J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2008;135:1198-1200
© 2008 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery
How it came about
Albert Starr, MD*
Providence St Vincent Medical Center, Providence Health System, Portland, Ore
Received for publication February 13, 2008; accepted for publication February 17, 2008.
* Address for reprints: Albert Starr, MD, 9155 SW Barnes Rd Suite 240, Portland, OR 97225. (Email: astarr@starrwood.com).
| The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Much in life is determined by being in the right place at the right time, while being prepared and bold enough to seek and seize opportunities as they present. As has been noted, I was prepared, in large part, within the Columbia system. A surgical internship interlude at John Hopkins with the great Alfred Blalock provided a little southern cover for my northeast background. I attribute my boldness to my parents and great teachers: Lionel Trilling in my undergraduate years and George Humphreys, Bob Wylie, Frank Berry, and master surgeon J. Maxwell Chamberlain at P&S, both as a student and during my postgraduate training. I arrived at the right place and the right time in August 1957. The University of Oregon Medical School had a brand new University Hospital with a frontier mentality and was ripe for starting a program in cardiac surgery. I met this setting with complete confidence that I could do anything, a characteristic often found among well-trained young surgeons.
The major focus of cardiac surgery then was on the treatment of congenital heart disease. Extracardiac approaches for patent ductus arteriosus, aortic coarctation, and the Blalock–Taussig shunt were well established, and the first open-heart procedure using the heart-lung machine had been performed by Gibbon in 1953.1
Lillehei and Varco in Minneapolis and Kirklin in Rochester, Minnesota, were moving swiftly. My marching orders from our Chairman, J. Englebert Dunphy, were to introduce their techniques and achieve results comparable with theirs as soon as possible. We opened an animal laboratory in 1957 for research and team training and operated on our first patient in the spring of 1958. The operating room was now our laboratory, and I became fully engaged in clinical work.
Around this time, M. Lowell Edwards visited me to ask whether I would collaborate with him . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Copyright © 2008 by The American Association for Thoracic Surgery.
