Southwestern Surgical Congress Research Articles

Surgical training: the private hospital, the medical school, and the federal government, 1978

Two years before the founding of the Southwestern Surgical Congress, Dr. Thomas G. Orr, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, and the man honored by this lectureship, read a paper reporting a technic he had used for complete removal of the stomach for cancer and restoration of the continuity of the alimentary tract in five successful operations. Total gastrectomy, and a variety of esophagoenteric anastomoses, were and have been done both before and after Dr. Orr’s work by a number of illustrious surgeons. Slides taken from Dr. Orr’s article published in the Archives of Surgery in 1947 [I] illustrate some of the technics devised before his presentation. Since that time, a number of thoughtful surgeons have demonstrated imagination, ingenuity, and talent in an effort to create a satisfactory substitute gastric pouch, using segments of both small and large bowel. Drs. Path 121, Wilkinson, Simms, and Williamson [3], and Hunnicut [4], to name a few in this congress, have separately published articles on this subject to document their efforts. Although the mortality statistics in gastric cancer have improved due to a better understanding of pre-, intra-, and postoperative alterations in the patient’s physiologic processes, particularly in the face of concomitant disease, the question remains today whether any type of esophagoenterostomy after total gastrectomy has significantly improved the nutrition or comfort of the patient over the fundamental

A new horizon for surgeons: Genetics and cancer control

Claude H. Organ, Jr, MD, FACS, Omaha, Nebraska The officers and members of the Southwestern Surgical Congress honor me with your invitation to present the 1977 Edgar J. Poth Lecture. The “roots” of both Doctor Poth and myself lie in Texas, and as a young student living in north Texas and aspiring to be a physician, I had heard the name, Edgar Poth, mentioned often. Having spent his formative years in Seguin, Texas, Doctor Poth started his medical career at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, then as now a stellar university of the medical world. He journeyed to the West Coast for his residency training in surgery at Stanford University. It can be said that he had the best of all worlds: Hopkins, Stanford, and Texas! As is so often the case with successful men, he was blessed with a fine and talented wife, Gaynelle Robertson Poth, an ophthalmologist of distinction in her own right [I]. After World War II, Doctor Poth rose to the rank of Ashbel Smith Professor of Surgery at the University of Texas (Galveston) and during this period contributed significantly to the experimental and clinical literature on various aspects of intestinal obstruction, intestinal sepsis, and peptic ulcer disease. His work on the bacterial flora of the small bowel and the use of the nonabsorbable sulfa preparations represented a landmark in antimicrobial bowel preparation. His has been a full life in which there are lessons of courage, excitement, stimulation, and respect. Albert Camus, the noted Frenchman, once related that in his lifetime he had known two types of aristocracy: the aristocracy of courage and the aristocracy of intelligence. I am pleased to join the previous guest speakers of the Congress in honoring Edgar Poth, an aristocrat of both courage and intelligence. Surgical progressafter World War II and extending up to the present time has allowed us to participate in and benefit from the most prosperous era in

Biologic frontiers in the control of healing

I never knew Thomas Grover Orr. The responsibility which the honor of giving the Orr Lecture before this distinguished society carries, however, has weighed heavily upon me. In looking over some of Dr Orr's contributions, it has been intere sting to find that much of his life in surgery is recorded in the Archives of the Southwestern Surgical Congress. There can be little doubt that our organization was important to Dr Orr and that the standard of his contributions played a prominent role in the success we have enjoyed on the national surgical scene. As I searched through Friesen's superb 1968 Orr Lecture [1] reviewing Dr Orr's contributions to surgery, I was struck by the relevance of Dr Orr's laboratory research to the needs the patients under his care must have presented. Clearly, Dr Orr did not go to the laboratory or send a student to the laboratory to fill a block of time, produce a paper, or fulfill a grant contract. I strongly suspect that Thomas Orr, if the whole truth were known, disliked the laboratory except for what it could do for a sick person under his care. He must have been, therefore, a real human biologist who recognized that the scientific method could not be applied to solve some problems in human beings, and so animal models were developed and adapted to provide data which would be useful to his patients. Invariably, however, there is the return to the patient and often there was a reward because self-descipline in the laboratory provided an answer which was otherwise unobtainable. This is a remarkable achievement which I have found extremely difficult to emulate.

Southwestern surgical congress: Mexico City Host to First Mexican-North American Surgical Congress

southwestern surgical congress: Mexico City Host to First Mexican-North American Surgical Congress