Category: Cleveland Clinic Origins

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Miriam Kerruish (Stage) biography The National cyclopædia of American biography 1931

Miriam Kerruish (Stage) biography The National cyclopædia of American biography 1931

The pdf is here part 1      part 2

The original link is here

Here is more on Dr. Kerruish, from this article about her husband, Charles “Billy” Stage:

…This new direction may also have been the result of a change in his personal life that occurred when Stage married Miriam Kerruish on August 27, 1903. His new bride came from a background just as extraordinary as his own. Her father, William Kerruish, was the son of emigrants from the Isle of Man and proved such an excellent student that he was admitted to the sophomore class of Western Reserve College. As would be the case for his future son-in-law, money was tight so he worked his way through school “by making beds, sawing wood and doing anything else that he could find to do.”

Kerruish brought an infectious spirit and a strong social conscience to the campus. Although American-born, he took great pride in his heritage and taught his language teachers how to speak Gaelic. He also became deeply involved in the abolitionist movement and convinced his fellow students to invite Frederick Douglass to deliver a commencement address in 1854, a choice that stirred up considerable controversy. Kerruish then finished up his education at Yale — once again teaching the Gaelic language to his instructors — and returned to Cleveland to practice law. He became the head of one of the city’s best law firms and continued to practice law until his death at age ninety-six. He also found time to marry Margaret Quayle, an emigrant from the Isle of Man, and raise a large family.

Their daughter Miriam was born in Cleveland on November 7, 1870, and shared her father’s probing intellect and social conscience. After receiving a bachelor’s of arts degree from Smith College in 1892, Miriam enrolled at Wooster Medical College and graduated in 1895. She became the first female doctor ever to practice at Cleveland City Hospital, where she specialized in obstetrics and pediatrics.

Dr. Kerruish soon became convinced that poverty was responsible for the illnesses of many of the children she was treating. She emerged as a champion of child welfare, organizing the Women’s Protective Association of Cleveland and serving on the board of trustees of the Woman’s Hospital, the Maternity Hospital Council and many other noble causes. She also became active in the woman’s suffrage movement, starting the Cuyahoga County Woman’s Suffrage Party and spearheading its activities. In the midst of all these endeavors, she also found time to give birth to and raise four children — three boys and a girl.

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Once her children were old enough, Miriam Stage returned to practicing medicine. She joined the staff of the Cleveland Clinic, a medical center formed upon novel principles. It was founded by Drs. George W. Crile, Frank E. Bunts, William E. Lower, and John Phillips, three of whom had served overseas during the First World War and been impressed by the benefits of having medical specialists from a variety of disciplines working together. While serving in France, Crile marveled in his journal: “What a remarkable record Bunts, Crile and Lower have had all these years. We have been rivals in everything, yet through all the vicissitudes of personal, financial and professional relations we have been able to think and act as a unit.” (Clough, 19)

Upon returning to Cleveland they decided to open a clinic based upon a similar cross-disciplinary, cooperative approach to medicine. Central to their mission was an emphasis on research and education, as the founders believed that patient care and teaching went hand in hand. As Crile’s son later described it, the clinic was based upon a shared ideal of “an institution in which medicine and surgery could be practiced, studied and taught by a group of associated specialists. To create it, the four founders began to plan an institution that would be greater than the sum of its parts.” (Clough, 32)

Their clinic at Euclid Avenue and East 93rd Street opened its doors in 1921 and three years later a 184-bed hospital began to admit patients. At the 1921 opening, Crile articulated the vision of the founders. One of the pinnacles was ongoing education that was not departmentalized as in a university but in which doctors communicated new findings tow one another through a schedule of daily conferences and lectures. This dialogue, Crile explained, was “not only our duty to the patient of today, but no less out duty to the patient of tomorrow.” Just as important was the commitment to ensuring that, “the patient with no means and the patient with moderate means may have at a cost he can afford as complete an investigation as the patient with ample means.” (Clough, 39-41) It is easy to see why the setting was a perfect fit for Miriam Stage and she became one of the leaders of the Clinic’s Women’s Hospital.

In 1929, tragedy struck the Cleveland Clinic. On May 15, nitrocellulose x-ray films overheated, causing at least two explosions and sending lethal fumes through the building. One hundred and twenty-three people lost their lives, including Dr. Miriam Stage.

Billy Stage never remarried. While he was still in mourning, the stock market crash brought an end to the Van Sweringens’ empire. He retired in 1939 and passed away on May 17, 1946, at the Cleveland Clinic where his wife had practiced and met her untimely death. His death occurred on the seventeenth anniversary of his wife’s funeral.

