Our History

The Minnesota Academy of Medicine

In October 1887, a small group of doctors from Minneapolis and Saint Paul founded the Minnesota Academy of Medicine. They shared the desire for an organization that advanced medical knowledge rather than the professional or economic interests of its members. The advent of antiseptic surgery particularly inspired these men to embrace the boundless promise of new developments in scientific medicine.

The founders of the Academy were doctors of broad experience and training. Some had served as surgeons in the Union Army during the Civil War; others received their training from former army surgeons. During the Civil War, army surgeons had organized hospitals, enforced sanitary measures, and dealt with epidemics. They had also treated immense numbers of wounds, with limited success.

Two years after peace descended at Appomattox in April 1865, Joseph Lister reported to the British Medical Association on the antiseptic treatment of compound fractures and other wounds with carbolic acid. Although British and American surgeons were slow to accept antiseptic surgery, based as it was upon the germ theory of disease, German surgeons became firm believers in antiseptic surgery from their successful use of it during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Antiseptic surgery did not reach Minnesota until the 1880’s. On October 21, 1882 at the Minnesota College Hospital in St. Anthony (the former Winslow House Hotel), Frederick Dunsmoor successfully removed a large ovarian tumor from a young woman, using Lister’s antiseptic procedures. A few months later, young James Henry Dunn of Shakopee traveled to Germany for two years of medical study. At Berlin, Halle, and Vienna, Dr. Dunn was deeply impressed by the antiseptic treatment of surgical wounds. Even major wounds healed without inflammation or formation of pus, a thing then unheard of in Minnesota. The deadly surgical diseases, pyaemia, septicaemia, and erysipelas, did not occur. Dr. Dunn returned to Minneapolis in 1885 a firm believer in antiseptic surgery.

When the State Medical Society met at Duluth in June 1887, Dr. Dunn reported on sixty-one surgical operations that he had performed antiseptically without a single infection. Perry Millard of Stillwater, who had learned antiseptic surgery at Guy’s Hospital in London, reported on twelve operations for strangulated hernia performed antiseptically.

On the train returning to the cities from the Duluth meeting, George French of Minneapolis proposed to two colleagues riding with him that it was time to establish a select association of medical men. Three years earlier, Dr. French had helped to found the Unity Club, a small group of Minneapolis physicians who met at each other’s houses to discuss medical matters. After exploratory talks with Saint Paul doctors through the summer of 1887, sixteen doctors – nine from Minneapolis and seven from Saint Paul – met on Friday, October 7, at the West Hotel in Minneapolis to organize a new society to be called the Minnesota Academy of Medicine. The Academy was to be limited to twenty physicians from each of the two cities for a total membership of forty.

The first meeting of the Academy took place the following Wednesday, October 12. The twenty-three members of the new Academy again assembled at the West Hotel. They adopted a constitution, stating that the Academy was “for the purpose of professional research and for the association of medical men upon a basis of good fellowship, professional ability, and literary merit.” They elected as president John F. Fulton of Saint Paul and as vice president Amos Abbott of Minneapolis.

At the Academy’s second meeting on November 5 at the Hotel Ryan in Saint Paul, the thirty-three year old Dr. Fulton delivered a presidential address, remarkable for its vision. He referred to the extensiveness of medical literature and urged members of the Academy to have something to say and say it briefly. Clearly, he hoped that they would make real contributions to medical knowledge. He hoped also that the Academy would keep abreast of developments in medicine and even anticipate their future course. They should urge both the profession and the public “to accept the methods which are likely to be most fruitful.” Dr. Fulton recognized that specialties were emerging in medicine, but the specialist must be “well founded in the art and science of general medicine.” The purpose of the Academy was to bring together the various medical specialties for the advancement of general medicine. Finally, Dr. Fulton hoped that the Academy would stimulate among doctors an enthusiasm for medicine together with a spirit of chivalry, expressed in sympathy for the suffering. To a remarkable extent, through more than a century (117 years in 2004) the Academy has fulfilled its founders’ vision.

During the early years, the Academy held its monthly meetings alternately in Minneapolis at the West Hotel and in Saint Paul at the Hotel Ryan. Meetings began with dinner, after which members might present case reports or describe the results of new surgical operations. After 1900, the Academy met for several years in Minneapolis at the Minneapolis Club and in Saint Paul at the Minnesota Club. In 1911, it began to meet at the Town and Country Club on the western boundary of Saint Paul, easily accessible from either city. With occasional exceptions, it has continued to meet there ever since.

In 1888, a year after its founding, members of the Academy formed the founding faculty of the College of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Minnesota. In 1892, William Osler of Johns Hopkins came to speak at the opening of the new medical building on the university campus. At the university on October 4, he spoke under the title “Teacher and Student,” urging the need for teachers well-trained in the medical sciences and well-equipped laboratories for them to work in. The next evening, Dr. Osler dined with members of the Academy at the Minnesota Club in Saint Paul. They then went together to the Hall of Representatives at the State Capitol where Dr. Osler spoke to an audience of two hundred physicians on the question of the license to practice medicine.

Although membership in the Academy was limited originally to members from the Twin Cities, in 1888 the Academy amended its constitution to provide for ten associate members to be elected from the state at large. In 1890, William J. Mayo of Rochester was elected an associate member and gave an inaugural paper on surgery for periuterine and perityphlitic abscesses, that is, on appendicitis. During the next twelve years, he delivered a total of ten papers to the Academy. In 1893, his brother, Charles H. Mayo, also became an associate member and over the next decade delivered three papers to the Academy.

