Donald G. Anderson

Donald G. Anderson

1975-08-17

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Oral histories

Donald Grigg Anderson (1913-1995) served as Dean of the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry from 1953 until 1966. Anderson attended Phillips Exeter Academy (1926-1930) and received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University (1935). His medical degree was earned at the College of Physicians & Surgeons (New York) in 1939, and he completed his medical training as a research fellow at Boston University School of Medicine between 1943 and 1945. Anderson was appointed dean of the Boston University School of Medicine at the age of thirty-two, but left after two years to become executive officer of the American Medical Association’s Council on Medical Education. In 1953 Anderson succeeded George Whipple as dean of the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry, a position he would hold until 1965. He continued on the faculty of the School of Medicine and on the staff of Strong Memorial, and in 1973 he was appointed Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine. He retired in 1978. (adapted from the finding aid for the Anderson Papers, Miner Library website)

59 minutes

Thompson, LaRoy B.

LT: Good morning, Don.

DA: Good morning, LaRoy.

LT: I'm LaRoy Thompson, Senior Vice-President and Treasurer of the University. And I'm going to interview you about the term in which you were Dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry, and this will be like old times, since we worked together very closely. As you recall, I was Director of Research Administration at the time you were appointed, and as such I had quite a bit of experience with the workings of the Medical School, particularly in their research activities, and had some University-wide responsibilities. And I suppose I'm doing the interviewing not only because we worked together so closely in those years, particularly in the early years of your tenure as dean, but also because I guess I'm about the only one in University administration that's still around.

Now you were appointed the second Dean[3] of the University School of Medicine and Dentistry; you were appointed in 1953 and served until 1966. You were at a very young and tender age at that time, age of thirty-nine when you were appointed but you had a great deal of background. You were the Executive Officer of Council on Medical Education and Hospitals of the American Medical Association[4] and a former Dean of Boston University Medical School[5]. Educated first at Exeter, Phillips Exeter Academy[6], which rings a bell with me because I went to school at a competing institution, which will go unnamed [laughs] –

DA: Tilton Academy[7].

Tilton Academy, thank you. Then you went to Harvard, graduated from there in '35. Then to Columbia Medical School College of Physicians and Surgeons, where you received your MD degree in 1939. Perhaps we could start out by asking you to comment on your early training, your early education and in particular, on when you decided you wanted to be a physician, when you decided you wanted to go into medicine, and what the motivations were at that time.

DA: All right, but let me just say that I am Donald G. Anderson, in case it [laughs] that doesn't come across. And Roy, I think maybe in addition to the reasons you mentioned why we're having the interview to me one of the most important reasons, the important reason, is that during all my deanship you were the single person who was most helpful to me. Now I've said this privately many times and I said it publicly at the time I retired from the deanship of the Advisory Board meeting, that I've never encountered anyone in administration who approaches problems so constructively as you do, and always seeking an answer. And your sensitivity to the problems and the needs of the Medical School is tremendous and so that it was, as I think people can tell from our nonverbal communication, we've had a really happy friendship over a period now of twenty-five years and one that I value and treasure and one for which I am tremendously grateful, and I could go further but I don't want to embarrass you, so – [laughs]

LT: Well, I appreciate those remarks very much. That's very nice and it's certainly a very mutual feeling. Uh –

DA: Well, I think I should be rather brief; I think I had an excellent education at Exeter, and at Harvard. And when I went to P&S, I was going to probably one of the two or three very best medical schools in the United States. And as I look back on it, I realize that for the time, I – the times, I got an excellent medical education.

While I was there, I was very distressed with the approach to the student. And P&S, like most of the schools of its time, was guilty of of really a pedagogical approach, if you want to use that term more suitable for high school or grammar school than for graduate study. I'm contrasting the approach to teaching a pianist with the approach to teaching at Harvard College. Big step backwards. And I was sufficiently distressed about – this is where most of my classmates and others in school at the time – that when I became President of the Student Council in my senior year, I asked the dean if I could approach the – present to him and to the executive faculty on behalf of the Student Council a critique of the school's program. And they very graciously permitted us to do that, listened very attentively, and I think we got some ideas across. But I was – after that – well, I never expected after that I would ever have any opportunity to do anything about the things that I was concerned about in medical education. But when the opportunity came along and I was offered the chance to be Dean of the Boston University School of Medicine six years after I left medical school. I was defenseless and vulnerable [smiles] and or vulnerable and defenseless, because of my interest that I'd had at P&S.

So that's what got me into medical education. I still think of myself, and always have, first as a doctor, then as a teacher, and only in a very subsidiary way [laughs] as an administrator. In fact I don't like to be referred to as an administrator. "Administration" implies someone who is setting up rules and regulations and seeing that they're carried out. Well, I never looked at myself as that was my role. I looked at my role as being the sort of leader of the team of colleagues on the faculty, and it was my job to help them identify, define what their problems were, what their opportunities were, and then to help work out ways of finding answers to the problems, taking advantage of our opportunities. And you approached administration in the same way; that's why we got on so well. [laughs]

LT: Yes. That's why we worked so well together.

