Transplant surgeon Norman Shumway dies; connections to 2 senators.

[NNadir]

Norman Shumway, who made the heart transplant a standard treatment died at age 82 from cancer.

The NY Times obituary contains two items about his connections to two Senators, Frist and Feinstein:

But his influence on his profession was large. Among the many surgeons he trained was Bill Frist, now the Senate Republican leader, who yesterday called him "one of the great surgical thinkers."

"He was a pioneer in adopting a systematic approach to minimizing medical errors," Senator Frist said in an interview. "Emphasizing the importance of keeping things simple forced people to develop systems to prevent errors and mistakes."

Dr. William R. Brody, another Shumway trainee who is now the president of Johns Hopkins University, said: "Dr. Shumway had the ability to get people to work harder for him than anyone I have ever seen and yet never did it with a directive or an unkind word. He always used humor and delegated responsibility."

In what has since become standard practice in training chest surgeons, Dr. Shumway alternated his trainees through cardiac surgery and general surgery. One, Dr. Edward B. Stinson, performed a human heart transplant before he participated in a hernia operation.

Dr. Shumway differed from most surgery professors of his era who generally gave residents little opportunity to operate on patients. Instead, he assisted while the trainee did the surgery; if the young surgeon erred, the professor assumed command.

"We used to joke, he was the world's greatest first assistant," Dr. Brody said in an interview...

He began at the University of Michigan as a prelaw student, but after he was drafted into the Army in 1943, he took an aptitude test that showed he had promise as a physician. A colonel then offered him a choice of staying in the infantry or going to medical school. "I always wanted to be a doctor," the young soldier quickly replied.

He completed an accelerated pre-med course at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., without ever receiving a degree. (Years later, he wrote Baylor asking if he could obtain the undergraduate degree. University officials said he could if he took courses in religion and the history of Texas. He declined.)

He earned a medical degree from Vanderbilt in 1949, and returned to the University of Minnesota to train in surgery. He served in the Air Force during the Korean War.

On finishing surgical training in 1957, he practiced briefly with an older partner in Santa Barbara, Calif. It was an unhappy mismatch — a traditional practitioner and a young surgeon with pioneering ideas — and after six weeks Dr. Shumway sought to return to academia.

In a story he told many times, he interviewed at the University of California, San Francisco, with its chief surgeon, Dr. Leon Goldman. He knew he would not be hired when Dr. Goldman promptly fell asleep. (Senator Dianne Feinstein of California is Dr. Goldman's daughter.)...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/health/11shumway.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1