HJNO Jan/Feb 2022

A Letter About the Editor “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” --- Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton Long-time readers of the Healthcare Journals will remem- ber the introspective, mellow, goofy, challenging and sometimes poignant letters from our late chief editor and publisher, Smith Walter Hartley. Internally, we jokingly dubbed them the “leditors” and they were usually the last puzzle piece of each journal. Often, Smith would produce these epistles after thinking long and hard about a subject, a spinoff of an article we were exploring. But he wouldn’t start writing until the deadline was upon him. At other times, the leditors seemed off the cuff, a playful chase after a fleet- ing thought, leaving us to form our own conclusions. Sometimes we discussed them, quibbling over an idea or a word until we were in agreement. Other times, he didn’t care if we didn’t agree with him; he had something he wanted to say, in his own way. It was the same with our readers. Not all of you liked his let- ters, occasionally responding with anger or criticism. But Smith was never phased. He was just happy that he had provoked a response, challenged a convention, made you consider a differ- ent perspective. He didn’t need you to agree with everything he said; he just needed to put those thoughts out into the universe. When he was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2019, Smith noted it in his leditor as yet another fascinating experience — to explore brain cancer — and invited us along for the journey. He then stopped writing his letters with little fanfare. He didn’t want to make people sad or feel sorry for him or to speculate about his decline if he jumbled his words. We used his diagnosis and treat- ment as a springboard for editorial content, observing health- care from the intimate perspective of a terminal patient. When asked by his medical team if he would consider donating his brain to science, he surprised the docs by actually lighting up. His response was an immediate, “Yes.”The University of Wash- ington is now studying it from both a brain cancer and potential CTE perspective from playing high school and college football — a lasting legacy for his twin loves of healthcare and football. What he never realized back when he started his leditors and the journals themselves was that he was leaving another legacy — of tackling hard questions, coming at problems from new angles, embracing ideas and practices even if they fell outside of tradi- tional medicine, a search for well-being, a plea to take care of our planet and each other and to always be kind. To read Smith’s letters is to get to know the man he was. In the pages that follow, we share some of our favorites, all but one written before he knew he was running out of time. SmithW. Hartley October 16, 1966 - September 16, 2021 HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS  I  JAN / FEB 2022 25