Muggsy Panics: A Sequel to ‘Relaxin’ at the Touro’

“Muggsy Spanier and his Ragtime Band,” a short piece in the Red Hot Jazz Archive (now hosted on syncopatedtimes.com), recalls a dramatic event in the famed cornetist’s life. In 1938, while performing at the Blue Room in New Orleans’s Roosevelt Hotel, Muggsy collapsed on stage, stricken by a life threatening bleeding peptic ulcer. As the article reports, he was taken by the club’s wait staff to the Emergency Room of Touro Infirmary, which was affiliated with Tulane University Medical School. The care he received there from the renowned “Surgeon of the South,” Dr. Alton Ochsner, led to Muggsy’s medical recovery and to a musical comeback. He played his horn brilliantly for another 25 years. In the mid-1940s, immersed in medical studies at Tulane, I was consuming the rich culture and music of New Orleans. Well before graduation in 1948, a “little voice” was telling me that four years there would suffice. If longer, one might be caught forever in the city’s taunting illusions and Elysian excesses, its particular madness. So, I had accepted an internship as far from, and as different as possible from the Crescent City. The first stop was at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago’s Near North. There, despite my choice to leave, I found myself suffering New Orleans withdrawal and began to seek traditional jazz spots in Chicago. One evening, on a streetcar bound fo