Wagner_Marriot's Practical Electrocardiography, 12e

Foreword

Barney Marriott was one of those bigger-than-life icons who populated the 20th century. To those who knew him at all, he was simply Barney. Born on the eve of St. Barnabas’ day in 1917 in Hamilton, Bermuda, he was never referred to as Henry J.L. Marriott. Those who did were likely destined to remain strangers . . . but not for long. He was never a stranger to me. I have had the wonderful and rare privilege of spanning the charmed lives and careers of both authors of this book. Galen Wagner, my mentor, friend, and colleague for the past nearly 40 years, has asked me to pen a reminiscence of Barney because, for the last 25 years of Barney’s life, he and I were buddies. Therein lies a tale. Following his early formative years in Bermuda, this “onion,” as Bermudans call them- selves, went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He enrolled at Brasenose College. The princi- pal of Brasenose was a German named Sonnenschein (later changed to Stallybrass), about whom Barney painted me a picture of respect, awe, and perhaps a little disdain. Traveling to London during the war (not The War), he matriculated at St. Mary’s as a medical stu- dent, then as a registrar. During our many luncheon outings together, Barney would regale me to stories of St. Mary’s. Not uncommonly, the Germans would launch their V-1 mis- siles called “buzz bombs” (because of their ramjet engines) to rain terror on the English populous, especially London. Barney would laugh in his usually reserved guffaw as he told me that the medical students had been fascinated by these weapons. The V-1 missiles emitted a characteristic high-pitched “clack-clack-clack” as they approached the city, then silence as the missiles entered their final path to their target. Barney said that the clack- ing drew the students to the wide open windows of the anatomy lab on the top floor of St. Mary’s, except for Barney, who, not quite ready to meet his maker, had dived under the cadaver dissection table seeking some sort of premortem protection provided by his postmortem colleague. Happily for all concerned, there were no acute casualties in the St. Mary’s Medical School anatomy lab during those wartime adventures. In another tale of St. Mary’s, Sir Alexander Fleming had performed his initial stud- ies into the isolation and first clinical use of penicillin in that institution. By the time of Barney’s registrar years, the original “penicillin lab” had become a registrar’s on-call room. Barney was the registrar on the Penicillin Service, where he and his attending made fate- ful decisions about who was to receive the new life-saving antibiotic and who was not. Dr. Marriott’s attending of that era was George Pickering, later knighted and a much later successor to Osler as Regius Professor of Medicine at the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford. Following the war, Barney came to the United States. After a fellowship year in allergy at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, Barney moved across town to the University of Maryland. As a young faculty member there and director of the Arthritis Clinic, Dr. Marriott was drafted into the role of teaching and supervising ECGs, a job he embraced with a fervor that was infectious and illuminating. By the late 1950s, Barney had grown tired of Baltimore and its cold, wet winters. He accepted a position at Tampa General Hospital in 1961 as director of Medical Education, where he remained for several years. In 1965, Dr. Marriott was approached by Frank LaCamera of the Rogers Heart Foundation to relocate across the bay to St. Petersburg, where he began his series of seminars on ECG

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