DA: Yeah. So that's really boiling it down, how I got to Rochester.

LT: Don, when you were appointed dean of our medical school that must've been something that you thought very long and deeply about, and I think it would be interesting to have your comments on how you saw the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, what you thought the strengths were, some of the weaknesses, the areas in which you might make improvements. It really was quite a challenge to you, I'm sure, to be only the second dean of the Medical School and as much as the first dean really built the school from from scratch, he still had many of his eminent department chairmen here. He was a Nobel Laureate he had started when the school was very small and not very complicated and it had kind of, over his tenure, outgrown the simple method of administration and operation, and you must have seen many of these aspects and had some of your own goals and your own plans for what you wanted to accomplish as dean. Would you comment on that?

DA: Well, while I was with the Council on Medical Education of the AMA, I had a chance to visit – in fact, I suppose, survey or inspect, as the term used to be – well over half the medical schools in the United States, so I had a pretty good idea. I'd seen the best, I'd seen the worst, I'd seen the ones in between. And I might say that, my last year or two there in the Council, I was approached by quite a number of schools to come as dean. But I've decided that I didn't want to go to a school unless I was sure that it there was some chance of accomplishing some of these objectives that I've hinted at earlier. And I saw in Rochester the very real chance to help foster the kind of educational program that I believed in. Rochester had its great tradition of quality; it had its fine tradition of good relationships between faculty and students; it had its excellent basic facilities; it had its fine resources, very substantial resources with promise of more yet to come, and, at the same time, after I'd been here for several visits and talked with members of the faculty, I could see there were enough things that needed to be done that it constituted a challenge to come and try to do them, and that there were the resources here to accomplish them. So it was a really a good growth stock, I guess is the way we would determine. [laughs]

LT: A real opportunity.

DA: I felt – that's the way I s – appraised it. And I've never regretted the the decision.

LT: Don, one of the very first things that I recall that that you tackled was a very delicate matter but one of great interest to faculty: namely faculty salaries and the faculty compensation plan. I think it's – it was clear then and it's certainly clear now, looking back, that faculty salaries in the Medical School had fallen. They were slipping behind and there was not a clear-cut plan that everyone understood, that was out in the open, and people followed having to do with private practice income and other sources of income in addition to the University's salary for the faculty members. And as a result of that, there was a great deal of misinformation, that because there wasn't a formally established plan each department thought the other department had a somewhat better understanding or perhaps were simply going ahead on their own. So this was a – not only an urgent matter but a very delicate one that you faced up to fairly early on, and I think it'd be interesting to hear your comments on that.

DA: Well, you're absolutely right, Roy, it was a crucial problem that had to be settled before we could hope to make any progress. Faculty salaries were unbelievably low. And, I think . . . people had been willing to tolerate that for a long time because the facilities here were so excellent and the opportunities to work were so good. But then as other institutions began to acquire comparable facilities after World War II one couldn't count on just your facilities and the environment to hold people. And it wasn't fair, obviously not fair to these distinguished scientists.

The first problem was to find out actually what the professors' salaries were. There was no accounting system, central accounting system, that had any record. And people were paid from a variety of different funds. And as I said in – quite in sincerity – and it wasn't a joke – the only way you could find out what a professor's salary was to go and ask him. Nobody in the University, nobody in the Medical School knew. And when I did go and ask them, I found they were distressingly low.

And so one of my very first moves was to begin to improve salaries. I will just mention so some people have some example, Dr. Whipple had limited his own salary to ten thousand dollars a year! And he'd been offered another three thousand dollars as a supplement to – for his deanship. And – which he never took.

LT: He turned it down, yeah.

DA: One of our most brilliant scholars, head of one our most distinguished departments, salary was seven thousand dollars a year. This was in 1953!

Well so, then there was the problem of how to handle for the clinical departments fees from private practice. But let me – I'm sort of jumping around a little bit – let's go back and say first of all – with your help and the help of Ruth Hemenway[8] and Ray Thompson[9] and other – number of other people – we got down on paper what everybody's salary was, where it came from, and saw what the picture was. And so starting from there we began to make improvements as fast as we could in impro – in increasing the salaries.

Then, more importantly and more difficultly – well, not more importantly but more difficult was the problem of how to handle private practice income. We were supposedly on the so-called Harvard Plan, where a clinician was allowed to match his basic salary with fees from practice and then turn over any excess over that in to the University. But each department, as you suggested, had its own way of determining what was the matching income. Some departments simply took the gross. Let's say a man's salary was eight thousand dollars and when he's taken in fees of eight thousand dollars, everything over that was overage. Other departments said that it only became overage or matching after you had deducted all the man's professional expenses.

LT: All the expenses.

DA: Some went so far as to say even after you deducted all the taxes applicable to the sum –

LT: Income tax.

DA: And the kinds of things that some departments thought were allowable expenses, it differed greatly from what other departments. So it was truly a chaotic situation. And I think where it threatened us most was in our – any effort we might make to bring new people onto the faculty. There was no way we could tell them clearly what they might expect, what they were entitled to, what our customs, practices were. And, you know, no one is going to come and take an important job if he can't get clear answers –

LT: This is what made it so crucial to have a –

DA: Right. Very crucial.

