Robert K. Stoelting, M.D.

highlight of this year’s ASA Annual Meeting will be the presentation of the Distinguished Service Award, our Society’s highest recognition, to Robert K. Stoelting, M.D., on Monday, October 25, just prior to the Emery A. Rovenstine Memorial Lecture at the Las Vegas Hilton. He was named the 2003 recipient of this prestigious award at last year’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California.

Dr. Stoelting matriculated as a freshman at Indiana University in Indianapolis in 1957, graduated from Indiana University School of Medicine in 1964, did his residency at the University of California School of Medicine-San Francisco and then served as a Clinical Associate in Anesthesia for two years at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Heading back to his roots, Dr. Stoelting joined the faculty of the Department of Anesthesiology at Indiana University School of Medicine in 1970 and became Professor and Chair of that department in 1977.

Dr. Stoelting has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, authored the textbook Pharmacology and Physiology in Anesthetic Practice, co-authored the textbooks Basics of Anesthesia and Anesthesia and Co-existing Disease and co-edited the textbook Clinical Anesthesia. He also served on the editorial board of Anesthesia & Analgesia from 1974-84 and was a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Anesthesia Research Society from 1975-93. He was a member of the editorial board of the Year Book of Anesthesia from 1983-94 and served as editor-in-chief of Advances in Anesthesia from 1982-92.

As a diplomate of the American Board of Anesthesiology, Dr. Stoelting participated in the Board’s certification process as an Associate Examiner from 1974-02. He was elected a Director of the American Board of Anesthesiology in 1980 and served as Secretary-Treasurer from 1989-91 and President in 1992. Dr. Stoelting was a member of the Residency Review Committee for Anesthesiology from 1983-89 and served as its Chair in 1988-89. He was appointed to the Anesthesia and Life Support Drugs Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration in 1984 and served as that committee’s Chair from 1986-88.

In 1994, Dr. Stoelting was elected ASA Vice-President for Scientific Affairs. He was re-elected to this office in 1995 and 1996. In 1997, Dr. Stoelting was elected President of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF), and on June 30, 2003, he retired as Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at Indiana University School of Medicine to serve full-time as APSF President in Indianapolis, Indiana.

My own appreciation of Dr. Stoelting’s contribution to anesthesiology gelled at his 1990 Rovenstine Memorial Lecture. The take-home message was that we should never lose our zeal for being students. Reading selected papers from Dr. Stoelting’s curriculum vitae made me his student — it rekindled my interest in basic physiology, refreshed my knowledge of fundamental concepts and taught me a thing or two that were brand new.

For example his 1969 paper with Edmond I. “Ted” Eger II, M.D., on second gas effect is a classic — a simple, elegant, original and empirically verified explanation of why the alveolar concentration of a less soluble gas, halothane, for example, rises at a faster rate when it is given on top of a more soluble gas such as nitrous oxide than when it is given alone. The key here is Dr. Stoelting’s “concentrating effect” — one of those ideas that is so simple and so clearly correct that I found myself saying, “I could have thought of that.” Of course I did not, and neither did anyone else. In a similar vein, again as Dr. Eger’s resident, Dr. Stoelting figured out the relationship between anesthetic gas solubility and rate of recovery from anesthesia, another obvious-once-you-think-about-it kind of idea whose time had come but whose vehicle for discovery had just arrived.

I do not have space to mention even a substantive fraction of Dr. Stoelting’s many articles and book chapters, but let me describe just one more because of its unique design. When Dr. Stoelting and his colleagues wanted to find out if it mattered whether protamine is administered by a five-minute infusion or by rapid injection at the conclusion of cardiopulmonary bypass, they faced an ethical dilemma. They believed, and it turned out correctly so, that rapid injection would jeopardize their patients. Dr. Stoelting again came up with an ingeniously obvious solution: six patients and 12 dogs. They gave the people and the first six dogs a five-minute infusion, got exactly the same benign hemodynamic result and then gave the second set of dogs a rapid injection, obtaining a clear and clearly deleterious hemodynamic effect.

The only difficulty with giving the Distinguished Serviced Award to Robert K. Stoelting at this juncture in his career is that his future contributions as APSF President may warrant yet another Distinguished Service Award before he actually retires. But never mind — we will decide how to handle that in 2024!

James E. Cottrell, M.D., is Chair, Department of Anesthesiology, Downstate Medical Center and Distinguished Service Professor, State University of New York, Brooklyn, New York. He is ASA Immediate Past President.