hen I became chair of anesthesiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) on April 1, 1994, I was fortunate to receive an appointment as the Alfred Habeeb Chair of Anesthesiology. The Alfred Habeeb Endowed Chair in Anesthesiology was established and funded in 1992 by friends of Alfred Habeeb, M.D., who was a pioneer anesthesiologist in Birmingham and who remains an esteemed leader in the Birmingham community.

The UAB anesthesiology faculty and I recognized the vital importance of endowed chairs and professorships for an academic department of anesthesiology. Endowed chairs and professorships are invaluable tools in the recruitment and retention of talented faculty, and they help to ensure the long-term stability of a department’s academic programs. During the last 11 years, we have been fortunate to establish and fund two additional endowed chairs and four endowed professorships in the UAB Department of Anesthesiology, which now gives us seven endowed faculty positions. To put this in perspective, $1,500,000 is needed to establish an endowed chair, and $500,000 is needed to establish an endowed professorship at UAB.

In 1997 we established the Benjamin Monroe Carraway, M.D., Endowed Chair in Anesthesiology in honor of the late Benjamin Carraway, M.D., a prominent Birmingham surgeon who performed pioneering clinical research in the use of sodium thiopental. William Lell, M.D., Professor of Anesthesiology, holds the Carraway Chair.

In 1998 we established the Alice McNeal, M.D., Endowed Chair in Anesthesiology in honor of the late Alice McNeal, M.D., who was the first chair of anesthesiology at UAB. Sadis Matalon, Ph.D., Professor of Anesthesiology, holds the McNeal Chair.

In 2001 we established the Edward A. Ernst, M.D., Endowed Professorship in Anesthesiology in honor of Edward Ernst, M.D., who was chair of the department from 1978-89 and who, arguably, was the architect of the department as it currently exists. Margaret Tarpey, M.D., holds the Ernst Professorship.

Also in 2001, we established the Simon Gelman, M.D., Ph.D., Endowed Professorship in Anesthesiology in honor of my predecessor, Simon Gelman, M.D., Ph.D., who served as chair of the department from 1989-92, and who helped to establish the strong research programs that exist in the department. Timothy J. Ness, M.D., Ph.D. holds the Gelman Professorship.

In 2003 we established the William A. Lell, M.D./Paul N. Samuelson, M.D., Endowed Professorship in Anesthesiology in honor of William A. Lell, M.D., and Paul N. Samuelson, M.D., who together have led our department’s cardiothoracic anesthesia division for the last three decades. Both Drs. Lell and Samuelson remain full-time faculty in the department and continue to provide strong clinical and academic leadership. A search to fill this professorship is in progress.

In April of this year, the department endowed a professorship in honor of Maurice S. Albin, M.D., who joined our UAB faculty in 2002 after having previously served on the faculty of medical schools at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Texas at San Antonio. Dr. Albin has an international reputation as one of the pioneers in neuroanesthesia, and he has performed important research that focused on spinal cord cooling, venous air embolism, and cerebral blood flow and metabolism. In 1981 Dr. Albin published a landmark paper on the positioning and use of a central venous multiorifice catheter for the aspiration of air during venous air embolism. Dr. Albin has served as president of both the Society of Neurosurgical Anesthesia and Critical Care and the Anesthesia History Association. He is one of the co-founders of our department’s Section on the History of Anesthesiology, which is the first section of its kind in the United States. In 2004 Dr. Albin gave the Lewis H. Wright Memorial Lecture at the ASA Annual Meeting. We are so pleased that we are able to honor Dr. Albin in this way.

Maurice S. Albin, M.D.

How did we fund seven endowed faculty positions over a 13-year period? Generous contributions from outside the department certainly helped. For example the Habeeb Chair was funded almost entirely by friends of Dr. Habeeb, and Carraway Methodist Medical Center generously contributed half of the funds required to establish the Carraway Chair. The bulk of the funding, however, resulted from the hard work and good stewardship of our department’s clinical faculty, which allowed us to transfer funds from the University of Alabama Health Services Foundation (i.e., the faculty practice plan) to the university. I am grateful to our faculty for their vision and their commitment to the academic mission of the department.

David H. Chestnut, M.D., is the Edwin Overholt Director of Medical Education for the Gundersen Lutheran Medical Foundation in La Crosse, Wisconsin.