LT: – place to –

DA: So I did what I did throughout the rest of my time as dean: I discussed this openly and fully with the Advisory Board. And I might say one of the first things I did when I came here was to arrange to have the Advisory Board meet its stated monthly – have stated monthly meetings with an agenda published a week ahead so they knew what was going on. We met, as you recall, the last Wednesday of each month. So I brought a – put the facts on the table for the Advisory Board to see, gave them all a chance to discuss it; they all agreed it was an impossible situation. Something had to be done.

And so I appointed a Committee on the Compensation Program, we called it. And they worked – it took them two years. They gathered information from all the other schools – well, not all the others, but many other schools, particularly schools of our own type. And from that, came up with a statement of how – what levels of compensation should be considered for the different faculty ranks, and how such things as royalties from books, lectures, fees from private practice should be handled. And it was – we tried to keep it simple. We kept it on an honor basis; there was to be no surveyance, auditing, and so on. We assumed we were all honorable gentlemen. We would abide by – once we agreed on a set of rules we would abide by them. And this is what happened. The Advisory Board adopted this, the central University administration approved it, the trustees approved it, and it went into effect, and I'm very happy to say that only one member of the faculty left because of the introduction of this comp – out of several hundred members, now.

LT: And that's really remarkable –

DA: It really is.

LT: – that so many people had come under certain kinds of understandings that many of which I suppose were at some variance with the plan as it was finally worked out.

DA: And in most schools where such a plan has had to be introduced, it has often caused a tremendous upheaval, even an explosion, because of the number who are dissatisfied. Now we were lucky. First of all, I think it was handled well. [laughs]

LT: Yes.

DA: The faculty handled it well, I think the administration handled it well, and I think it reflects credit on everybody.

LT: Well Don, this leads me to another –

DA: But let me just say we were very lucky, Roy, as you hinted, that salaries were very low. So when we introduced the compensation program we were able at the same time to increase almost everybody's salary. So nobody was being hurt. And they were being brought up to proper levels.

LT: That makes it much easier to –

DA: It helped a lot, there's no question.

LT: – to get acceptance.

DA: Yeah.

LT: And I think another part that helped was that we had published some guidelines for salary ranges, as I recall, for the various professorial levels. And that gave some credence to the faculty who could read the compensation plan and know what their salary was in relation to the published ranges.

DA: Yes, we pub – I think, as I said, one of the things I tried to do was keep everything open. And we printed up in a very attractive booklet form [laughs] of this program and we distributed it to every member of the faculty and he could see just exactly what the rules were.

LT: Now, Don, this brings me to another aspect of your tenure as dean that I think is particularly important: namely, your concept of the of the deanship and your relationship to the faculty, to the administration, to trustees; the way you went about the administration of the Medical School, which was quite significantly in contrast with the previous deanship, when Dean Whipple had a much smaller, less complicated school with much less support from the outside government agencies with rules and regulations. But I think you brought to the administration of the Medical School a sense of participation, the morale improved, and so on. But I shouldn't be telling you that. I think this was your concept of what good academic administration should be.

DA: Yes. Well, first of all, I think nothing that I say about what I did should be any way construed as criticism of how Dr. Whipple handled things. As you've pointed out, a totally different set of circumstances. Totally different. And what would be – what was quite appropriate for – in Dr. Whipple's tenure would not have been appropriate in my tenure and probably quite vice-versa. And I might just say in passing one of the – you mentioned wasn't I a little bit awed at coming to trying to fill, or step into, not fill, Dr. Whipple's shoes. I was. At the same time I decided, right from the beginning, I would have to be myself. There would be no point in my trying to be a second Dr. Whipple even if I could be or to act like him or so on. I had to be myself. And I talked this over with some of the key members of the faculty and I said, "I'm going to be myself. I'm going to do things my way. My own way." And they said, "That's the only way you can do it." So we were all – they were ready for someone that would do things [laughs] differently.

Well, I would say in a nutshell I – there was an important transition made when I became dean from essentially Dr. Whipple's running the school as he had to a more investing – what should we say – developing a corporate type of organization in which really it was the faculty, with myself as their leader as dean, who developed all of the policies and plans and so on, programs, within the Medical School. And I also felt that it would be very important for us to be closely identified and associated with the University as a whole because one could easily see that much of the strengths of the medical school the good medical schools, came from the strong backing that they got in many ways from the university's basic science departments: physics and chemistry and biology and genetics. And good effective university administrative resources in accounting and investments and all the things that you need, building and grounds. So I was very happy to I could see it was to our advantage to work very closely.

So that was really my I haven't, you know, I haven't touched on all facets of it, but I think that gives a hint as to what my concept of the deanship was.

LT: Well, it also came at a time when the rest of the University was changing, going through a certain amount of maturation and development, and in many ways, the – some of the administrative policies and procedures and just the way of dealing with a complex organization were used as models for the rest of the University. That to that extent there was a good deal of rub-off to the advantage of the River Campus and Eastman School.

