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Frank Howard Lahey was born in Haverhill, Massachussets, the only child of Honora Frances Powers and Thomas Benjamin Pierce Lahey. He was christened Francis but used the shorter form of his name throughout his life. His mother had been born in Ireland. His father, a wealthy contractor, was the son of immigrant Irish laborers.
Lahey attended high school in his hometown of Haverhill, Massachusetts. He then went on to attend Harvard Medical School from which he received the M. D. in 1904.
After his studies Lahey served as intern and surgeon at several Boston hospitals. Lahey taught at Harvard from 1912 to 1915 and at Tufts Medical School from 1913 to 1924. He began to specialize in thyroid surgery in 1914. Lahey's World War I experience as an army surgeon crystallized his belief that asepsis, antisepsis, and anesthesia had created a new surgery, best performed and refined by teams of specialists. This view shaped the practice of the private clinic that he founded in Boston.
In 1923 he was named to an unprecedented joint chair at Tufts and Harvard, but the next year he resigned to devote himself to the Lahey Clinic. Through teamwork and advanced techniques, including the division of complicated procedures ("Lahey operations") to lessen trauma, Lahey reduced the high mortality of thyroid surgery. He applied the same methods to abdominal surgery, pioneering total removal of the stomach and colon. Lahey combined careful preparation, coolness, and stamina. He decried "grandstand plays, " insisting that "the best criterion of a surgeon is his batting average. "
As a surgical "court of last resort, " the Lahey Clinic attracted many well-known patients, although a sliding scale of fees assured equal admission and treatment for charity patients. Lahey, as administrative and medical head, selected colleagues who could achieve individual success as specialists in the clinic setting; these included the anesthesiologist Lincoln F. Sise and the gastroenterologist Sara Murray Jordan. Lahey always stressed that the entire team deserved credit for the clinic's achievements. He believed that "organized surgery" provided invaluable experience for young specialists; and his operations became lectures for visitors and clinical fellows.
By the late 1930's he had gained a reputation as the greatest American teacher of surgery. A favorite of medical groups, Lahey was a brilliant speaker, skilled in formal addresses, humorous talks, and debate. He drew on broad knowledge and vast experience--including his mistakes--and often showed color films of his operations.
Lahey was president of the American Medical Association for 1941-1942, when a divided A. M. A. faced a federal suit for fighting health cooperatives. Politically conservative and a member of the association's old guard, he held that medical standards, maintained by free-market quality competition, were threatened by group health plans which would lead to price competition and "state medicine. " An advocate of intervention in World War II, Lahey used the preparedness issue to contrast the dedication of physicians with the complacency of New Deal politicians. Later, however, as chairman of the War Manpower Commission's Medical Procurement and Assignment Service (which oversaw a crash program to mobilize physicians without endangering the care of civilian patients) he criticized some A. M. A. policies.
He served as a consultant on naval medical facilities, on Selective Service physical standards, and in 1947 on federal medical services. The Lahey Clinic trained Navy surgeons during the war, yet Lahey managed to keep up most of his own practice, including consultations on President Roosevelt's health. In 1949 Lahey opposed President Truman's proposed compulsory national health insurance plan. As probably the world's most famous surgeon, he attracted an international clientele. He died in Boston less than two weeks after performing his last operation. His greatest legacy was the craft that many younger surgeons learned from him. "I was a darn good surgeon and not much else, " he liked to say; he taught a generation how much that could be.
Lahey was the founder of the Lahey Clinic in Boston in 1923. He was nationally known in the U. S. medical profession, not only as a world-renowned surgeon, but also as a teacher of medicine, and a medical administrator. As a surgeon he was noted for his expertise in thyroid and esophageal surgery, and surgery for stomach cancer and colon cancer.
Lahey was a small, active man whose youthful vigor was infectious, and a perfectionist in his private interests as well as in surgery. Although idiosyncratic--he disliked taller or left-handed assistants--he was to most people warm, even lovable, and his brisk courtesy could yield to extraordinary tenderness.
On April 15, 1909, Lahey married Alice Church Wilcox. They had no children.
