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Dr. Sundwall arranged for me to see Anthony W. Middleton, Jr. the next day, despite it being Dr. Middleton’s day off. The office visit was likely a favor granted out of friendship between the two doctors. Both men had completed residencies at Harvard at the same time, and the small Boston LDS community all but guaranteed that the men knew each other, regardless of which hospitals or programs they had trained in. But it is also possible that they knew each other earlier, since both men came from well-established Utah families filled with physicians dating back to the pioneer era. The Sundwalls had arrived in the 1870s while the Middleton family had emigrated to Utah two decades earlier with the ill-fated Martin handcart company. Dr. Middleton’s grandfather, George Middleton, became not only a prominent physician but also a popular author.

Dr. Middleton, along with his father, Anthony Sr., and brother George, was a partner in Middleton Urological Associates, with offices just across the street from Holy Cross Hospital, located on South Temple and 1050 East, a long drive from our home. Given how traumatic I had found the radiology examination the previous day (urinating was still painful), I dreaded what would result from this next visit. I stared out the car window, silently looking at the bright green leaves coming out on the trees lining the road. Thankfully the office was much nicer than the dreary hospital settings of the previous Tuesday and Friday. Dr. Middleton himself was kindly but quiet. With the copies of the radiology films we had brought with us illuminated on a lightbox mounted on the wall, Dr. Middleton started vigorously probing my stomach, pushing his fingers all the way to my back it seemed to my mother, trying to feel for himself the mass depicted on the X-ray films.

After he was finished examining me, Dr. Middleton turned to me and said, “Brian, do you know what your kidneys are?”

I shrugged my shoulders and wrinkled my forehead as I shook my head “no.”

“You have two kidneys. They sit in the back of your tummy, and they help make sure your blood is clean and working properly. The doctors at Cottonwood Hospital saw something in your right kidney and I can feel something in that kidney also. I’m going to send you to the hospital for some more imaging tests so we can better understand what is there. You’re going to have to stay overnight in the hospital. You can either go to Holy Cross Hospital or Primary Children’s Hospital. Let me know what you decide, and I’ll get the orders called in.”


I wanted to go to Primary Children’s Hospital, a hospital that was created by the LDS church in 1922 as an enlargement of a pediatric ward that had been established at LDS Hospital in 1913. For as long as I could remember, I had donated spare pennies, nickels, and dimes to the “Pennies by the Inch” campaigns the LDS Church Primary program had, where the children of the Church helped fund the hospital by donating “a penny” for every inch they were tall. I felt a part ownership of Primary Children’s Hospital. But after consulting with Dr. Sundwall, my mother had me admitted to Holy Cross that afternoon. The decision was to accommodate Dr. Sundwall who had hospital privileges at Holy Cross but not at Primary’s.

Questions

  1. Following the principle that all data is physical, what are the different physical forms of data in this episode?

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