In many ways, Memphis was the antipode of Boston. Convulsing with bitter racial tensions and rock-and-roll music—gyrating between the gold and pink of the Graceland mansion in its south and the starkly segregated black neighborhoods in its north—Memphis was turbulent, unpredictable, colorful, perennially warm, and, medically speaking, virtually a no-man’s-land. Pinkel’s new hospital, called St. Jude’s (named, aptly enough, after the patron saint of lost causes), rose like a marooned concrete starfish out of a concrete parking lot on a barren field. In