DA: I've always y'know, one of the things I think we did was open the eyes of certain people, [smiles] at least in the University, to the needs for these things and in fact I've often ticked them off, the things that got started over here. First personnel department. The first really strong buildings and grounds department. The first good accounting system. The first good security program. Before there was really anything – purchasing department. There were a number of what now have become central University functions –

LT: Yeah. Which were first established –

DA: – first established here and then taken over – or modified or adopted or copied or what you will, depending on the situation – by the University.

LT: Well I'm sure the University has benefitted greatly from the Medical School and from your taking the leadership and meeting the increasing complications, the increasing requirements, the kind of reporting that we were increasingly forced to do, and I don't mean forced in the wrong sense, it simply hadn't been required before; it was something that now became necessary but something that we should've been doing.

DA: Well, let me make – say two things. I think credit for getting many of these – some of these things started really has to go to the hospital. Because they had greater need for such services many years before other parts of the Medical Center or the University had need. The fact that they were running a service operation that had to go seven days a week throughout the year, twenty-four hours a day, they had to have strong purchasing or at least a purchasing department, employment department, and so on.

The other thing I'd like to say was that your own office [laughs] was a very well-organized office, University-wide and I guess Henry Meadow[10] started it, did he?

LT: Yes. He was the first coordinator –

DA: And then you succeeded him as the director of research administration and despite the chaos and confusion that I referred to a little while earlier in accounting and other areas, all the research monies were beautifully accounted for from day one by your office and by you. And that was a tremendous help to us in our dealings with the NIH and other granting agencies when we could – they were always completely satisfied with fiscal accounting of the accounts they got. And I think at times we were – we have the – established the record of being the first university to ever turn back some money that we got through an NIH grant.

LT: Were we the first one?

DA: Yes. Maybe the only one. [laughs] I know when I used to go to Washington they'd say, "Oh yes, Rochester. You turned it back some money to us once." [laughs]

LT: That probably created a real problem for them down there. [laughs]

DA: Well, it has helped establish –

LT: They didn't know how to handle it.

DA: – our reputation, our line of credit, and as you know ten years later in the sixties, a lot of schools were on the carpet because –

LT: Oh, were in real trouble.

DA: – because they couldn't account for where their funds – we were never – never had that problem.

LT: Well, being director of research administration was a very fine position to hold because we had and continue to acquire eminent scientists and eminent researchers so that it was easy to get support for them, relatively easy in comparison with other schools. And we also were small enough so that we could establish centralized procedures for the handling of funds and accounting for them, and we did get off to a good start by Henry Meadow's foresight in establishing appropriate ground rules.

Don, let me shift a little bit to more substantive academic program in terms of some things that occurred while you were dean, such as there were several new departments that were created. And there were some very key departmental chairmanships that you were responsible for. One for example, was Lowell Orbison[11] in the Department of Pathology, who in fact succeeded you as dean. But would you care to comment on some of this?

DA: Certainly. I had the benefit – I'd like to make the point of this – of a critique that the Alumni Association had made of the school a year or two before I arrived. The Alumni Association had only been organized in the very late forties or early fifties, but they were a bunch of bright, eager graduates who had been around and while they greatly valued Rochester and held it in highest esteem, they knew, as with any school, there were places where it could be improved. And they made a number of recommendations in this report which I guess was drafted maybe six months or a year before I arrived. But very shortly after I arrived, a group from the Alumni Association –

LT: [laughs] Is that so.

DA: – called on me and made sure that I had a copy. [smiles] Well, it was an excellent report. And they pointed out the need for, for example, a department of pharmacology, which had up to that time had really been just a stepchild of biochemistry and radiation biology. They pointed out the need for a department of preventative medicine and community health. We'd had no program real program in that field. They pointed out the need for a program in rehabilitative medicine, and a number of other things. And I took this report, as I said earlier, I took most matters, all matters really, to the Advisory Board and said, now, how about this? What do you think about it? And they agreed that these were holes that should be – gaps that should be closed.

So we did. We went – we established the Department of Pharmacology, the Department of Preventative Medicine and Community Health, a Division of Rehabilitation. We Division of Dental Research was created as a department of the Medical School instead of sort of a free-floating division without much opportunity to have a voice in its own destiny. Even nursing, which had been a school or hospital school of nursing, became a medical school department of nursing before it became an independent School of Nursing in the University[12]. Paved the way for that. And...

LT: See, it also brought in a program of nursing on the River Campus, through the University College[13].

DA: Well, yes, that had been set up quite separately but it was brought into the Department of Nursing.

And I think one of the other things that I'd like take some credit for is the fact that I really brought the Atomic Energy Project – known as the Department of Radiation Biology at that time; it's had its name extended now[14] – into the – really into the academic fold. They had felt very much outside the Medical School. They felt they were in an appendage even though they were a tremendous appendage. [laughs]

LT: I think this is probably a carryover from wartime when it was classified –

DA: It was. Right.

LT: – and heavy security, and it took a surprisingly long time to –

DA: That's exactly –

LT: – move that into the school, but you were very successful in that. It now is a full-fledged department along the same basis as other departments and has had just a splendid record of graduate students that have been trained, and that aspect was something that was new because during the war, of course they had to stick to the military problems.

