Surgical Amphitheater, Lane Hospital

Demonstration in surgical amphitheater at the dedication of Lane Hospital, January 2, 1895

• Levi Cooper Lane, Professor of Surgery and President of the College
• Emmet Rixford, Adjunct to the Chair of Surgery
• Stanley Stillman, Adjunct to the Chair of Surgery
• Adolph Barkan, Professor of Ophthalmology, Laryngology, and Otology
• R.H. Plummer, Professor of Anatomy
• T.C. McCleave, member of the class of 1896, student assistant to Dr. Lane
• Bertram F. Alden, first graduate interne at Lane Hospital, 1894 graduate
• Patrick O'Neill, patient

A public reception was held on January 1, 1895 for the opening of Lane Hospital. To mark the formal opening, the next day Dr. Levi Cooper Lane performed an operation and delivered an address to the students and faculty of Cooper Medical College. This operation was conducted in the surgical amphitheater which was considered one of the most valuable features of the new hospital. Blueprints of the hospital indicate that the amphitheater was a structure somewhat separated and behind the hospital. Newspaper accounts at the time described the amphitheater:

Its floor, at the sub-basement level, is the center of an amphitheater which will seat about 250. The amphitheater is connected to the hospital by a passage. Patients in the hospital may be placed on the operating carriage, transferred by elevator to the sub-basement level, then wheeled through this passage into the amphitheater where the necessary operation may be performed in full view of doctors and students.

The skylight allowed for plentiful natural light though the operating room was also lighted by gas and electricity.

The patient, Patrick O'Neill, had previously had a cancerous growth removed from his left cheek by Dr. Lane. This operation "was to demonstrate the possibilities of plastic surgery in the cosmetic repair of the residual deformity."

Following the operation Lane delivered an address. He opened with references to the "annals of antiquity," citing the Greek and Roman practice of embarking upon important enterprise with an address. He then cited Hippocrates and summarized what he believed to be the traits of the physician: "love of work, patient attention to details, ability to control one's self, as well as the whims and freaks of the patient, an exhaustless fund of the sunlight of cheerfulness to dissipate the clouds of melancholy which often surround the patient, and a flexibility to meet and provide for exigency and emergency." He then discussed his philosophy of medical education and care as well as the role he saw for the new hospital.

Many years later the Dr. Lane's student assistant wrote to the alumni bulletin.

Sir: ...I am the fellow standing between Dr. Lane and Dr. Barkan. ...Dr. Lane for many years had a practice of taking a student as an assistant, such students usually remaining with him throughout their entire courses of study in the college if all went well. I was so fortunate as to be one of these students. On the opening of Lane Hospital, Dr. Lane moved his office there and I went along, living in the hospital during my senior year in college and the following year. I graduated in 1896, in December, in which month the college year then terminated. ...The period was a transitional one in San Francisco medicine and my long association with Lane gave me the interesting opportunity of knowing most of the older men of note on their way out as well as the new men coming up, Stillman, Rixford, Cheney, and many more who became themselves leading medicos of the West.
--Letter to the Editor, Stanford Medical Bulletin, V.1, n.1 (May 1942) p.17.

See also

• An Address delivered at the opening of Lane Hospital , January 2, 1895 by Levi C. Lane
• Dr. Wilson's Stanford University School of Medicine and the Predecessor Schools: An Historical Perspective , Chapter 26
• T.C. McCleave, Inaugural dissertation on surgery in Lane Hospital, a report of three months work, with illustrative cases