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Biographical sketches of the nineteen chairmen who have guided the evolution of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and surgery department, America’s first, from 1765 to the present day
In Surgeons and Something More, Clyde F. and Elizabeth D. Barker chronicle the evolution of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and surgery department, America’s first, begun in 1765. In the turbulent times before and after the Revolution, with medicine and surgery then in a primitive state, the new school’s leaders included some of America’s most conspicuous political and military figures.Over the next 250 years, the new nation experienced a dozen wars, four presidential assassinations, several devastating epidemics, and the expansion of US territory nine times over. This book reveals how Penn surgeons played prominent roles in these events as well as in the concomitant medical advances, such as anesthesia, antisepsis, heart surgery, x-rays, transplantation, cancer chemotherapy, intravenous nutrition, and gene therapy.
Biographical sketches of the nineteen chairmen who have guided Penn Surgery over its development detail the department’s progress and depict some of its setbacks. These trailblazers wrote the first text- books, taught the first classes, started the field’s journals, and led its academic organizations. By inventing new procedures, they saved countless lives. But by ignoring antisepsis, they lost many others. They operated on paupers, prisoners, Supreme Court justices, and gravely wounded presidents. Three of them became US Surgeon Generals. Others fought duels, explored the frozen Arctic seas, and conducted clandestine love affairs. In war, they parachuted behind enemy lines and invented SCUBA to disrupt enemy shipping. They built World War II’s largest hospital in the Burmese jungle to care for wounded commandos, and in Korea’s MASH tents they were the real-life Hawkeyes struggling to save the lives of stricken GIs. This is the story of how surgery evolved to its present, still imperfect, form, and of the role played by the doctors of the University of Pennsylvania in advancing the surgeon’s science and art.
Clyde Barker, the Donald Guthrie Professor of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, is a native of Salt Lake City and a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Cornell University, and Cornell University Medical College. His entire career has been at the University of Pennsylvania. He trained at Penn, spent ten years on transplant immunology in the department of genetics, practiced vascular and transplant surgery for forty years, served under eight of Penn Surgery’s nineteen chairmen, and for eighteen years, chaired the department. He has published 425 scientific papers, four books, and an essay on Thomas Eakins that won the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities. He has also been president of the American Surgical Association and the American Philosophical Society.
Elizabeth Barker has an AB in Art History from Princeton University. She has worked as a finance director for education reform initiatives at Edison Learning, the New York City Department of Education, and New Classrooms Innovation Partners.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. William Shippen Jr.: Feuding Founders Poison the Atmosphere of America's First Medical School
2. Caspar Wistar, John Jones, Benjamin Rush: Interruption of Progress by Revolution and Plague
3. Philip Syng Physick, John Syng Dorsey: The Unloved Father of American Surgery
4. William Gibson: Ill-Tempered Student of Warfare
5. William Edmonds Horner: A Constitutional Cripple Is the School's Foremost Anatomist, Surgeon, Anthropologist, and Dean
6. Henry Hollingsworth Smith: Unrecognized Administrative Genius of Union Army
7. D. Hayes Agnew: The Department's Icon: Painting or Man?
8. John Ashhurst Jr.: A Forgotten Scholar
9. J. William White: Playboy or Surgeon-Scientist?
10: Edward Martin: How a Little Club Inspired Surgery's Largest Professional Society
11: John B. Deaver: Slashing His Way to World Fame
12: Charles Harrison Frazier: Comeback of a Failed Reformer
13: Eldridge L. Eliason: A Gentleman Athlete Trains a Generation of Master Surgeons
14: I.S. Ravdin: An Army General Transforms Penn Surgery
15: Norman Freeman, Walter Freeman: The Brothers Freeman
16: Bernard Fisher: The Triumphs and Setbacks of a Revolutionary Cancer Surgeon
17: PhDs: The Past and Future of a Surgery Department
18: Julian Johnson: Epitaph for a Legendary Bully and Gifted Teacher
19: Jonathan E. Rhoads: Colossus of 20th Century Surgery
20: HUP Chief Residents During Dr. Rhoad's Chairmanship: A Generation of Leaders
21: Graduate Education for Surgeons: Failure of a Worthy Experiment
22: William T. Fitts Jr.: The Right Man at the Wrong Time
23: Leonard D. Miller: A Master Teacher Delays the Demise of the Halsted-Ravdin Residency
24: A Period of Turbulence, 1968-2000
25: Brooke Roberts: Engineer of the Department's Truce with the University
26: HUP Chief Residents During Drs. Fitts, Miller, and Roberts's Chairmanships
27: Clyde F. Barker: For Surgery, the End of Turbulence
28: HUP Chief Residents During Dr. Barker's Chairmanship
29: Larry R. Kaiser: A New Approach, a New Division
30: Jeffrey A. Drebin: Science and Surgical Leadership
31: Does the World's Largest Explosion Inspire a New Field: Children's Surgery?
32: Penn Trauma Surgeons in War and Peace
33: A Collection of Educators
34: Surgeon-Scientists of the Department
35: Distinguished Graduate Awardees
36: Named Lectures of the Department
37: Evolution of Specialties and Divisions
38: Ronald P. DeMatteo: A Time of Change
Epilogue
Afterword
Endnotes
Index
About the Authors