DA: Some other things we did in this area, I – we paved the way for the development of the Department of Neurology, although Dr. Joynt[15] was actually appointed until after I – the year after I left the deanship but we recognized that would have to – we were going to get some –

LT: The departmental concept had been approved under your regime.

DA: Yes. And then the thing we did was we established most of the surgical specialties on an academic basis. They had really been stepchildren of the Department of Surgery. They were divisions, but when I came the budget for ophthalmology, ear, nose, and throat neurosurgery plastic surgery; if you may recall, for each of them the University budget was one thousand dollars a year. [laughs] One thousand bucks. That went –

LT: There was no discrimination at all.

DA: There was no discrimination.

LT: They all got a thousand dollars.

DA: That went to head of the department, who was practicing specialist in his field, as an orthopedic surgeon. I think there was a little difference in orthopedic surgery but the others got one thousand dollars a year. And they didn't get a secretary, they didn't get anything. In fact, they bought a lot of their own equipment. And slowly, with the help of Merle Scott[16] during the time he was Professor of Surgery, we found space and budget to put these departments on an academic basis, to appoint full-time heads of the departments, to give them research space, to give them whatever kind of technical support and clerical support they needed to become academic units.

LT: And some are now academic departments, like orthopedic surgery.

DA: And they've gone on to become departments.

LT: Right.

DA: Logical development. So these are some of the areas where I think we made a lot of progress.

LT: Don, you also personally made a very real contribution to the University in at least two areas of – that I've recall, even though initially they were not in the Medical School. They were on a – either on a University-wide basis or got their start on the River Campus. I'm referring of course to the Center for Brain Research[17] and then Space Sciences[18]. But let's start with the Center for Brain Research.

DA: Well, actually, I think the real credit for my efforts in that field go to George Engel[19]. Because when Roy John[20] was in the Department of Psychology and was getting going with what became the Center for Brain Research. He felt that he wasn't getting, I guess, all the recognition, support, et cetera that he needed from the Department of Psychology. And so he approached the University – I don't remember who – with the proposal that there be established a separate Center for Brain Research. And George Engel in our Department of Psychiatry – and who's been head of our Psychiatric-Medical Liaison Group for so long and has such a distinguished record in that field – came to me and said "Are you aware of this?" I said, no I wasn't. And then he went on to tell me about the importance of what a Center for Brain Research could do in terms of the whole advancing field of human biology and particularly medicine and particularly mental health. And he said, "I hope that you'll throw your full support behind this." So I went over and had many conferences with Roy John; I was fascinated by what he was doing, what his hopes were. And when I found that no one else in the University was really ready to take the leadership, I did take the leadership, approached the dean – I mean the President – and eventually, at his request, the trustees –

LT: The Board of Trustees?

DA: – and told them that I thought this was something the University should do. And I was very gratified they did.

LT: Yes, it certainly has turned out very well, and I'm not sure you're aware of this. Other times when the trustees were being approached to create a new program to put some up-front money, as we say the example of the Center for Brain Research was usually given, because the – what turned out to be a relatively small amount of money put up by the University as an investment to get it started paid off very handsomely in terms of the external funds that that group was able to attract to the University.

Now, another area which got started a little bit differently and which you played a very important role was the field of space sciences with the ultimate establishment of the Center for Space Sciences.

DA: Well, that was interesting. I found myself in the early sixties appointed to what was called a White House Committee on Bioastronautics. I didn't know anything about bioastronautics but I had – I was at that time president of the Association of American Medical Colleges and they wanted someone speaking for the medical schools on this panel. And there was a heated debate at that time in Washington as to how far we should go with our space program, particularly how far we should go in terms of biological experiments as opposed to physical experiments, whether we should be using manned spacecraft or unmanned spacecraft. And the then-scientific advisor to the President, I've forgotten what it was – Wiesner[21] of MIT –

LT: Jerome Bert.

DA: – appointed this committee. And we met a great many times in Washington. And I had the great opportunity to meet some of the leading figures in space exploration and science. And I began to hear what some of the other universities were doing in the way of – in this field and I began to hear what the government was going to want in the way of centers for research in this area, and I came back to Wallace Fenn[22], who of course, y'know, his wonderful work in the high-altitude physiology was so crucial in World War II to our efforts in aviation. And I told Wallace what was going on; of course Wallace knew all about it from other channels.

LT: Other channels.

DA: And I said, "Why don't we get one of these space science centers!" And he said, "Don, I think we should!" So we joined forces and I've forgotten just how we did it but without too much trouble we persuaded the administration and the trustees we should have a space science center with Wallace as its head.

LT: Wallace was the first director of the space sciences.

DA: Yeah. So that's – I really was just a messenger boy in that, uh –

LT: Well, much more than that this really stimulated the interest of many others at the University and did culminate not only in the establishment of the center but actually a building on the River Campus, the Space Sciences Building in which we received a very large grant from the federal government to help meet the cost of that building. That was particularly important in those days. So that again, that's another example of how your contribution was on a very broad scale within the University, not just the Medical Center.