 

Cleveland Clinic co-founder George Crile helped meet medical challenge of World War I Plain Dealer 4/4/2017

Cleveland Clinic co-founder George Crile helped meet medical challenge of World War I
Plain Dealer 4/4/2017

The link is here

By Brian Albrecht, The Plain Dealer
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on April 04, 2017 at 6:51 AM, updated April 04, 2017 at 7:04 AM

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Poison gas, machine guns, flame-throwers and rapid-firing artillery were among the new battlefield horrors of World War I, capable of killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a single battle.

Transporting and treating the flood of survivors from this carnage was a nightmare for medical personnel, most of whom who had never handled the type or number of these wounds before.

Cleveland provided a modest but important contribution to confronting this challenge in the form of Dr. George Crile and the Lakeside Unit.

Cleveland’s Dr. George Crile and Lakeside Unit helped treat World War I wounded

Crile, who would later co-found the Cleveland Clinic, was a surgeon at Lakeside Hospital (now University Hospitals) with a keen sense of scientific curiosity and the ability to tackle medical mysteries.

The Lakeside Unit was formed when Myron Herrick, a Clevelander and ambassador to France when World War I broke out, asked Crile to organize a surgical team to come to France to study medical conditions. A team of volunteer surgeons and nurses was recruited from Lakeside Hospital and spent three months in Paris in 1915, treating more than 1,200 war-wounded patients.

Crile, who served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during the Spanish-American War, anticipated that America might be drawn into World War I, and devised a plan for mobilization of civilian hospitals for overseas military service.

“His theory was that a unit of medical men should be a group that has worked with each other in the civilian world so that they are a package, a unit that can be picked up in the U.S. and moved overseas . . . hit the ground running and not have any training to worry about once they get there,” said Jennifer Nieves, registrar/archivist at the Dittrick Medical History Center at Case Western Reserve University.

More World War I coverage:

Crile worked with American Red Cross officials on a plan creating 25 units at hospitals across the country that would be able to respond and serve overseas under Army supervision if the U.S. went to war.

Nieves, a contributor to the new book “Glimpsing Modernity — Military Medicine in World War I,” said Crile also prompted a review and upgrade of U.S. Army medical equipment.

“They found out that it was so outdated that some of the things were wrapped in newspaper from the Spanish-American War,” she said. “They were still using things as far back as the Civil War.”

Less than a month after America declared war on Germany in April of 2017, the Lakeside Unit — including 27 medical officers, 64 nurses, and 155 enlisted men — was headed back to France. The unit was designated as Base Hospital No. 4 and took over a former British military hospital (No. 9) in Rouen.

The unit would stay nearly two years, its ranks swelling to 42 physicians, 124 nurses and 356 Army enlisted men, treating more than 83,000 patients from both sides of the war in two hospitals.

Crile finds ‘living lab’ overseas

Nieves, curator of a Dittrick exhibit (running May through September) about the 1917 experience of the Lakeside Unit, said Crile was “the perfect person to go over there” with the Lakeside Unit.

“He saw it as a living lab,” and an opportunity to further his research in how shock and traumatic injury affects the entire body, she added.

Crile also brought along a few innovations that he helped develop.

He was among the first to use blood transfusions on patients, and taught the French how to use nitrous oxide as an anesthetic that did not leave patients violently ill (like chloroform and ether) when they regained consciousness after surgery.

Crile designed some of his own surgical clamps and forceps, and while overseas discovered that sea water could be used when saline was in short supply to stabilize patients.

His surgical techniques . . . become critical in treating massive numbers of wounded.

Even before the war, “what makes him so fascinating is because he is unconsciously anticipating a modern application of all his surgical techniques that will become critical in treating massive numbers of wounded, particularly wounds coming out of World War I that had never been seen before,” said James Banks, director of the Crile Archive Center for History Education.

The center is a repository of materials about the famous Cleveland surgeon and World War I, located on the west campus of Cuyahoga Community College in Parma (formerly the site of an Army hospital named for Crile during World War II).

Banks said that in touring battlefront aid stations during the war, he was amazed at the number of soldiers who had died without a mark on them. Suspecting that the blast of exploding artillery shells might have been involved, Crile conducted experiments using stray animals.

Part of Dr. George Crile’s work during World War I involved studying the concussive effect of artillery. (AP photo)”Sure enough, if they were in the direct line of a concussive blast, they were killed,” Banks said.

WWI BRITISH SOLDIERPart of George Crile’s research overseas during World War I was the effects of concussive blasts from artillery shells. (AP photo)

Crile wrote that the “concussive effect of exploding shells . . . shocks the ear, shakes the body and often produces a molecular change in nervous tissue . . . rupturing blood vessels in the central nervous system causing sudden death.”

“The essence of George Crile was his insatiable curiosity,” Banks said. Because of it, “he was able to do a number of remarkable things.”

Banks believes that Crile was in his natural element during the war. “It’s the excitement, it’s the fact that this is a whole laboratory of testing the human spirit, its physiological capabilities,” he said.

