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July 1997
Volume 61 |
Number 7
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Lewis H. Wright
Memorial Lecture:
Donald Caton, M.D., to Discuss 'Feminists and Early Development
of Obstetric Anesthesia' |
Kathryn E. McGoldrick, M.D., Chair
Lewis H. Wright Lectureship Committee
Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology
The Lewis H. Wright Memorial Lecture, sponsored annually by the
Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology, honors its namesake, an
indefatigable pioneer in American anesthesiology who was devoted
to enhancing the stature of anesthesiology as a clinical science
and medical specialty. A dynamic innovator, Dr. Wright was a founding
member of the Board of Trustees of the Wood Library-Museum and,
in later years, served as its President-Emeritus. He was also
a founder of the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists
in 1955, working in close collaboration with Harold Griffith,
M.D.
This year's distinguished Wright Memorial Lecturer is Donald
Caton, M.D., Professor of Anesthesiology and Obstetrics/Gynecology
and Chief of the Division of Obstetric Anesthesia at the University
of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, Florida. His lecture,
titled "Feminists and the Early Development of Obstetric
Anesthesia," will be delivered during the ASA Annual Meeting
on Tuesday, October 21, 1997, at 1 p.m. at the San Diego Convention
Center, San Diego, California.
Born in Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1937, Dr. Caton has an impressive
academic background, having received his bachelor of science degree
from Yale University and his medical degree from the College of
Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, New York, New
York. Dr. Caton then trekked south to the University of Virginia
in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he completed an internship
in internal medicine in 1963. Military service, however, interrupted
Dr. Caton's postgraduate training, and from 1963 to 1965, Dr.
Caton served as a General Medical Officer with the United States
Navy in Taiwan. He then returned to the University of Virginia
for his residency in anesthesiology. As a Josiah Macy Foundation
Fellow, Dr. Caton returned to New Haven and joined the Department
of Anesthesiology at Yale in 1967. The following year he remained
at Yale as the distinguished recipient of a Special Postdoctoral
Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health. In 1969, Dr.
Caton brought his formidable talents to the University of Florida
College of Medicine where he has loyally remained to this day.
During his illustrious career, Dr. Caton has made meaningful
contributions to such important concerns as regulation of the
uteroplacental circulation, delineation of physiologic perturbations
associated with pregnancy, fetal monitoring, the effects of inhalation
agents on uterine muscle and noninvasive determinations of cardiac
output during pregnancy and delivery. A superb educator, Dr. Caton
has thrice received the Haven M. Perkins Award for career contributions
to the education of anesthesia residents, and he has lectured
extensively in such distant venues as Cambridge, England, and
Dundee, Scotland.
During his undergraduate years at Yale, Dr. Caton enrolled in
a course highlighting intellectual history; this sparked what
was to become his abiding fascination with the past and its influence
on the present. A decade later, while he was completing his NIH
Fellowship, Dr. Caton, with the encouragement of the eminent Nicholas
M. Greene, M.D., focused his keen interest in history on the evolution
of obstetric anesthesia in particular. Indeed, Dr. Caton is the
author of an illuminating book, What a Blessing She Had Chloroform:
The Medical and Social Response to the Pain of Childbirth From
1800 to 1960, to be published later this year by Yale University
Press.
Dr. Caton, moreover, has served with dedication and distinction
since 1989 as a Trustee of the Wood Library-Museum. He has perspicaciously
pointed out that "History is too important to leave to historians"
(ASA NEWSLETTER 1994; 58(9):20-21). Although medicine has
always had its historians, the early medical historians were usually
physicians. This situation, however, began to change about 50
years ago when university departments engaged historians to teach
the history of science and medicine. This involvement of professional
historians transmogrified the character of medical history and
brought limitations as well as benefits.
In a positive vein, historians serve to remind us that the practice
of medicine is not simply a technical tour de force impelled solely
by scientific discoveries. Rather, medicine is shaped by cultural
values as well as political, economic, geographic and social factors.
It is critical, Dr. Caton believes, to retain the human element
in the history of medicine and, especially, in the history of
anesthesia. Preserving and transmitting the human as well as the
scientific and technical traditions of anesthesiology has been
the mission of the Wood Library-Museum and of Dr. Donald Caton.
It is no mere coincidence that Dr. Caton will be delivering his
illuminating discourse in 1997, the 150th anniversary of the administration
of the first modern obstetrical anesthetic by the Scottish obstetrician
James Young Simpson, M.D. The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology
is honored to have Dr. Donald Caton - an extraordinarily gifted
clinician, researcher, educator, historian and, yes, poet - as the
1997 Lewis H. Wright Memorial Lecturer.
Kathryn E. McGoldrick, M.D., is Professor
of Anesthesiology at Yale University School of Medicine and Medical
Director of Ambulatory Surgery at Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven,
Connecticut. She is a Trustee of the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.
E-mail the author.
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