Contributions of Public Hospitals to Surgery in the United States

Abstract

The Western Surgical Association was formed as the Western Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1891. The first president, Dr Milo Ward, a gynecologist from Topeka, Kansas, sent out a call for a meeting to be held in at the Copeland Hotel in Topeka for the purpose of organizing the Association. The most important business transaction of the 1895 meeting was the name change to the Western Surgical and Gynecological Association, a name that remained until 1909, when it became the Western Surgical Association. The association was originally limited to specialists residing in the Missouri River cities of Iowa and Missouri and the states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. Eventually, the membership criteria were interpreted to include members from states bordering on and west of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and their major tributaries (Fig. 1). In his Presidential Address in 1926, Robert C Coffey pointed out that “The West is not a mere geographic term, a personality if you wish, which has fled from a cramped social environment to the great open spaces where men may think and act independently, untrammeled by precedent and tradition.” The Western Surgical Association (WSA) is now a national surgical society, evidenced by the fact that 3 of the last 11 presidents elected have been from New York, that is, Fabrizio Michelassi, Merril Dayton, and myself. I am proud to be the 6th WSA President associated with Los Angeles County þ USC Medical Center. Lawrence Chaffin (WSA President, 1953) was a Massachusetts General Hospital-trained surgeon, and during his career he served as Chief of Surgery at Good Samaritan Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles County Medical Center, and was vice president of the American Surgical Association. Dr Chaffin, Arthur Pattison (WSA President, 1969), and William P Mikkelsen (WSA President, 1976) were part of the tradition of community