“Don’t ever say you can’t do something until you’ve tried.” Dr. Angela L. Brown said those words of wisdom from her grandfather, Alex G. Brown, stays with her. Brown is Vice Chair for Health Equity and Professor of Medicine, Cardiovascular Division at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. As an internal medicine physician who restricts her practice to hypertension, she directs the Hypertension Clinic at the medical school.
Adhering to her grandfather’s guidance, Brown is continuously persuading her patients to engage in healthier lifestyles that can decrease the risk of developing hypertension or diabetes, risk factors for COVID-19 infection. This means boosting the immune system, exercising, eating healthy, reducing stress, getting plenty of sleep and other efforts to ward off or boost heart health if someone has contracted the coronavirus. Research has shown that COVID-19 can damage the heart of individuals who’ve had even mild cases and have recovered from the virus.
When asked about the guidance she received as a child that fueled her trajectory in the medical field, Brown immediately credited her late grandfather:
“He believed that you don’t know you can’t do something unless you try it. That was his attitude.”
The simple but meaningful lesson came when Brown was about 12 years old. One day, while her mother and grandmother were away, Brown was tasked with making her grandfather lunch. There was no sandwich bread in the house that she could toast so her grandfather told her to put a hamburger bun in the toaster. “It won’t fit,” the adolescent Brown insisted. “Try it,” her grandfather insisted.
“I put the bun in the toaster and low-and-behold, it fit,” Brown said laughingly. “He didn’t fuss, he just said: “Now see, you hadn’t tried.”
That simple lesson complemented her uncomplicated life. Brown, an only child, grew up on a farm in Sherrill, a small town in Jefferson County, Arkansas. The city with a population of around 87 people, is about the equivalent of 12 city blocks, Brown said. The farm had been in her family for generations. Before his death, Brown’s great grandfather left his wife and three children about 20 acres of farmland.
At the age of 24, her grandfather, Alex,decided he and his wife were going to make their living as farmers. By the late 1940s, the couple had about 1,500 acres of land where they grew mostly cotton. Today, the family manages the farm and grows rice, corn, and soybeans.
Brown fondly recalls a childhood where her playground was hundreds of acres of land, where all the neighbors knew one another. She was raised in a household with no cable TV, a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother who made sure she learned her alphabets and could count and read before entering kindergarten. She loved to read, play crossword puzzles, read Nancy Drew novels and other heady material:
“I was probably one of only a few kids who had a subscription to Science Digest.”
Brown’s mom was a schoolteacher. Her father worked remotely in construction. She reserves the title “Daddy” for her grandfather, Alex, whom she emulates:
“I’m a risk-taker because my grandfather was a risk-taker,” Brown said.
Her grandfather nurtured her independence. He was the one who taught her to drive before she could see over the steering wheel. By the 9th grade, Brown was driving tractors and she often took the family truck to school in Pine Bluff about 16 miles from her farm.
Brown credits her upbringing for her outlook on life:
“My grandparents had a lot of mother-wit, a commonsense way of doing things. My grandfather was very good at math, he ran his own business,” Brown recollected. “As a child, I was probably treated more like an adult. I was always motivated to do things so I never thought I couldn’t do, or couldn’t be, whatever I wanted.”
Brown knew she wanted to be a doctor by the seventh grade:
“Maybe it was the technology that I was reading about in Science Digest. I couldn’t see myself as a biologist, but I could see myself as an engineer working in bio-mechanics on things like artificial limbs.”
Brown enrolled at Southern Methodist University to study electrical engineering with bio/medical engineering focus. Her decision was purposely strategic:
“Even though my goal was medical school, I deliberately looked for engineering programs that also had a pre-med base. So, in four years, I’d not only have an engineering degree, I’d meet all the medical school requirements.”
Initially, Brown had no desire to pursue internal medicine or primary care. Her dream job was to get a medical degree then get a job with NASA in biomedical research. After doing rotations in internal medicine, she changed her mind:
“I was seeing a lot of people with hypertension whose blood pressure was not controlled. So, I decided that I was going to learn everything about hypertension in order to take care of my patients.”
Brown is now recognized as a leader in her field. She chuckled at the fact that St. Louis Magazine has listed her as one of the region’s “Best Cardiologists” for the past 14 years, even though, technically, she’s not a Cardiologist.
“I’m a non-cardiologist in the cardiology division,” Brown explained.
COVID-19 didn’t just expose health disparities among people of color, it made existent disparities more obvious. The medical community, Brown said, must do a better job of “addressing the social determinants of health.” That means addressing housing, food security, education, transportation, safe neighborhoods, access to quality health care, structural racism, and other concerns. It may also mean venturing into “uncharted or uncomfortable” territory Brown added.
In those times of doubt, Alex G. Brown’s guidance may be apropos:
“Try it before deciding it can’t be done.”
