9 Down is Dead

Kenneth L. Toppell

Kenneth L. Toppell wanted to write when he went to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He was there during a tumultuous time, the start of the sit-in campaigns and the onset of the civil rights movement. He graduated with a degree in history and political science before he went on to Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, and postgraduate training in Houston, Texas, and in the army. Over the next forty-eight years, Ken did his writing on patient charts in medical wards and intensive care units. It was a time when organ transplants, which were rare and only performed by celebrity doctors, became techniques which are now part of surgical training. Passionate physicians implemented new forms of medical research and brought HIV/AIDS from an epidemic with a 100 percent mortality rate to an outpatient disease. There were new tools and new drugs reinforcing why medicine is called practice. As the years passed by, Ken began to give lectures in American History, and he had some time to practice a new kind of writing. He now lives in Plano, Texas, where he reads, writes, and enjoys life with his wife of fifty-four years.