WVU in the news: Paying it forward
In 1990, AAMC Chief Academic Officer John Prescott, MD, healed a badly broken little boy. Twenty-eight years later, that boy is an emergency room physician and instructor to Prescott’s own daughter, Amy Prescott, MD.
It was a brisk fall day in October 1990, and 9-year-old Jacob Isserman was hiking with his family 30 minutes from their home in mountainous Morgantown, West Virginia. Trudging through a thick layer of leaves that covered the trail of Coopers Rock State Forest, he scouted ahead of his parents and 4-year-old brother, Noah.
In a matter of minutes, Isserman went from a curious, care-free little boy to a trauma patient in the emergency department of West Virginia University J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown.
Isserman had slipped on a pile of leaves, slid down a small hill, and went careening off a 35-foot cliff, landing face-first in a creek bed.