Barrie Fairley from his post as Chief of Anesthesia at the San Francisco General Hospital. Ellis Cohen and Bunker served as interim leaders while the school searched for a new chair. Having transformed the clinical side of the department into a force to be reckoned with, Larson stepped down in 1982 and stayed on as emeritus chair - “the easiest job in the world,” he jokes - until 1993, when he went on to revitalize the anesthesia department at UCLA.ĭr. Under Larson’s reign, the department also opened a pain clinic and gained “superb” residents and faculty, Larson says. Throughout it all, Larson dealt with the challenge of working in a shared space with two private anesthesia groups that occasionally lured away his staff with better pay. He also oversaw the development of sub-specialties in the department, including neurosurgery, pediatrics and cardiac anesthesia. Al Hackel, Larson helped develop a pediatric ICU. Myer “Mike” Rosenthal as medical director of the new adult ICU. Larson quickly took over administration of the Intensive Care Units, redesigning the floor plan for extra efficiency and hiring Dr. “They didn’t have hardly any residents, the clinicians who were there were pretty much people who came for a year and went, and there wasn’t much focus on the clinical service.” “I was hired to develop a better balance between research and clinical care,” he says. While his predecessor had focused on research, Larson had his heart set on turning Stanford anesthesia into a clinical crown jewel. Philip Larson, an alumnus of the Stanford undergraduate program and a McGill-educated anesthesiologist, took over the job.
He’d stay with the department until 1989, serving again as an interim chair from 1983 to 1985, before leaving for the University College London Medical School.Īfter Bunker stepped down, Dr. After 12 years of building the department, Bunker stepped down to focus on his research in surgical epidemiology. “You can imagine how far he got with me,” he says. The memory of that skirmish still makes Bunker laugh. Thomas Stamey came to him and suggested that urology needed that lab space more than anesthesia. Anesthesia had only a small, inadequate laboratory, Bunker says, and even that was under threat. He set to recruiting faculty, and with the help of new researchers like Richard Mazze and Ellis Cohen, grant dollars began to roll in.īut a growing research department created new challenges. Settling into the new Palo Alto location was like building a medical school from scratch, Bunker remembers.
This time, perhaps realizing that no top-tier candidate would settle for division head when they could be department head somewhere else, the school gave in. The school’s first candidate for the job had dropped out of consideration because the school refused the same request. It wasn’t the first time that demand had come up. Bunker agreed-with one condition. “I said I would accept if anesthesia was a separate department,” Bunker says. John Bunker was a visiting professor at University of California, San Francisco when the Stanford Chief of Surgery offered him a job as anesthesia division head. The pressure was on for the school to give anesthesia a department of its own.ĭr. The only problem? None of the candidates were interested in playing second fiddle to surgery. The medical school’s transition from San Francisco to Palo Alto was shaking up the faculty, and the anesthesia division of the surgery department needed a new leader. But one thing remained the same: Anesthesia would remain under the domain of surgery. After that merger in 1908, anesthesia would evolve into its own division with six specialist physicians. The young doctor’s account is one of the few mentions of anesthesia services in the days before Cooper Medical College became the Stanford School of Medicine. “Generally the slower of the externs was stuck, as we said, to give the anesthetic,” he wrote in the Journal of Western Surgery in 1933, adding wryly, “In this way, I had personally a very large experience in administering anesthetics.” Using a mixture of alcohol, chloroform and ether, he’d put patients under-and then ventilate them when the concoction brought their breathing to a halt. Rixford was also responsible for anesthesia. He’d sterilize equipment, sponge “generations of pus and blood” off his mentor’s apron, and sit up all night with post-operative patients, listening to vegetable-delivery carts rumble down Mission Street. He quickly became a favorite of the college’s founder, Levi Cooper Lane, and was soon assisting Lane with surgeries. In 1889, a young man named Emmet Rixford enrolled in Cooper Medical College in San Francisco.
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