Don, there is another aspect of your tenure as dean that we really haven't touched very much on. Namely the one of community relationships. There were a number of things going on at that time: affiliations were established with hospitals[23]; we made some major changes in the municipal hospital which opened the door for our brand-new hospital[24]. Maybe you'd like to comment on some of your experiences there.

DA: I would but I want to move on after that if we can, Roy. I don't know what you have in mind but I would like to move on to our what we did in the way of long-range planning because –

LT: Yes, well, that would fit in very well with this.

DA: You're coming to that. Okay, fine.

LT: I was just leading up to that.

DA: All right.

LT: You're way ahead of me.

DA: [laughs] Because I do think that. Well, . . . I don't know quite how to deal with this briefly but it – let me put it this way. In the late forties the trustees of the Genesee Hospital[25] approached the trustees of the University; in fact, the men involved, Thomas Spencer[26] and Mr. Harper Sibley[27], were trustees of both institutions. And said, look, Genesee Hospital is not attracting to its staff the caliber of men it wants; can't you at the University give us some help. And I gathered that the University discussed this with Dr. Whipple and he was receptive to a very loose kind of affiliation in which the Medical School would take the responsibility of nominating to the Board of Trustees of the Genesee Hospital the heads of their major clinical services. Genesee Hospital in turn guaranteed to pay these men a reasonable salary so they could devote time to organizing their services and teaching house staff; giving them some quarters even, limited quarters for research. And that went into effect roughly in 1948 or '49. And immediately the Genesee Hospital sprang to the fore in – among the other hospitals in the community for the caliber of men who wanted to work on its staff, their ability to attract interns and residents, and the esteem in which it was held by patients.

So it was not unforeseen then, one might say, that in the late – middle fifties, the other hospitals, as they began to have problems similar in nature, approached us and I followed Dr. Whipple's lead on this from the start in saying that we would only go where we were invited and we would only do what we were invited to do. And one by one the other hospitals came. We got to know each other, we developed mutual respect for each other, and these very – we patterned our articles of affiliation on a very simple statement that was drawn up by Dr. Whipple and Genesee Hospital.

LT: Yes, those affiliation agreements are a masterpiece of a very short contract.

DA: Right.

LT: But they work. And that's the important thing.

DA: They worked. And so these affiliations, they blossomed and bloomed much more so since I left the deanship; I mean, they were coming along well but they've been much – the hospitals have taken much more responsibility for providing salaries and research space and now we are, of course, tremendously dependent on these hospitals for our teaching programs.

LT: So it's really a very close network.

DA: So I think, you know, goodwill prevails among all these institutions, unusual goodwill. Well –

LT: This really developed into a changing relationship between the Medical School and the community, not only the hospitals but the community generally, and it was during your term as dean that the Rochester Regional Hospital Council got very active in community-wide planning. Marion Folsom[28], one of our trustees, had spent some time in Washington on a couple of occasions.

DA: Secretary of H.E.W. [laughs]

LT: Secretary of H.E.W. as well as –

DA: Under-Secretary of the Treasury.

LT: Under-Secretary of the Treasury, um earlier than that. He headed up a group called the PCPC, Patient Care Planning Council. Now you were very much involved in the establishment there and the operation of –

DA: Well, I was involved in the sense, Roy, that I took an active part. I let the Rochester Regional Hospital Council know that as dean of the Medical School I thought what they were doing was important and worthwhile and had my support. I attend – I was a member of the Board of Directors and their Executive Committee and I attended their meetings, and in any way that I could be I was helpful to their effort. And the same –

LT: But that was extremely important because without that kind of support and sympathetic understanding and strong backing. Community planning without the support of the Medical School could never have –

DA: Well, it could well be. I thought it was – y'know, we were all in the same boat, it seemed to me, and we – it's clear now we are, with the way things have come about in the last twenty years in terms of government – state, local, national – all of – all hospitals in this region are in the same boat. I could see we were going to be in the same boat.

LT: Don, this brings us to the planning function –

DA: I just want to take care of the municipal hospital ‘cause you did mention –

LT: Oh yes, yes, please do.

DA: That was a very difficult situation because the relationship with the municipal hospital and the Medical School had y'know, had been one of the great accomplishments – achievements, whatever you want to call it – of the Medical School and the city[29], the fact that they'd been able to work together so closely from the opening of the Medical School. We were looked on all over the country as a model for the relationship between a medical school and a city hospital. And of course the credit for that goes primarily to Dr. Goler[30] but also credit goes to Dr. Whipple and to Dr. Kaiser[31] and a great many – and Dr. Rhees[32] and a great many other people.

And this worked beautifully until about the mid-1950s, when the cost of running the municipal hospital really became more than the city's tax structure would permit it to bear. And this was happening all over the country, but it came as a great shock to us because we thought we had this very fair contract. We thought that it was working so much to the advantage of both the city and the University that the city should have any misgivings about continuing it, it came as a shock. But we used to meet with Mayor Barry[33] and others regularly around the table, and it eventually became clear that there was just no way the city could finance it any longer. It – you know, just before the war, if I remember correctly, the per diem costs of the municipal hospital were five dollars a day. I think in the early fifties they were something like nineteen dollars a day. At about that time, per diems began to go up and I think when we broke off they were still under – I'm sure they were under a hundred maybe even under fifty dollars a day; this was about 1960, I think.

