Submitted for consideration of publication in Current Surgery

                                                                        DRAFT:         10/18/03

Victor Paul Satinsky – Renaissance Doc

Marjorie A. Satinsky, MBA, FACHE

President, Satinsky Consulting, LLC

 

 

 

Although the surgical community and television audiences knew Victor P. Satinsky, M.D. as the inventor of the Satinsky clamp used in vascular surgery, his family and the many students he influenced know him as an unusually gifted individual who touched our lives in many ways.

Victor Paul Satinsky, or “Uncle Vic” as our family knew him, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1912. His parents were David Satinsky and Anna Purcell Satinsky. David had emigrated from Russia to join other family members who were already here. He was the lone entrepreneur in a family where most members were kosher butchers, and he invested in both movie houses and textile markets (1). Both David and Anna died when Vic was six, and two aunts and uncles shared the responsibility for raising their orphaned nieces and nephews. My grandparents cared for Vic and two of his brothers. Another brother and Vic’s sisters lived right next door with another aunt and uncle. There were 19 Satinsky cousins under these two roofs – enough for two baseball teams and much mischief.

My father and Vic were the same age, and so as children they considered themselves the Satinsky twins. They called themselves Victor Alex and Alex Victor, to the dismay of their teachers, who always confused them. From an early age, Vic’s inquisitiveness and creativity stood out. He used to say that when his mind soared, as it always did, my father was the gyroscope that kept him grounded.

By age 15, Vic had already distinguished himself as an adolescent with a poetic bent. Ardent love poems to a fellow high school classmate prompted the young woman’s mother to forbid her daughter from all future association with Vic, going so far as to remove her daughter from Vic’s class. Vic’s penchant for verse lasted well beyond his teens and became a life-long passion. On his eighty third birthday, just a year before he died of lymphoma, he wrote the following Limericks for Eighty-Three:

I am a man who just turned eighty-three
And one who loves life so desperately
For a birthday gift
And a real uplift
I’d like a re-run of my history.

Ah, life, some people will say
Is a prison in every which way
Thought not guilty of crime
I’ll do double time
For I love every single day!

Its nice to have reached eighty-three
With a life full of joie de vivre
And I own that I’m greedy
And remarkably needy
Of stretching chronology.

Today I’m eighty-three
Not a very nice place to be
For I say in all truth
I prefer my old youth
But I can’t fight chronology.

At least I reached eighty-three
And I’m glad that was meant to be
But I’d put up a purse
For the digits’ reverse
And thus place old age behind me.

Vic’s life was as rich and full as his poem proclaims. At age 19, he was featured in the local newspaper when his overzealous fencing resulted in a stab wound. He entered University of Pennsylvania in 1930 without a clear idea about the direction his career would take (1). His Uncle Jules, already a physician, convinced him that medicine would be a stable profession and therefore less vulnerable to the economic trauma that the country had experienced in the Depression. Vic received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1934 and a medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in 1938. He did a general internship at Mt. Sinai Hospital (later the Southern Division of Albert Einstein Medical Center). As his interest in surgery burgeoned, he worked as a house surgeon with Harry Koster, M.D. at Crown Heights Hospital in Brooklyn, NY. He later credited Dr. Koster with teaching him the importance of surgical simplicity and efficiency (1). Following his time in New York, he returned to Mt. Sinai for two more years of surgical study.

Vic served in the Army during World War II and distinguished himself both on and off the battlefield. As a lieutenant in the 34th General Hospital Division stationed in England, his main job was to assist Lieutenant Colonel William B. Schaefer, M.D. in surgery. Shortly after D-Day, Lt. Colonel Schaefer opened the chest of a wounded soldier, discovered a piece of shrapnel in that man’s heart, and was prepared to give up on removal of the foreign body when Vic intervened. With Vic’s encouragement, the commanding officer successfully removed the foreign body. Vic’s interest in cardiothoracic surgery was born. Vic’s ingenuity extended to his troop ship as well. Upon discovering that the ship had Protestant and Catholic chaplains but no Rabbi, Vic rose to the occasion and took to the pulpit. Years later at family Passover seders, he entertained us all with his original melodies and quick wit.

Following his discharge from the Armed Forces, Vic had opportunities to join the surgical faculties at both the University of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann Hospitals in Philadelphia. Encouraged by his close friend and cardiologist William Likoff, M.D., he selected Hahnemann in order to work with Charles Philamore Bailey, M.D., chief of thoracic surgery at that institution. Dr. Bailey’s support for surgical innovation and heart surgery in particular offered Vic a fertile environment for discovery and experiment. Between 1946 and 1954, he concentrated most of his clinical efforts on cardiothoracic surgery (1). He worked briefly in California and he returned to Philadelphia to become research director of Hahnemann’s cardiovascular institute from 1961 through 1977. During that time, he was credited with 30 major medical innovations, including both operational procedures and improvement in existing techniques. One of the procedures he helped develop through experiments in the 1960s was the coronary bypass. The famous Satinsky clamp is now a standard instrument used in vascular surgery.

Although most of Vic’s work in cardiothoracic surgery was done in Philadelphia, he also made his mark on the West Coast. During the five year period when he was a senior staff member and Director of Cardiovascular Research at Temple Hospital in Los Angeles, CA he developed a close friendship with the late actor Walter Matthau and an acquaintance with Hank Greenberg, the baseball player. Our family memoirs include correspondence to Vic from them both.

Vic’s numerous hobbies and interests included painting, playing the clarinet, and roller-skating. He wrote not only poetry but also plays that were produced in London. At age 80 he earned a black belt in aikido and eventually taught it to others (2).

Vic often said that although orphaned at an early age, he had been raised to give back to the community, and he did just that throughout his long career and into retirement. Human creativity fascinated him. He himself was a remarkably creative individual, and he nurtured creativity in others (4). While still a practicing heart surgeon, he taught himself psychiatry and then served as Hahnemann’s associate dean and director of the institute for human resource development. That institute included 40 programs for groups such as college dropouts, gifted students, underachievers, and children and adolescents with emotional problems. After his retirement from Hahnemann in 1977, he formed the Satinsky Institute for Human Resource Development, a private academic high school licensed by the Pennsylvania Board of Education and designed to help gifted, but underachieving adolescents. Under Vic’s guidance, students received therapy to remove emotional blocks to learning and were encouraged to take courses at their own pace. Many Institute graduates who have become successful professionals often credit Vic with cultivating the spark of success within them.

Just as our large family influenced the course of Vic’s life, he influenced our lives and those of his many students. Many members of the Satinsky family are in the healthcare field today. All of us had an outstanding role model, a man with many talents and the boundless energy to pursue them all. Vic’s words of advice to us and to all his students reflected extraordinary optimism. To him there was no such thing as a mistake. He regarded failure as an attitude and often reminded us that everything in life is an experiment.

References

  • Eisen, M.D. and Brayman, K.L. (2000). Victor Satinsky (1912-1997) and the success of his partially occluding vascular clamp. Transactions & Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. V: XXII, December 2000 (87-104).
  • Keiles, S. (1991). The city is his campus. Special to the Jewish Exponent, Philadelphia, PA, August 30, 1991, 1X – 3X.
  • Satinsky, V.P. (1991). Creative thinking in the 1990s. Edited transcription of an extemporaneous address presented at the reception honoring Hal Abrams on October 17, 1991.
  • Wallace, A. (1997). Victor P. Satinsky, 84, innovative surgeon. Philadelphia Inquirer, September 13, 1997.

The author wishes to thank the following family members and friends for sharing their insights and memories: Beverly Cohen, Jonathan S. Satinsky, George Teplik, M.D.