Abstract
The long mission of Bob McCully is now complete. The senior surviving alumnus of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) Department of Veterinary Pathology and likely its most colorful personality, Col Robert Moses “Bob” McCully, USAF, lived a life and successfully pursued a rich and varied career that most pathologists simply dream about. Col McCully was also one of the Department’s most prolific authors, with over 50 first-author papers to his credit. He passed on 24 March 2017, having left his mark and singular impression on generations of pathologists on 2 continents, and on 16 March 2018 was interred with honors at Arlington National Cemetery, alongside many other American heroes. The last line of his gravestone in Arlington bears the achievement he was most proud of—“Veterinary Pathologist.”
A lanky Mississippian, Bob McCully enlisted in the US Merchant Marine in 1945 immediately upon graduation from high school. With the war over, he returned to civilian life and enrolled in pre-vet studies at Mississippi State College, entering veterinary school at Iowa State University in 1949. He graduated from veterinary school at Iowa State in 1953, did a 2-year internship at Angell Memorial, and was recruited to join the Air Force in 1955, with an initial assignment at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (which was to ultimately become his one and only duty station in a 20+-year Air Force career). While serving as the chief of both the Lab Animal Colony and Experimental Surgery Section in the brand-new AFIP building on the campus of Walter Reed, 1st Lt McCully simultaneously trained as a veterinary pathologist under Drs T.C. Jones and Charlie Barron, forming the first AFIP resident class in 1958 with Capt F.M. Garner. As a resident, he not only worked with NASA’s fledgling space program but was also an observer during 3 separate nuclear tests at the Nevada Proving Grounds (proudly displaying, years later, the certificate he received from the US government in the 1980s stating he had not received a dangerous dose of radiation during his observer days.)
He culminated his official 3-year residency with ACVP certification in 1961. (His ACVP “class” of 6 was a memorable one, including John King and David Dodd, among others.) Following 2 years as the training officer at the AFIP, Capt McCully was the first AFIP-Onderstepoort Exchange Officer, a program that was to change the course of his career and life.
In December 1963, Maj McCully, his wife Elaine, and 4 children traveled to South Africa, a country that captured their hearts and they would truly never leave. While studying foreign animal diseases for the US government and sending incredible amounts of material back to the AFIP for teaching and research, Bob also accompanied local guides, rangers, and African natives on their excursions in Kruger national park and elsewhere around the country, doing field autopsies on culled hippopotami, large cats, and many and varied hoofstock, cataloguing diseases that few non-Africans had ever seen. Dr McCully investigated and eventually published over 40 peer-reviewed articles dealing primarily with the pathology and parasitology of African wildlife and domestic livestock. In 1969, he returned to the AFIP to manage the exchange program until 1975, when he retired from the Air Force. His family remained behind in South Africa, beginning for him a 40-year quasi-nomadic life that would take him between South Africa, Washington, DC, and his childhood home in Lewisville, Mississippi, each year.
In South Africa, where he primarily lived and watched his family grow to 8 members (all graduating college and most entering various aspects of medicine), he continued to interact and work with the Department of Veterinary Pathology at Onderstepoort, attending rounds, assisting in autopsies, and collecting additional photographs and data on almost every disease of local livestock. His dedication to pathology was evidenced by his electronic publication of his ultimate work, the The AFIP-Onderstepoort Program Color Atlas of Foreign and Domestic Diseases of Pastoral Animals and Other Selected Species, a volume 30 years in the making and ultimately financed, completed, and distributed (a copy handposted to each member of the ACVP) by Dr McCully himself.
These are the facts of the man, most set in stone before I met “Dr Mac,” but certainly not his measure. I met him first in the early 1990s when the incessant delays of the AFIP’s publishing of his Atlas made him a much feared figure whenever he would turn up in its hallways, but I was later to find out that his anger was righteous and his treatment (and more importantly to him, those of his fellow authors) by my organization was most unconscionable. (The aforementioned delays totaled 16 years before Col McCully was able to wrest back his manuscript from the government and publish it himself.)
I was not to meet the real Bob McCully until almost 20 years later, when the AFIP was closed and its successor, the Joint Pathology Center (JPC), established miles away on the old Forest Glen Campus. On the day we opened the JPC doors, I noticed a lanky, albeit stooped older gentleman in a leather bomber jacket and USAF retiree ballcap walking laps around our parking lot behind a grocery cart (the JPC shares a building with the Army commissary, so grocery carts are a common sight). My memories of Dr McCully were vivid enough to allow me the temerity of reintroducing myself after many years, and my invitation to come see the “new AFIP” was met with enthusiasm and grace, but only “after I finish my two miles.” From that day on, Bob McCully, at least when he was in the US, was a fixture in our department—attending lectures, looking at cases, and telling stories as only he could about his days at the AFIP and in South Africa, to the delight of residents 50 years his junior.
At the JPC, he was considered family, which made it all the more difficult when he returned from South Africa in 2015 with a diagnosis of melanoma and a tumor on his ear and face that made all of us gasp. Fearful of a surgery that might leave him with facial paralysis, Bob handled the situation as only Bob would—he informed his doctors at Walter Reed that he would endure no surgery, no chemo, and no radiation. After 6 weeks of additional rapid tumor growth, his doctors started Bob on an experimental monoclonal antibody (nivolumab), which combined with several biopsies and tumor debulking (under local anesthetic and Bob’s very watchful eye) resulted in an almost miraculous recovery and ultimately, a cure. During this time, even though he often suffered great pain from the tumor, he insisted on biweekly biopsies to document the tumor’s response to treatment and doing the pathologic observations and descriptions himself. He continued to put in a full day each day at the microscope, poring over his own biopsies, interrupting his work only for lectures and slide rounds. His case, a rare success in melanoma treatment, has been written up in surgical journals, where the rapid regression of his tumor once he insisted on surgical debulking and repeated biopsy (contrary to all AMA oncologic directives) has been published as “the McCully effect.” His work during this most trying of times was an inspiration to our staff, our residents, and even the visitors lucky enough to share the study spaces with him.
For me, the Bob McCully I met in his last 5 years will always be larger than life. His stories of Africa and the AFIP in its heyday, his incredible work ethic—a full day at the JPC at the age of 88, and then home to work on his memoir or his beloved Atlas, his endless graciousness to everyone in the Department (the secretaries were as fond of him as he was of them) and his generosity—“Bruce, go buy sandwiches for everyone in the department, as long as they all want Reubens” (as half of the department had the first Reuben sandwich in their lives that day), will always be fond memories. He was also a true man of letters—writing constantly (his memoir stands at 530 pages, his Atlas even more), as well as writing several letters to friends and family each day. Everything was written in beautiful longhand—while Bob loved the Internet, especially YouTube, he eschewed email and refused to ever get an email account. Most of all, those who knew Bob in those last years will remember his love of life and that omnipresent smile.
Perhaps my most lasting memory will be the last day I saw Bob, as the hyperstimulated immune system that cured his melanoma turned on his body, attacked his lungs, and made the great man weak. “Time is short, and we still have work to do,” he told me, as we set up his laptop one last time and, side by side, made some final changes to his memoir. Changes made, he got back into the hospital bed, and we talked and laughed a bit more about pathology and pathologists and finally about the nature of family and the universe. His work finished, and his long mission complete, my friend Bob McCully passed peacefully early the next morning, surrounded by family.