Well, to get to the point, we finally said we understand the situation and we will take it over on the understanding that the County Welfare Department now will pick up much of the tab of what the city had been picking up, by our billing the Welfare Department for individual patients. Previously the city – the indigents went into the municipal hospital; nobody billed them unless it was clear they had some money. The city just made up the –

LT: They just picked up the –

DA: – picked up the cost.

LT: – operating deficit.

DA: So – but it was crucial to us to have them give us the hospital and the land that it was on because when the original affiliation was agreed to, of the sixty acres that I think makes up the Medical Center tract[34], we had deeded to the city twenty-six acres to the east of here – the land on which the new hospital now stands, the new Eastman Dental Center[35], the Goler House[36], and so on – for any purpose they wanted to use it. So that they would never be hemmed in if they built their municipal hospital as part of the original Strong, two wings on it. So they had to have that guarantee that if they ever wanted to split off from us, and have a separate institution, they had the land on which to develop.

LT: They had the room to grow.

DA: On the other hand, by 1960, if we had any prospects of meeting our needs for space, we had to have acc – we had to own that land. So we arrived at a very amicable agreement. And it would've been terr – a tragedy if it had gone otherwise.

LT: In many ways it was fortuitous that both interests were in the same direction. And this had a very major bearing on our ability to plan physical space to meet the most pressing needs.

DA: I don't know what we would've done. I don't know what –

LT: We certainly wouldn't have the kind of hospital that we have today. As you recall, we were talking about trying to squeeze a hospital in between Q Wing and R Wing. Instead of the parking lot and that – there just was none.

DA: And we were in the airport lane[37] so we couldn't have gone up in the air. I mean, we would've – I don't know what we would've done. Probably have to go to some other site.

LT: Very possibly.

DA: Probably, if we hadn't gotten that land. Well, I wanted to talk about long-range planning because I think from the very beginning of my time in the deanship I tried to have my eye on the years ahead. I was looking ahead fifty to a hundred years to the point you can look that far. Not in detail but in principle, certainly looking ahead twenty, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years in terms of maybe more detail. And Harold Hodge[38] was very helpful. He came to me early on and said, "Don, you know, we're going to need to do a lot of building here in the next many years." I said yes. He said, "Wouldn't it be helpful if we had a master site plan where we, at least tentatively designated certain areas for certain buildings or functions?" And I said, "Harold that's a great idea." Instead of our just putting up a wing here and a little outhouse there [laughs] and a little this there –

LT: And then finding later that it was the wrong place to be.

DA: Yeah. So with your help particularly, we finally got – we made a couple of false moves but we made some progress; we were – did a lot of thinking. We finally got the Ellerbe Architects to come in and help us develop both the site plan and the basic plans for the GG Wing and the O Wing and the S Wing and the new hospital. And we had something then that we could look at, both on paper and actually three-dimensional models, scale model. And we could see what the place might look like and what the limitations were and what the opportunities were. And I think that in general that site plan, with one or two exceptions, has been adhered to very closely since it was drawn up.

LT: Yes, I'm not even sure the exceptions but it certainly –

DA: Well, Goler House and the Eastman Dental Dispensary were not in it.

LT: Yes, that's right.

DA: But that space was for future –

LT: We did not really foresee those, uh –

DA: Right.

LT: – those developments at that time.

DA: But the, uh –

LT: But by virtue of plan and the conserving of the ground space, we were able to meet those unexpected opportunities.

DA: The other thing which is really – you know, I hope we haven't talked too much nuts and bolts for those who may want to see this tape behi – y'know, budgets and buildings and things, site plans and so on, are all for just one purpose: to make it possible to carry out a good program. And I want to come back, and I know you would too, to the fact that this was our concern all the time. Are we giving our students the best opportunity to develop and become mature, competent, and compassionate physicians. Are we giving our faculty the opportunity to carry out the research, to do the stimulating kind of teaching that they want to do. And all of these were just means – the budgets and buildings are just a means to those ends.

LT: A means to an end.

DA: So I'm going to probably have to be [looks at watch] guess I'm going to have to boil this down very quickly –

LT: Don, let me just say that you think that one of the things that you have managed to do, with all of the major changes that have been made in the Medical School, you've been able to preserve the fine traditions of – that you inherited, so to speak.

DA: Yes.

LT: And that has taken a great deal of doing and you may want to comment on some of those. I think this has been one of your goals.