In Crile’s study of how shock resulting from traumatic injury could cause death, he developed a rubber suit fitted to patients that could be constricted with a bicycle pump to prevent loss of blood pressure, according to Banks.

“He was the first one to recognize the correlation between shock and the lowering of blood pressure,” Banks said.

Crile recognized the importance of transporting wounded soldiers as quickly as possible to medical treatment to gain the upper hand against infection, a scourge of the front. “What he’s really talking about is the ‘golden hour’ (for treatment) now known in emergency medicine,” Banks said.

WWI ALLIESDr. George Crile recognized the importance of transporting wounded from the front to aid stations or hospitals as quickly as possible to fight infection. (AP Photo)

When a solider got hit, “he’s lying in filth, perhaps for six or seven hours, in the vermin-infested, bacterial-laden soil of a trench or No Man’s Land, so he’s being jostled every time he’s moved, and who knows what’s happening inside his body?” Banks said.Combat stress affected everyone

Crile also studied the effects of stress on the body, resulting from prolonged exposure to combat. The surgeon once wrote: “I have observed soldiers in the trenches show unusual lines of strain upon their faces, giving them the appearance of being from five to ten years older than their actual ages.”

“Crile saw that in any kind of sustained warfare, the body is put through a tremendous amount of physical stress. Which he believed was linked to neurological stress,” Banks said. “What Crile is really, in a sense, stumbling on is the precursor to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).”

But Crile and members of the Lakeside Unit weren’t immune to the psychological impact of war.

One unit member, Sgt. Robert Shrimplin, of Cleveland, wrote home: “It surely is pathetic to see these fellows when they come in, covered with mud and blood, and yet with few whimpers or apparent pain.”

Nieves noted that among the unit personnel, “sometimes they found it very difficult because, of course, they saw a lot of young men being severely injured, and there were injuries we had never seen before.”

Nurses were advised “not to become too attached to some of these young men because chances are they’re not going to survive,” Nieves said.

Even Crile “did get emotional when he came back to Cleveland in 1915,” she added. “He did comment in his diary pretty much what you hear soldiers say today – You’re coming back to something to something that’s now foreign to you because you are not ducking and worrying about the next bomb exploding over your head.

“He definitely did feel there was a huge difference between what he had experience and what he was coming home to,” she said.

But, “I think he felt it was sort-of his duty,” she added.  For Crile and the Lakeside Unit, “it was a huge patriotic endeavor.”

Cleveland Clinic Fire 1929

1. Chapter on the 1929 Cleveland Clinic Fire from “To Act as a Unit” The Story of the Cleveland Clinic

The link is here

 

2. From the Ohio Historical Society

A catastrophic fire at the Cleveland Clinic in 1929 impacted fire-fighting practices and hospital procedures in Ohio and across the United States.

On May 15, 1929, the main building of the Cleveland Clinic caught fire. The fire began when an exposed light bulb was too close to some nitro-cellulose x-ray film, igniting the film. In the end, 123 people lost their lives. Eighty of the dead were either patients or visitors at the clinic, and the rest were employees. One of the Cleveland Clinic’s founders, Dr. John Phillips, was among the dead. Most of the victims died from inhaling poisonous gases produced by the burning x-ray film.

Investigators found that the clinic was not to blame for the tragedy, but the Cleveland Clinic fire influenced major changes at both the local and national levels. The city of Cleveland decided that fire departments should receive gas masks as part of their equipment and advocated creating an ambulance service for the city. Nationally, medical facilities established new standards for storing hazardous materials such as x-ray film.

 

Cleveland Clinic Origins

From the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

The link is here

The CLEVELAND CLINIC FOUNDATION (incorporated February 5, 1921) is an independent, not-for-profit academic medical center engaged in patient care, research, and education. In 2005, it was the second-largest private medical group practice in America, including 1,400 physicians in 120 medical specialties and sub-specialties, serving more than a million patient visits a year. Founders GEORGE W. CRILE†, FRANK E. BUNTS†, WILLIAM E. LOWER†, and JOHN PHILLIPS†, served in the LAKESIDE UNIT, WORLD WAR I in World War I, and fashioned the Cleveland Clinic on the military model of cooperative medical specialties. Returning from the war, they recruited JOHN PHILLIPS as a fourth founder, and built and dedicated (1921) the first Cleveland Clinic building on EUCLID AVE. at 93rd Street. To provide “better care of the sick, investigation of their problems, and more education of those who serve,” they set aside a portion of the institution’s revenues for research, and other non-income producing activities. The Cleveland Clinic added a 184-bed hospital to its outpatient facilities in 1924. On May 15, 1929, nitrate-based x-ray films ignited in the original building, releasing poisonous fumes; 123 people died, including Dr. Phillips (see CLEVELAND CLINIC DISASTER). Despite losses from the disaster and the stock market crash, the institution stayed afloat on the good will of prominent Clevelanders, and the large surgical practice of Dr. Crile. It expanded greatly after World War II, focusing on specialized medicine. The Cleveland Clinic Research Division investigated kidney disease, blood circulation, and artificial organs, including the artificial kidney. Researcher IRVINE HEINLY PAGE† made key discoveries in hypertension. Cleveland Clinic physicians, researchers and nurses pioneered enterostomal therapy, dialysis, and kidney transplant, and were first to identify carpal tunnel syndrome and isolate serotonin, all before 1960.

