Oh. So that’s what we’ve come to talk to him about. Chicken soup.
Dr. Rennard exhaled, and leaned back in his chair so his voice would carry into the open office door across the hall: “How do I feel about the chicken soup story, Lillian?”
After a knowing laugh, the answer: “It’s just been unbelievable,” Lillian said. Dr. Rennard is Stephen Rennard, M.D., Larson Professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at UNMC.
Lillian is Lillian Richards, office associate I, internal medicine pulmonary, charged with wrangling Dr. Rennard, and sometimes (OK, often) also all this stuff about chicken soup.
And this chicken soup stuff never stops. It happened again, just the other day. This time it was Martha Stewart mentioning it in a syndicated “Ask Martha” column. Yes, Martha said.
According to a “recent” University of Nebraska Medical Center study, chicken soup, while not a cure, could help alleviate symptoms of the common cold.
It never stops.
Go ahead, Google the words Rennard chicken soup and the search engine comes up with about 5,330 results in 21 seconds. None of them, as far as we can tell, are about any other Rennard or any other chicken or any other soup.
People love it that a scientist actually has studied whether chicken soup might be good for you when you have a cold, just like your mom says.
Dr. Rennard, UNMC’s inaugural scientist laureate, is a world-renowned chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) researcher. Well, he’s world renowned for his COPD research within scientific circles. To the rest of us, thanks to a 1993 study that’s proven to have gone not viral, but retroviral, he’s world renowned as Mr. Chicken Soup.
“It’s been 20 years,” Dr. Rennard said.
“That’s the funny part,” came Lillian’s voice, from across the hall. It’s like a musician who has done great work for decades. But we, the public, can’t get that one, long-ago hit song out of our heads.
Right?
Well, no, Dr. Rennard said. It’s not like that at all. “It would be kind of like,” he said, and then paused for a good 10 seconds, trying to think of what it would be like.
“OK, so Charles Dodgson,” Dr. Rennard finally said. (Charles Dodgson? Pen name: Lewis Carroll.) “It’s kind of arrogant to compare yourself to somebody like that. But, he got to be really famous for ‘Alice in Wonderland.’
“He was actually a serious mathematician,” Dr. Rennard said. “But nobody cares about that other stuff.” This all happened because Dr. Rennard had also always heard the folk wisdom, from cultures all over the world, that chicken soup helps colds, and he loves that kind of stuff – he studied folklore and mythology at Harvard. But he also is a scientist. He lives to find the truth of things, to figure things out.
And, his wife makes chicken soup. Wonderful chicken soup. Magical chicken soup. It is Barbara Rennard’s grandmother’s recipe, and if any chicken soup could cure colds, it would be this one.
Why not look into it?
“What we did in the laboratory was actually very rigorous,” Dr. Rennard said. “Admittedly, we did it for the fun of it. Because we were amused by it like everybody else.”
And?
“What our work shows is that there are ingredients in common foodstuffs that might have anti-inflammatory actions. Mom’s old adage might just be true.”
And so it is that Dr. Rennard, renowned COPD scientist, will be forever cited for his research on chicken soup.
How does he feel about that? Well, when the subject was first broached, his body language did not scream enthusiasm. But, the longer Dr. Rennard talked, the clearer it became that chicken soup is like that rascal uncle you can’t help but love. With every memory, he couldn’t help but smile. It’s been a fun ride. Besides, he may as well roll with it. It’s never going away.
Leaning: “Do you think people will finally stop calling about the chicken soup story, Lillian?”
“No,” Lillian said.
“I think when you finally retire we’ll give them your home phone number,” Dr. Rennard said.
Chicken soup has given Dr. Rennard three great career highlights, the kind few scientists are lucky to get:
- His wife Barbara, the study’s first author and head soup chef, always loved listening to Bob Edwards on National Public Radio (NPR). Guess who was interviewed by Edwards about chicken soup and managed to get his wife in on the call? “He talked to me for 10 minutes. He talked to her for the whole rest of the hour!” Dr. Rennard said. “And my wife’s friends were listening to NPR radio and said, ‘That’s Barbara Rennard!’ ”
- When Dr. Rennard’s hometown paper, the St. Louis Sun, was doing a chicken soup story for its Sunday magazine, it asked him for a photo. Well, it is his wife’s grandmother’s recipe, he said, and she was from St. Louis. How about a photo of her? It ended up being an old photo of Barbara Rennard’s grandmother cooking with her two young daughters, Barbara’s mother and aunt. Heartwarming stuff. “I got my mother-in-law’s picture in the newspaper,” Dr. Rennard said. A man can’t do much better than that.
- Dr. Rennard and chicken soup are a question in Trivial Pursuit. Every parent can relate: of all the work he has done, it was nice to finally have something his kids thought was pretty cool.
And so, Dr. Rennard will continue to work tirelessly on COPD (“It’s the third leading cause of death in the United States and it’s not a household word,” he said). And he will continue to take phone calls about chicken soup.