Department of Surgery (University of Michigan) publications, 1975-2006

Summary

Creator:

University of Michigan. Department of Surgery.

Abstract:

Includes annual reports, brochures, faculty directories, prospectuses and reports. Also contains programs from the William Mayo lectures and the Advances in Surgery Conference, development brochures, and an annual report from the Section of Neurosurgery.

Extent:

0.5 linear feet

Language:

English

Call Number:

9944 Bimu 2

Authors:

Finding aid created by Jennifer Jacobs, 1999.

Background

Scope and Content:

The Department of Surgery Publications include annual reports, brochures, faculty directories, prospectuses and reports. Also contains programs from the William Mayo lectures and the Advances in Surgery Conference, development brochures, and an annual report from the Section of Neurosurgery. The publications are divided into two series: Unit Publications and Sub-Unit Publications.

Biographical / Historical:

The first Professor of Surgery at the University of Michigan was Moses Gunn. Gunn had apprenticed himself to Dr. Edson Carr, a renowned surgeon, and was taking classes at the Medical Institution of Geneva College in Geneva, New York in 1845, when he heard that the University of Michigan was planning to start a medical school. He packed a cadaver into a trunk and traveled with it by stage coach to Ann Arbor where he immediately began to give a course of lectures on anatomy using his cadaver for demonstration. His intention was to become the Professor of Surgery, and he succeeded.

In 1848 the University began to organize the Department of Medicine and Surgery, and Gunn ensured that his opinions were heard. The school would be an integral part of the University, unlike most of the medical schools in the country. The professors would be salaried by the University so the students would not need to buy tickets from the instructor in order to attend the lectures.

Gunn was among those who believed that, in order to have enough patients available for clinical demonstrations, the Department would need to be moved to Detroit. When it became obvious that the Regents would refuse to do this, Gunn resigned his professorship in 1867. Donald Maclean would be forced to resign by the Regents in 1889 because he shared this opinion of Gunn's.

Maclean did not arrive in Ann Arbor until 1872, however, and the school had four interim Professors of Surgery between 1867 and 1872: William Warren Greene, Henry Lyster, Alpheus Crosby and Theodore McGraw.

In 1869 Crosby converted one of the professors' homes on North University into a twenty-bed hospital. All patients had to be willing to be used for instructional demonstrations.

In 1873, during Maclean's professorship, the Michigan State Medical Society told the University Regents that they would need to establish entrance requirements similar to those already in place in the literary department. So, in 1875, the department began to conduct entrance exams. At the same time, more students began to apply having already completed a four-year degree, and the medical school could establish a more rigorous and laboratory-based curriculum.

Charles B. Nancrede was Professor of Surgery from 1889 until 1917. In lectures, Nancrede emphasized the effectiveness of the new aseptic procedures, including scrubbing one's hands before an operation. He volunteered in the Spanish War in 1898, and as a lieutenant colonel, ranked above his Ann Arbor dean, Victor Vaughan, who was a major.

The new University Hospital opened in 1891, and when the Homeopathic Medical School moved out of its half of the building to its own hospital, the surgery department and surgery specialties moved into its place.

Until 1914, Nancrede was director of the newly formed Department of Surgery and forty-six men variously served under him. He relinquished his administrative duties in 1914 to Cyrenus Darling. According to Horace W. Davenport in his book University of Michigan Surgeons, 1850-1970: Who They Were and What They Did, Darling was told that he was not good enough to keep the directorship, and so the department went without effective leadership until 1920, with the appointment of Hugh Cabot. The state had appropriated the one million dollars necessary to rebuild the University Hospital in 1920. Another perceived drawback of the University of Michigan, according to Davenport, was the full-time plan adopted by the medical faculty where a newly appointed clinician would see no private patients and confine his work to the University Hospital.

On moving from his private practice in Boston to Ann Arbor, Cabot took an almost fifty percent pay cut. But he had been becoming dissatisfied with what he perceived as the medical profession degenerating into a business and he believed that all doctors should be on a salary in order to eliminate the allure of money in the profession. Cabot replaced Vaughan as Dean of the Medical School in 1921, but he did not have the power (accumulated over forty years with the School) that Vaughan did. Davenport explains how Cabot could not persuade the rest of the faculty to help him pursue his ideals concerning medical practice.

Cabot made it his practice to hire faculty who were surgical specialists. In his first year he acquired professors who were to be individually responsible for general, thoracic, orthopedic, neuro- and dental surgery. Cabot himself specialized in genito-urinary surgery, and did much general surgery as well.

The new hospital, with over a thousand beds, was opened in 1925. The surgical wing had ten full-size operating rooms and only four of those had small galleries. No longer would a class of a hundred people watch an operation.

Cabot also tried to change the "block-style" curriculum where students were trained in one clinical subject per term, so they could concentrate on the subject at hand, but could not benefit from the conjunction of the disciplines, for instance, of surgery with bacteriology and pathology. But Davenport notes that he was up against other senior faculty members, and could not make any reforms.

Cabot was a dean who accomplished much, including revamping the Department of Surgery. He amalgamated the Homeopathic Medical School with the original school, and was unsympathetic to the difficulties encountered by the homeopathic faculty, when homeopathy was still an influential sect (see University of Michigan Surgeons). He was relieved by the Regents of his duties as Dean and as Director of the Department of Surgery in 1930.

During the years from 1915 to 1925, medical school departments across the country underwent a change in structure. The University of Michigan Department of Surgery was not an exception and began this decade with Nancrede as head with a couple of assistants, and ended with Cabot in the leadership of a department made of many physicians, some with professional reputations equal to Cabot's. One of these was Frederick Amasa Coller, who instructed in general surgery. He was appointed Director in 1930 after Cabot was dismissed. Coller remained Director for thirty-seven years. The new University Hospital that opened in 1986 contained the Department's new ambulatory care facility in the A. Alfred Taubman Health Care Center. The Frederick A. Coller Surgical Suite was named honoring the former chairman, and the contribution to the suite of the Frederick A. Coller Surgical Society.

C. Gardner Child III was chairman of the department from 1959 until 1974. Jeremiah G. Turcotte was appointed to take Child's place and kept the position until 1987. Turcotte remained in his position of Director of the Transplant Program after his resignation of the chair. Lazar J. Greenfield is the current chairman of the department.

Chairs of the Department of Surgery

Date	Event
1891-1914	Charles B. Nancrede
1914-1920	Cyrenus Darling
1920-1930	Hugh Cabot
1930-1958	Frederick Amasa Coller
1957	Henry King Ransom
1959-1974	C. Gardner Child III
1974-1987	Jeremiah G. Turcotte
1987-2002	Lazar J. Greenfield
2002-	Michael W. Mulholland

Acquisition Information:

Publications are received periodically from the unit (donor 8354 ).

Subjects

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Formats:

Annual reports.
Brochures.
Directories.
Programs.
Prospectuses.
Reports.

Names:

University of Michigan. Dept. of Surgery.
University of Michigan. Section of Neurosurgery.
William Mayo lecture.
Advances in Surgery Conference.