In 1893, Perry Millard, who had earlier moved from Stillwater to Saint Paul and was now dean of the College of Medicine and Surgery at the university, delivered a paper on intubation of the larynx, a procedure then used frequently in the treatment of diphtheria. At the end of his paper, Dr. Millard protested that too much time was spent at meetings on business at the expense of proper scientific work. He urged that an executive committee should handle Academy business and leave meetings free for scientific discussion; that became the Academy’s practice. Dr. Millard also advocated that the papers delivered at the Academy be published. During the early years, many papers appeared in the” Northwestern Lancet” and later in its successor, the “Journal-Lancet.”

During the 1890’s, the Academy began to play a role in the struggle against the spreading epidemic of tuberculosis, a leading cause of death in the state. After hearing a talk in 1894 by Thomas S. Roberts on the control of tuberculosis, the Academy recommended to the Minnesota legislature that in state asylums, hospitals, reformatories, and prisons, inmates with tuberculosis should be segregated. The Academy also urged public health officers to perform sputum examinations on patients suspected to have tuberculosis. At the urging of Henry Longstreet Taylor of Saint Paul, who had studied at Berlin with Robert Koch, the discoverer of the tubercle bacillus, the Academy recommended in 1900 the establishment of a state tuberculosis sanatorium to care for poor patients ⎯ a project realized in 1907 at Ah-Gwah-Ching near Walker, Minnesota. In 1913 the Minnesota legislature also provided funds for the creation of fourteen county tuberculosis sanatoria distributed throughout the state. At the Academy’s November 1914 meeting, George Douglas Head of Minneapolis discussed the existence of concealed cases of tuberculous infection, revealed by the tuberculin test, and S. Marx White urged the use of x-ray examination of the chest to supplement the tuberculin test.

During the early years of the Academy, successive secretaries, Richard Olding Beard from 1888 to 1902, Arthur Dunning from 1903 to 1912, and F. E. Leavitt from 1913 to 1919, recorded the minutes of meetings. When Harry P. Ritchie of Saint Paul became secretary in 1920, he recommended the appointment of Miss Goldie Creever as official reporter of the Academy’s proceedings for their publication in the “Journal-Lancet” and” Minnesota Medicine.” Miss Creever began work on April 11, 1921. In September 1922, Dr. Ritchie reported that the minutes were “in wonderful shape due to the splendid work of Miss Creever.”1 In 1924 the Academy elected her an honorary member. The following year the Academy deposited its records at the Minnesota Historical Society and each year thereafter Miss Creever added the year’s proceedings. She continued to record the minutes for forty-seven years, until her retirement in 1968. At the time of her retirement, the Academy gave her a trip to her ancestral home in Norway.

In 1922, Harry P. Ritchie spoke of the extraordinary character of the discussions at Academy meetings: “This selected body of men of broad experience and maturer judgment can and do present material in a critical and intimate way which is incomparable in its educational value….”2 As if to emphasize the truth of Dr. Ritchie’s words, in November 1923, L. C. Bacon described a woman suffering from myxedema,3 whom he had begun to treat when she was thirty-three years old with sheep thyroid obtained from a slaughterhouse in South Saint Paul. She was then past sixty and in good health. In April 1925, E. K. Geer showed a motion picture on the development of pulmonary tuberculosis in patients.4 The following September, in speaking of four Academy members recently deceased, Dr. Ritchie again referred to the value of Academy meetings, saying: “the opinions here expressed upon the merit and value of the methods for the curing of the sick and the relief of suffering are almost final.”5

During the 1920’s, Academy members from Rochester frequently attended meetings. In November 1925, the Academy held its monthly meeting at the Kahler Hotel in Rochester and in January 1926 three associate members, H. F. Helmholz, Donald Balfour, and H. Z. Giffin, came from Rochester to hear their colleague from the Mayo Clinic, H. F. Braasch, speak to the Academy on ureteral obstruction. In March, M. C. Henderson of Rochester discussed ununited fractures of the femur and in May, Donald Balfour spoke on the management of peptic ulcer.

On May 17, 1930 the Academy held a Founders’ Dinner to honor eight survivors of the original group of charter members in 1887. At the dinner, the first president, John Fulton, who forty-three years before had issued a clarion call for a scientifically-oriented medical society, guided by a chivalrous sympathy for human suffering, rose to speak. “I am enthusiastic,” he said, “in the belief that this Academy will continue to be a careful recorder of clinical observations, the encourager of laboratory investigations, and a just endorser of new meritorious therapeutic agents.”6

In 1928, the Academy revised its constitution to permit the election of members of the medical faculty at the University of Minnesota and in January 1931, Irvine McQuarrie and Owen H. Wangensteen were elected from the university. At the May 1932 meeting, Dr. Wangensteen presented a paper on the treatment of acute intestinal obstruction, in which he described the use of gastrointestinal suction.

Through succeeding decades of the twentieth century, the Academy strove to fulfill the founders’ vision. Its members contributed to a multitude of medical advances: the early use of sulfa drugs, penicillin, and other antibiotics; the development of open heart surgery; the recognition of immune deficiency diseases, organ transplantation, bone-marrow transplantation, and many others. New developments of all kinds ⎯ diagnostic and therapeutic ⎯ have been reviewed and discussed at Academy meetings. In 1987 the Academy celebrated its centennial with a special day-long scientific session held on the campus of Saint Catherine’s College in Saint Paul.

Today the Academy continues to meet eight times a year from October to May, for the association of medical men and women “upon a basis of good fellowship, professional ability, and literary merit.”

Leonard G. Wilson, Ph.D. May 2004