed my interest in biography. As a journalist at newspapers that supported long-form narratives, I spent months and sometimes years developing stories that illustrated a public good or problem. At The Baltimore Sun, I also wrote short biographies—profiles of the famous as well as the unknown. I could ask questions and share what I learned about how the world works. Why would a farmer clone his cow? Why did a 21-year-old woman shoot her father? How did a tired mother discover she needed brain surgery? For someone who could not afford grad school, the life of a journalist was a cheap substitute for what I really wanted: the life of a history professor.  

What genre, besides biography, do you read for pleasure and who are some of your favorite writers?

During the pandemic I re-read favorite poets like Walt Whitman (Song of Myself) and discovered new ones, Wisława Szymborska (View with a grain of sand) and Marie Howe (What the Living Do). I generally read novels and books on the creative process. I’m interested in the structure of everything. I admire Magda Szabó (The Door; Abigail; Iza’s Ballad); Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go); John Williams (Stoner; Butcher’s Crossing); and Isabella Hammed (The Parisian). For Helen’s biography, I read Portrait & Persons (Cynthia Freehand); On Photography (Susan Sontag); and James Lord’s amusing account of his 18 days posing as the artist’s subject, A Giacometti Portrait.

Patricia Meisol is a writer and health policy expert. A former feature writer and business reporter for The Baltimore Sun and former staff writer for the St. Petersburg Times, her narratives have also been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media.