ALT TOUR STOP 1: The D-0300 corridor in Medical Center North. Here’s the thing—nobody has ever called this the D-0300 corridor. For most of the time this basement passageway has been here, it has been known as Sugar Hill.
When Medical Center North was both the hospital and the site of the School of Medicine, there were a lot of young medical students, young nurses, and young residents who spent many long nights in this building. This hallway was built on the slant, out of the way, dimly lighted, and was used as a storage area for wheelchairs and gurneys. Well, that was its official use.
It may not look like much now—heck, it didn’t look like much then—but if these walls could talk, it would be in French.

ALT TOUR STOP 2: Hallway in front of T-1206 Medical Center North. Here is a place that illustrates the passion of a scientist. Right now these offices are the Center for Lung Research, but many years ago in this space were a laboratory and a men’s bathroom. The researcher who occupied this lab space—who is still on the faculty, by the way—wanted to apply for a grant, but a requirement for the grant was that he had to have a certain square footage of lab space—and his lab was too small. He set up a meeting with the Dean of the School of Medicine to plead his case.
The Dean was sympathetic, but said, “Sorry, there’s just no room.” It was true. Space was very tight and many faculty members had bigger ideas than they had the lab space to do the work.
The Dean’s decision, if it stood, meant the scientist had to give up a shot at this grant he knew he had a good chance to get. It ate at him. He fumed about the unfairness of it all.
And then he thought about the fact that on the other side of one of the walls of his lab was a men’s bathroom.
Some days later, when the people who worked in the lab arrrived at work, they discovered that the wall had been demolished with a sledgehammer.
The lab now had enough square footage to apply for the grant.
Men on the floor had to walk a little further to find a bathroom.
The researcher received his grant.

ALT TOUR STOP 3: Near B-4200 Medical Center North Stairway. This is surely the most bizarre architectural feature in a building brimming with them. Step into the stairway in the B-4200 area, up the three steps to the left, and through the door. You will find yourself in a Twilight Zone corridor that takes you first down five metal warehouse-like steps, then around a corner to the right before passing through another door and hooking up with the T-4100 corridor. It’s as though an addition was grafted onto the building and, after the fact, somebody realized things just didn’t quite match up, so this jury-rigged arrangement was put in place.
It gets weirder. Look to your left as you walk through the first part of that hallway. This brick wall used to be the exterior wall of the building. There is a door and several dark windows complete with Venetian blinds. Look closer—the windows are dark because they were closed off from the other side by drywall, with the blinds left in place. Nobody has looked out these windows, which once overlooked 21st Avenue South at the front of the building, since the addition called the Werthan Wing was added onto Medical Center North 30 years ago.

ALT TOUR STOP 4: Pediatric Intensive Care Unit waiting room, 5th floor, VUH. This is the site of one of the saddest and most shocking events ever to occur at VUMC.
About 11 p.m. on the night of Jan. 9, 1986, gunshots shattered the quiet of this waiting room as a local pharmacist named Charles Jones shot and killed Bobby Gann, a 23-year-old wrecker operator from Hendersonville, as Gann slept in a chair.
Jones calmly handed over his .38 to a bystander, other patient family members screamed, nurses came running and did CPR on the victim, but Gann died from his gunshots.
The events that led up to the shooting garnered Jones a lot of sympathy in some quarters. Jones’ grandson, a little boy named Ryan Reed, was in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit near death, a victim of beating and cigarette burns, and Jones was convinced that Gann, who was his daughter Angela Reed’s boyfriend, had abused the child. The little boy died the next day.
Charles Jones was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served a short prison sentence.

ALT TOUR STOP 5: Elevator MCN 1 on B corridor, Medical Center North. This elevator, now primarily used as the quickest way to get to and from the Post Office in the basement of Medical Center North, was the site of one of the most unusual births ever recorded at Vanderbilt Hospital.
When Medical Center North was the home of Vanderbilt Hospital, where the Post Office is now was the Emergency Room, and elevator MCN 1 was the connector to the upper patient wards and rooms, including Labor and Delivery, on the fourth floor.
The date was Sept. 17, 1971, and Barbara Viner and her husband, Vanderbilt medical graduate and resident Dr. Nick Viner, had rushed to the hospital because Barbara was in labor. The young couple hurried into the ER and Barbara was immediately helped onto a gurney and wheeled to the elevator for the ride to the fourth floor.
Then things started happening fast. Too fast.
“All I remember is, they said ‘He’s coming’ and ‘There he is’—and I was still on the elevator,” Barbara remembered later. Their baby boy was born in the elevator. Barbara and Nick named their newborn son Dan (it’s not recorded whether they considered Otis).
Twenty-three years later, in 1994, Dan Viner followed in the footsteps of his father and came to medical school at Vanderbilt. Before he came for his interview, his mom had some advice for him: “When you get on the elevator, look up—you may recognize it.”

ALT TOUR STOP 6: T-4300 corridor, Medical Center North. In the winter of 1983, this hallway was stalked by a killer. Luckily, this particular killer was fictitious, as Medical Center North was used as a shooting location for the TV movie The Cradle Will Fall, which starred Lauren Hutton, Ben Murphy, James Farentino, and William H. Macy. The plot revolved around Hutton’s character, who is an assistant district attorney, who is investigating the apparent suicide of a woman. It turns out that the death was not a suicide, but…MURDER. And, wouldn’t you know it, the chief suspect is the physician (Farentino) who is treating Hutton when she is hospitalized after a car accident.
Medical Center North, which until 1980 was the home of Vanderbilt University Hospital, was under process of interior renovation for other uses, but this corridor still pretty much looked like an old hospital, which is what it had been until three years before. So it was a perfect set for this spooky movie, based on the novel by Mary Higgins Clark.
There are numerous shots in the movie of VUMC, including one big scene when Hutton looks out a window—which, we insiders know, is in the hallway leading to the Round Wing—and the exterior shows the shuttle turnaround before the construction of Eskind Biomedical Library.
The movie first aired on CBS the night of May 24, 1983, and is still available on video and occasionally airs on extremely late night TV.
Voters at the Internet Movie Database give The Cradle Will Fall six stars out of a possible 10.

