There is an edge in Maurice Reeder’s tone when he recalls his first three years of medical school. “Half of us in the class were married,” he recalls. “I was one of them and also had two young boys. I was tired of being broke.”

At the time, “Mo” and his family lived with his in-laws in northeast Baltimore, and the tall young man commuted to campus on a streetcar. He had spent the past seven summers in the cabin of a Coca-Cola truck, making deliveries to help pay the bills. It was time for a change, or perhaps Dr. Reeder would say, “It was time to break the pattern.”

So in the summer of 1957, the Baltimore native enlisted in the U.S. Army Medical Corps Senior Student Program. In addition to receiving financial support, he could enroll in an externship program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. These weekly commutes to Washington, D.C., would allow him to focus on internal medicine, as he prepared to follow in the footsteps of Theodore Woodward, ’38, chairman of Maryland’s department of medicine. But things didn’t work out that way.

Upon his arrival in Washington, Dr. Reeder was “exiled” to the radiology department after learning that the openings in medicine had already been filled. On the second day of shadowing residents, he was invited to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) and its registry of radiologic pathology. The brief encounter captivated the 24-year-old novice, and he decided to spend the entire summer with Col. William L. Thompson, originator of the gamuts concept. “I knew right away this is what I would be doing,” says Dr. Reeder.

Together they analyzed each day’s new cases and reviewed many of the registry’s 10,000 chest, bone, GI and GU cases. Dr. Reeder learned how to grasp important clues and nuances from a radiograph, place them in an established pattern or gamut, and work toward a diagnosis based on what was known about the patient’s history, lab results and clinical findings—an approach known as the triangulation approach to radiographic diagnosis. “When I returned for my senior year I knew more about pattern recognition and differential diagnosis than most of the residents,” he says.

Graduating from Maryland in 1958, Dr. Reeder interned at William Beaumont Army Hospital in El Paso, Texas, and then returned to Walter Reed for a residency in radiology. Once back in Washington, he found additional opportunities to continue his tutelage under Col. Thompson and even provide support to the registry. Recognizing a scant assortment on congenital heart disease, Dr. Reeder added some 500 cases from a collection of angiocardiograms at Walter Reed. He was becoming a recognized leader in the field.

Military assignments would keep Dr. Reeder bouncing around after training, although the nation’s capitol would continue to serve as his center of gravity. Two years at Fort Meade were followed by two years at the U.S. Army Hospital in Okinawa during the Vietnam War. In 1966, he returned to Walter Reed as assistant chief of the diagnostic section and associate radiologist at the AFIP. Dr. Reeder then traveled to Honolulu, serving as chief of the radiology department at Tripler General Hospital, but was called back to Walter Reed in 1972 for a similar position.

It was during his stint in Hawaii that Dr. Reeder and a colleague, Dr. Benjamin Felson, decided to write a book on differential diagnosis to support the second leg of the triangulation approach. “I couldn’t understand how after 75 years of radiology nothing had ever been done on the subject,” says a disbelieving Dr. Reeder. Their effort took four years, and the final product was a manuscript that bucked tradition. “We had a radiology textbook with no illustrations,” he adds. “Ours consisted of gamuts.”

After making an accurate analysis of clues on the film, the radiologist would now have
a text of some 500 gamuts to reference for the pattern. Correlating these two legs with the final leg—the patient’s clinical lab findings—would allow the interpreter to arrive at the most likely diagnosis.

Sensing that they had something special, the doctors were asking publishers for 15% of the royalties rather than the customary 10%. Finding no takers, they produced the book on their own through Audiovisual Radiology of Cincinnati, a fledgling company Dr. Felson had started out of his garage a few years earlier. In the first year, despite very little advertising (other than word of mouth), Gamuts in Radiology sold more than 20,000 copies, and the publication began appearing in hospitals and radiology offices throughout the world. For residents, it became a necessary resource to help them through board exams.

By 2003, Dr. Reeder had published a fourth edition of the book. It was triple in size and available in CD-ROM, complete with thousands of corresponding images. There were also three spinoffs: Gamuts in Bone, Joint and Spine Radiology; Gamuts in Neuroradiology; and Gamuts in Cardiovascular Radiology. Along the way Dr. Reeder also co-authored The Radiology of Tropical Diseases in 1981, another passion that developed during his days in the military. The title was changed to The Imaging of Tropical Diseases in its second edition in 2001.

Dr. Reeder retired from the Army in 1978 with the rank of colonel. He returned to Honolulu
where he opened a private practice and, until 1997, served as chairman of the department of radiology at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine.

Now back in Washington, he is a visiting scientist in the department of radiology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences where he also serves as registrar for the institution’s international registry of tropical imaging. “As I looked back, I found the military’s philosophical approach to treating patients and its comradeship more appealing than that of civilian practice,” Dr. Reeder admits. “I miss it.”

Despite the wonderful technological advancements in his field, he is critical of trends in private practice to employ night hawks and outsourcing in the reading of film. As an educator who never had a resident fail the boards, Dr. Reeder also views as counter-productive the manner in which some of today’s residents are trained. “It would be nice to see them spending less time viewing slides in group presentations and more time individually at the viewbox studying the pattern approach,” Dr. Reeder concludes.

Just three years away from celebrating his 50th medical school reunion, the Potomac, Md., resident has sound advice for students and residents: “Work hard and play hard. Enjoy your work and your free time. Life is short.”