DA: Well, that was one of my goals. Rochester is an outstanding institution, as I've said earlier, with fine traditions and I wanted to be sure that I could do everything to preserve and if possible strengthen these traditions. I'm just going to mention the Committee of Six[39] because I think we've only got a minute or two. With all the fine things about Rochester I have to acknowledge it was a very conservative institution. And I must say there were quite a few here when I came who were mu – more than conservative, they were very complacent. And so to get things moving was really a tough job. And I won't go into all the details but after a number of – I won't say false starts but not-to-effective starts, we finally got the Committee of Six appointed in the early – about 1960 with authorization to come forward with a sweeping plan for the development – future development of the school's programs. And with my proposal that the preclinical departments elect three members and the clinical departments name three members to that committee and that I appoint a chairman, and I appointed Lowell Orbison as chairman he having been elected as one of the preclinical departments. And they came up with a really excellent plan; I just have always felt sorry that the faculty wasn't willing to adopt that in its whole – entirety.

LT: In its entirety.

DA: It had to be cut back and modified substantially, both before it was adopted and before the implementing curriculum committee program was adopted. I think we lost a great opportunity then to become – attract much more notice for what we were doing in the way of innovative things in medicine. Things that needed to be done, not gimmicks but things that needed to be done. But we did the best we could under the circumstances.

You spoke about department chairmen; I must say that I think back, that I had the privilege of participating in the appointment of a number. The two that come right to my mind. Larry Young[40] in medicine, who I think did an outstanding job; we canvassed the country; if we had two hundred candidates we had twenty-five people come here; when we were all through, we said we don't have anybody better than Larry. And he did I think a magnificent job taking over a department. The other appointment that I'm particularly happy about was that of Lowell Orbison in Pathology; he became an outstanding figure in the school immediately, re – highly regarded by faculty, by students, and, while no one ever asked me, he would've been my choice to succeed me [laughs] as dean, but I had no voice in that.

LT: Well, it went about the same way as Larry Young. We looked all over the country and finally found we couldn't find anybody better than Lowell Orbison so again, we appointed one of our own and that too has worked well. But it was you who brought Lowell Orbison here to begin with from Western Reserve[41] as I recall.

DA: It was.

LT: Don tell us a little bit about about your family and what they have done, and in particular what you are going to do now. I understand you're leaving for a warmer climate but I'm assuming the –

DA: Well, we're going to try a warmer climate. I don't know. We're going to try a warmer climate. Well, of course, I first got to know Rochester through my wife, my first wife, Dr. Erna Anderson[42], who, as you and I both know, tragically died of a brain tumor four years ago. And we were classmates at PNS. And in those days I wanted to intern in Boston. She wanted me to intern in Boston; Boston wouldn't accept women as house officers. The closest she could get in a good appointment – because she was at the top – practically at the top of her class – to Boston was Rochester. So while I was interning at the Boston City she was interning in medicine here at the Strong. And when I used to come over here almost every other weekend for twelve-hour, twenty-four hour visit, during that time I got to know many of the people who later became my colleagues. I met Dr. Whipple, I met Dr. McCann[43]. So that it was that –

LT: So Rochester was well-known to you.

DA: Yes. We have three children our oldest is Patricia, who went to Mount Holyoke and graduated with high honors in chemistry and taught high school science until her husband[44], who's a Ph.D. physicist from Rochester and an American, went abroad and for additional training at the École Polytechnique in Paris and then eventually got a permanent appointment at the University of Nijmengen in Holland and so they've lived abroad now for the last twelve years. My second child is my daughter Roberta, known as Bonnie, who went to Stanford and married a classmate at Stanford[45] and went to Harvard Medical School.

LT: It must be very satisfying to you to have had your your children continue in the way of –

DA: And I have my son James, who went to Harvard and was in the Marine Corps as an officer for three years and then graduated from law school and is now practicing law in Boston. So that's, uh – now, as you know, I should mention that I did remarry; I married[46] Hermine Teute, otherwise known as Rusty Teute to many of the people in the University –

LT: She was an alumni of the University?

DA: An alumni of the Eastman School and this has been a very happy solution too.

LT: How about your plans for the immediate future I'm sure you're going to remain active. Active professionally.

DA: Well, we're leaving our options open at the moment. Lowell Coggeshall[47], a former dean of the University of Chicago and one of my good friends, he retired a number of years ago to Alabama. And he liked it so well down there that I went down and looked it over several times and decided – we decided we'd like to go down there. And so we were going down there; first establish ourselves there and what we do after that I don't quite know.

LT: Well, as usual you're keeping the options open.

DA: Yeah.

LT: And I think that's a characteristic of what you've done for the school and for the University and doing in your own life. Don, it's been a great pleasure talking with you; it's just like old times. There are just so many things that we haven't covered but I think we've covered many of the major events. It's certainly something that I look back on with a great deal of satisfaction and enthusiasm. I just feel very very pleased that I had the chance to work with you. It's been very –

DA: Roy, I'm – as you know, I will always be grateful for the tremendous support you gave me, right from the start, you were the one person I knew I could always count on.

LT: Thank you.

DA: You had the answers too! [laughs] I'd say you had both the answers to the problems and you were willing to help solve them.

LT: Well, working together, I hope that we made it a better University.

DA: It was great. I hope so.

LT: And we've enjoyed it.

DA: We have.

[shake hands]

LT: Very best to you Don.

DA: Thanks Roy.

[Recording ends]

Transcript by Eileen L. Fay (April 2014)