ALT TOUR STOP 7: Outside the Emergency Department. The Vanderbilt ER, like any urban Level 1 trauma center, sees its share of noteworthy events, tragedies, and sometimes even comedies. But there was a case that came through the ER in the early summer of 1986 that people still talk about. The patient’s name was Mike Harper, a 15-year-old from Mt. Juliet, but, in telling the story, he’s usually just known as the Fence Post Kid.
On that just-out-of-school summer night, Mike was riding around with his friend Chad, who was 16 and had been given the keys to his family’s Audi 5000. On a deserted two-lane country road, the boys got an idea: let’s see if we can get this car to 100 miles per hour.
Bad idea. Even worse execution. Chad lost control of the car and it spun into a row of fenceposts, backward. One of the fence posts came through the floor of the car, through the back of the passenger side car seat, and…through Mike. All the way through. He was impaled on a six-inch thick fencepost.
Amazingly, he was conscious and in no pain. But he was scared. He had lifted up his T-shirt and had seen his skin folded under where the post came through, and he had also heard the concerned tones of the paramedics who came to the wreck site. The paramedics called LifeFlight and Mike was loaded into the helicopter with the post still protruding from his body. His parents were told that Mike likely has massive internal injuries and that he might not survive the necessary surgery to remove the post.
But there were virtually no internal injuries. As the post penetrated his body at an estimated 60 miles per hour, the organs simply rolled aside and made room. Had the post been slightly to the left, Mike would have had a gaping wound to his side and bled to death. Slightly to the right would have meant likely fatal internal injuries.
Mike went home one week later, and before the summer was over was playing baseball, leaving the tale of the Fence Post Kid behind as the trump card on quiet nights when ER people play “can you top this?”

ALT TOUR STOP 8: Department of Anesthesiology offices, 504 Oxford House. This is as good a place as any to note that arguably the first shining light on the national stage who graduated from the Vanderbilt School of Medicine was a pioneering anesthesiologist who happened to also perform as a circus acrobat.
Dr. James Tayloe Gwathmey earned his medical degree in 1899, and in 1914, after practicing medicine for years in New York City, wrote Anesthesia, the first complete text on the subject to be published in the U.S., and for years the standard work in the specialty.
But it’s worth noting that Gwathmey was also the author of a standard work on acrobatics called Tumbling for Amateurs, and, before attending medical school, had actually dropped out of Virginia Military Institute to join a circus as part of a traveling acrobatic troupe.
To the best of our knowledge, no current medical faculty or member performs with a circus.

ALT TOUR STOP 9: First floor, VUH garage. On the hot afternoon of August 22, 1995, what happened in this garage ignited a bizarre series of events that wound through federal courts for more than seven years.
On that day, a nurse phoned Vanderbilt Police and reported a man in an strange disguise was lurking around the garage. When an officer responded, he immediately spotted the man, who was decked out in an obvious wig, an Abe Lincoln-style fake beard, and, most ridiculously out of place on a Nashville August afternoon, a large trenchcoat. He also wore padding around his waist, to make himself appear heftier.
The officer detained the man on trespassing charges, and asked for some ID. He was given a British West Indies drivers license issued in the name of Steven Maupin.
But the man was not named Steven Maupin. His real named turned out to be Dr. Ray Mettetal Jr., and he was a former resident at VUMC. In his possession was an enormous, veterinary-style syringe with a four-inch needle filled with a boric acid solution, as well as a map of the Vanderbilt campus, diagrams of the garage, notes on garbage pickup schedules in Belle Meade, and a photograph of a Belle Meade house that had, until just a few months before Mettetal’s arrest, belonged to the chair of Neurosurgery at VUMC and Mettetal’s former boss, who is still at Vanderbilt.
As police developed their case, they discovered from interviews with both Vanderbilt sources and Mettetal’s family and friends that the former resident had an apparent grudge against the chairman. The theory that Mettetal was stalking his former boss with intent to do him harm was strengthened by searches of his house and a storage locker in his new home of Harrisonburg, Va., where he had vials of poisons and reading material such as The Complete How-to-Kill Book and Silent Death.
The irony is that Mettetal would likely have been completely inconspicuous in scrubs or street clothes had he not ineptly tried to fool everybdy with his clownish getup.
The case was transferred to Virginia for trial, since federal charges of possessing poison for use as a weapon were considered a stronger case by prosecutors and Mettetal’s attorney desired that his client be tried in a federal court rather than a state court, as he would have been if charged in Nashville.
He was convicted in 1998, but the case was overturned on appeal. Mettetal was retried in 2001, and again convicted. But for a second time, the conviction was overturned. In October 2002, the federal appeal judges ruled that the arrest of Mettetal for trespassing—which led to the discovery of the syringe and fake ID, which led to the search warrants for his Virginia property where the poison was stored—was improper, and therefore the evidence couldn’t be used.
Mettetal, who served more than five years in prison on these charges that were later overturned, is a free man.