printable versionMemorial Resolution: Norman E. Shumway, M.D., PhD.
Norman E. Shumway, M.D., PhD.
(1923 - 2006)
Norman Edward Shumway, Jr., the Frances and Charles D. Field Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Emeritus, was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on February 9, 1923, and died peacefully at his Palo Alto home in the early morning hours of February 10, 2006, one day following his 83rd birthday. In between he had a remarkable life marked by achievement of the highest order in his chosen field of Cardiothoracic Surgery.
The Shumway family moved to Jackson, Michigan, during Norm's childhood and it was in Jackson that he went to high school, where he was a star member of the Debate Team, Valedictorian of his senior class and voted Most Likely to Succeed. He was encouraged to go to Yale for college, but instead chose to attend the University of Michigan intending to become an attorney. In 1943 he joined the Army and was one of several hundred young men being trained to become engineers. The Army decided that it needed more doctors and dentists, so they gave an aptitude test to this group and decided that six of them would be going to one of these professional schools, Norm among them. He ticked medicine as his choice and, by the flip of a coin, was assigned to go to Vanderbilt. His pre-medical preparation consisted of 9 months at Baylor University, so he had no undergraduate degree. Some years later, he wrote to the Registrar at Baylor inquiring whether, in light of his subsequent academic accomplishments, they would consider bestowing upon him the Bachelor's degree. The response was that they would be pleased to do so if he would return to the campus for one quarter to complete required courses in Religion and Texas History. Norm declined this offer.
Norm had his residency in Surgery at the University of Minnesota following graduation from Vanderbilt in 1949. This was a fortuitous circumstance, indeed. Open heart surgery was in its infancy. Over the next 5 years, the very first successful operations inside the human heart would be performed in the Minnesota Department by Norm's mentors. Since the heart-lung machine was not yet sufficiently developed, F. John Lewis used total body hypothermia to repair an atrial septal defect in a child in 1952, followed in March of 1954 by the successful repair of various congenital anomalies by C. Walton Lillehei, who used cross circulation from a parent. In this technique, the vascular system of the child's parent would be hooked up to the patient with plastic tubes, the parent then acting as the heart-lung machine while the heart was opened and the repair performed. Norm assisted on Lillehei's first such operations. The excitement and the promise of these pioneer procedures was irresistible, and Shumway scrapped his original intention of becoming a Neurosurgeon and decided to join the young field of Cardiothoracic Surgery.
Dr. Shumway left Minnesota in 1958 after 9 years of residency and fellowship, PhD. in hand, and joined a senior surgeon in Santa Barbara, California, in what turned out to be an ill-fated partnership. It was simply a mismatch. Because of his interest in hypothermia, Norm was able to arrange an interview with Professor Leon Goldman (the father of Senator Diane Feinstein) who was then Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of California in San Francisco. Norm realized that the interview was not going well when Dr. Goldman fell asleep! Through an old friend from Minnesota days, Bill Hofmann, Norm was able to arrange an interview the following day with Professor Victor Richards, Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Stanford, then in San Francisco. Richards hired Shumway to run the kidney dialysis machine at the princely salary of $3000 a year. Because this was a nighttime job, Shumway had his days to do cardiac surgery, of which there was precious little available, and to begin his laboratory work with his first resident, Richard Lower. Their early work concentrated on the use of local cardiac hypothermia as a tool for safer heart repairs, but turned to orthotopic transplantation of the heart when they found that cool preservation provided the time to remove the heart and then re-implant it. This lead to years of further work on the immunologic and physiologic problems of heart transplantation, which was essential before consideration of performing the procedure for patients.
Shumway was one of the few Stanford faculty members who moved from San Francisco to Palo Alto when the clinical departments moved south in 1959. Here he, Lower and their colleagues continued their work on cardiac transplantation in the laboratory for 8 more years. In November, 1967, Shumway announced that he and his team (Lower had since moved to the Medical College of Virginia and was also preparing to do clinical heart transplantation) were ready to do heart transplantation in a patient. They were only waiting for the proper recipient and donor to come along. In December, 1967, Christian Barnard, who had observed Lower and his work in the laboratory in Virginia for a short period of time, performed the world's first heart transplant in a human. Shumway did his first of many in January, 1968.
The leadership role and success of Stanford's program in heart and, subsequently heart-lung, transplantation is well documented. There was a significant period of time in the 1970's when a majority of the heart transplants being done world-wide were being done at Stanford. This is because Shumway and his team continued to work on the problem in a constructive way, in the laboratory and the hospital. Other surgeons in the rest of the world concentrated only on the technical aspects which were easy to master. They failed while Shumway succeeded. As improved drugs for immunosuppression came along in 1981, and were first applied at Stanford, others restarted their programs. More than 1300 heart transplants have been carried out at Stanford, over 60,000 world-wide, all because Norman Shumway started it, continued it and studied the problem in a scientific fashion.
Norman Shumway has authored and co-authored more than 500 articles and book chapters. He and his daughter Sara, now Professor of Cardiac Surgery at the University of Minnesota, co-edited a book entitled Thoracic Transplantation. We know that Norman was particularly proud of this work. He received honorary degrees from academic institutions world-wide along with scientific achievement awards from the American College of Surgeons, the American Association for Thoracic surgery and the American Surgical Association, among many others. He was the recipient of the Rene Leriche Prize of the International Surgical Society, the Lister Medal from the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Medawar Prize from the Transplantation Society and the first Texas Heart Institute Medal in Cardiovascular Disease. Norm received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Vanderbilt University. He was President of the Western Thoracic Surgical Association and the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, as well as Honorary Lifetime President of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation. He was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of England, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Ireland.
Norm was known for his sometimes irreverent wit and his stunningly quick comebacks and quips. He was a man without pretensions who dressed comfortably and drove modest, sometimes old, automobiles. He was kind and generous and he loved to play golf. He played golf courses around the world, but his favorite was Stanford.
One of Shumway's most lasting legacies was the training program in Cardiothoracic Surgery that he established at Stanford. Of his more than 75 trainees, many head outstanding training programs of their own world-wide. His system of education, built on increasing resident responsibility and featuring open communication among all the team members, has been emulated by his trainees at their own institutions. Many returned from all over the world, to pay final tribute to Dr. Shumway at the Memorial Service held on April 17, 2006, at Memorial Church on the Stanford Campus.
Shumway is survived by his former wife, Mary Lou, by children Sara, Michael, Lisa and Amy and 2 grandchildren, Siena and Sander. His many friends, associates, patients and admirers will long remember and sorely miss this special man who contributed so much. And do not forget, he became a doctor because of an aptitude test!
Committee: Robert A. Chase, M.D. James B. D. Mark, M.D., Chair Bruce A. Reitz, M.D.