Good morning, I just want to welcome all of you to Louisiana. I'm going to give you a short talk about the history of Louisiana neurosurgery and I'm going to be very ably assisted by my colleagues in New Orleans. Dr. Frank Klick here, LSU New Orleans, and Dr. Aaron Dumont from Tulane. I'm of course up in the medical school in Shreveport. And we want to take you on a little bit of a historical voyage off Louisiana neurosurgery. What makes it click? What are the wonderful characters that add richness to its culture and its history? And how we came about in this place that was sort of French and Spanish and had so many influences and so much history that neurosurgery could evolve and germinate in its soil. Peter Genetta came here as a young chairman and made enormous advances in our specialty. Charlie Wilson was a young chairman in New Orleans and again went on to be an iconic presence in neurosurgery. And the list goes on. David Klein was the legendary chairman and I think his seminal contributions and what he did during Katrina, just from a heroic point of view, was amazing. So these are sort of the giants that many of us mere mortals, we sat on their shoulders and we could see much further because of that. In 1876 in Shreveport, they had the first hospital, sort of the charity hospital. Then in 1903, they made a bigger one. And then in 1956, this present day hospital was referred to the Confederate Memorial Hospital. It's not a very politically correct term now and then it became the LSU Health Sciences Center. It's now the University Health Center. Governor Jindal privatized these hospitals. The person that I think was sort of the transformative leader here was Dr. Don Smith. He's my senior partner. He runs the VA right now and we always tease that he has sort of Solomonic wisdom. He has the wisdom of Solomon. He's an amazing surgeon and he trained at Walter Reed, served in the Air Force, and then he came here from George Washington. Bob Rosenwasser was born in Shreveport. He went to undergrad here, went to this medical school, then went to Philadelphia and is chairman of Jefferson. Art Day, who was chairman at Harvard, was born here, went to medical school in New Orleans, but had strong local roots. And then I think Ed Benzel really put this place initially on the map. He was here for eight years and he set up the division so that the soil was set with some good talent. I came here in 1990 and Dr. John McDonald is this larger-than-life southern gentleman who was a chairman of surgery and he recruited me, calls me up and I said, you know, you want a Hindu boy and his Yankee wife in the Bible belt? Are you nuts or something? And I didn't know where Shreveport was. Maybe it's in the Gulf. Maybe we can windsurf there. Laura and I did not know where the place was. We ended up here. And you know how it is. I told her we'd be here two years. We ended up being here 27 years. As a surgeon, you know, after your kids, your residents are the most important things in your life. And I think as an academic neurosurgeon, your raison d'etre is residents. The history of our department actually goes back to 1931 when Gilbert Anderson was appointed as an assistant professor of clinical surgery in neurosurgery. Around 1942, Dr. Guy Odom, who was actually the brother of a local physician who was the coroner for Jefferson Parish, worked at Charity Hospital in LSU for a relatively short period of time after completion of his training at the Montreal Neurological Institute. He was then recruited pretty quickly out of New Orleans to Duke where he had a very illustrious career. The first full-time hire in the department actually was a section at the time, was Dr. Charles Wilson. He had just completed his training in neurosurgery at the Tulane program under the direction of Dr. Dean Eccles. He was a very talented surgeon, but Dr. Cohn, who was the chief of surgery at the time, thought Dr. Wilson should be supervised by the local private practice group that was working at Charity Hospital. Dr. Wilson and that group did not see eye to eye very often, and what came next was quite a surprise. Dr. Cohn released Dr. Wilson from his duties and began a search for a new head of the section of neurosurgery. Dr. Cohn invited Dr. Peter Gianetta who had just completed his training at UCLA in neurosurgery. He came to New Orleans in 1967 as the section chief of neurosurgery and the first chief of neurosurgery full-time at LSU. He soon recruited Dr. David Klein to join him. Dr. Klein had just completed his training at the University of Michigan. Dr. Klein trained many, many residents and fellows over the years and relinquished his position as department chair in 2006. LSU was in dire straits and had been notified by the residency training program that they were in jeopardy of losing their entire program, so they needed a rapid shot in the arm with cases since Charity Hospital was closed. We had a very large private practice group that we basically turned into the academic group and brought it over to LSU and began our training program with the residents. It could have been very easy to shut it down, it could have been very easy to move on to other places, and we didn't shut it down. We made it bigger and we made it better. People today talk to us about, how are you recovering from the storm? There's no recovery left. We're in growth. Recovery ceased a long time ago. Our program was founded in 1946 and is one of the ten original training programs for neurosurgery in the United States. It was started by Dean Eccles, who was chair at Tulane University. He trained under Max Peet at the University of Michigan and really was a prominent neurosurgeon. Before me, Dr. Donald Richardson was chair of neurosurgery at Tulane University and director of the training program. He was significant because he really was a leader and pioneer in the field of stereotactic and functional neurosurgery, as well as neurosurgery for pain management. He was doing DBS procedures before DBS electrodes were commercially available and really did some very clever and innovative work in the area. I took over as chair of neurosurgery at Tulane in June of 2013. Because we have a combined training program with Ochsner, the Ochsner leadership during that time was Dr. Wally Suleman, and now the current chair of neurosurgery and the program director of our residency program is Dr. CJ Bui. Some of the unique features about it are that it's a dual institution training program that has really experienced unprecedented growth. I think at this point we have 16 faculty members, 11 residents, and are doing over 3,000 cases each year. Other luminaries of the training program include Dr. Rayburn Llewellyn, who is chair at Tulane, Dr. Frank Colicchia, who is the current chair of LSU Department of Neurosurgery, and of course Dr. Charles Wilson, who is a long-term chairman at the University of California San Francisco, who has done so much for neurosurgery and also has been a very big supporter of our program. I'm an insufferable optimist. I think Louisiana will produce great surgeons that will help across the country and make a difference.

Louisiana neurosurgery

history

influential figures

training programs

future optimism