The Cleveland Clinic gained a national reputation in cardiac care beginning with the discovery of cinecoronary angiography by F. MASON SONES† in 1958. Over the following thirty-five years, the Clinic built one of the largest and busiest heart practices in the world, with 300 hospital beds, and – per 2005 statistics – more than 200,000 patient visits a year. Heart surgeries totaled 8,121 in 2003, including a national record for a single hospital of 120 heart transplants in 1998. (A national lung transplant record of seventy in a single year was set by the Cleveland Clinic in 2004, with survival rates well above the national average.) As of 2005, the Cleveland Clinic performed more valve surgeries (2,254 in 2003) than any center in the world. In cardiac research, Eric Topol, M.D., and Qing Wang, Ph.D., made the world’s first discovery of a gene mutation associated with heart attacks and familial heart disease. Historic surgeries at the Cleveland Clinic include pioneering coronary artery bypass grafting by Rene Favaloro, M.D. in 1967, and the first successful larynx transplant by Marshall Strome, M.D. in 1998.

The Cleveland Clinic operates one of the nation’s largest post-graduate medical education programs and was an early advocate of continuing medical education for practicing physicians. In 2004, it opened the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, with a curriculum devised by Cleveland Clinic staff to train physician investigators.

In the mid-1970s, the Cleveland Clinic made long-range plans and began acquiring land for future use. By 1986, it owned nearly all the land (about 140 acres) within the boundaries of East 88th and East 105th Streets and Chester and Cedar Avenues. In 1985, a $185 million dollar expansion added a signature outpatient building (the Crile Building, designed by Cesar Pelli) and a new hospital building. In 1988, the Cleveland Clinic became the first academic medical center to establish full-service hospital and clinic facilities beyond the borders of its home state, founding Cleveland Clinic Florida, in Weston and Naples, Florida.

Floyd D. Loop, M.D., chairman and CEO from 1989 to 2004, nearly doubled the Cleveland Clinic’s physical plant and number of patient visits. A successful capital campaign in the late 1990s financed the construction of the Lerner Research Institute (1998), Cole Eye Institute (1999), and Taussig Cancer Center (2000). The Surgery Center was built on Carnegie Avenue, and a seventeen-bed level III neonatal intensive care unit opened in 2001. The construction of two new on-campus hotels, in addition to an existing facility, brought the Cleveland Clinic’s lodging facilities for patients and visitors up to three.

Foreign heads of state, government officials, sports figures and celebrities have been cared for at the Cleveland Clinic. Interdepartmental collaborations include the Digestive Disease Center, Brain Tumor Institute, and Center for Functional and Restorative Neurosciences. The Cleveland Clinic Glickman Urological Institute is the largest and most specialized urology practice in America; the Children’s Hospital at the Cleveland Clinic provides care for all pediatric disorders; the Mellen Center at the Cleveland Clinic is the largest center exclusively for multiple sclerosis treatment and research in the country; Cleveland Clinic Sports Medicine provides team physicians for the CLEVELAND BROWNS, CLEVELAND CAVALIERS, and CLEVELAND INDIANS. The Cleveland Clinic assists in-house invention and entrepeneurs through CCF Innovations, its technology transfer arm.

The Cleveland Clinic began providing services to the SUBURBS through twelve family health and ambulatory surgery centers, beginning in INDEPENDENCE (1993), and adding Willoughby Hills, WESTLAKE, SOLON, Strongsville, Lorain, Wickliffe, Brunswick, Wooster, Lakewood, Beachwood, and Chagrin Falls through the 1990s. The Cleveland Clinic Health System consists of eight community hospitals (Euclid Hospital, Fairview Hospital, Hillcrest Hospital, Huron Hospital, Lakewood Hospital, Lutheran Hospital, Marymount Hospital, South Pointe Hospital), along with two affiliates (Ashtabula County Medical Center and Grace Hospital). Formalized in 1997, the system is Cleveland’s largest employer and the third-largest employer in Ohio, with 33,000 employees.

Delos M. Cosgrove, M.D., was appointed chief executive officer and president of the Cleveland Clinic and Cleveland Clinic Health System in 2004. In 2005, the Center for Genomics Research was dedicated.

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