The University of Oklahoma: The First Independent Academic Anesthesia Department?

Abstract

John Alfred Moffitt, M.D., was the Head of the Department of Anesthesiology at the Oklahoma Medical Center when it became the first ever academic independent Department of Anesthesia. Photograph courtesy of the University of Oklahoma Bird Library Medical History Archives at the OU Health Sciences Center by Mr. Jack Wagner. Introduction The true independence of a teaching department in an academic setting is based on its organizational separation from other departments with which it is affiliated. In academic anesthesia, such independence was unheard of for three quarters of century after the introduction of clinical anesthesia in 1846. The struggle for academic independence and authority for anesthesiology reached a high point in the second quarter of the 20 century when Dr. Ralph Waters established an academic anesthesia teaching center in Madison, Wisconsin in 1927. Yet, despite his vision and the sympathetic endorsement of his surgical colleagues, Dr. Waters’ division of anesthesia at the University of Wisconsin remained, not as an independent teaching program in the form of a department, but a section under the department of surgery. It took another quarter century for this beacon of anesthesia education to achieve full independent status in 1952. Organized medicine worldwide was slow to recognize the importance of anesthesia as a specialty. An inevitable question will be asked; if the Wisconsin program was not the beginning of true independent academic anesthesia teaching for medical students in 1927, when and where did such a program begin, and how? To date, all indications point to the University of Oklahoma, when a trained anesthesiologist from the Wisconsin program joined the faculty of the medical school in Oklahoma City as an instructor in anesthesia and assumed the leadership of the first truly independent Department of Anesthesia in 1930.