Birth of UCI College of Medicine


Photo: Richard Kammerman

Dr. Richard Kammerman, MD, interviewed by Dr. Michael Seffinger, DO

at UCI Medical Center in Orange, California
May 2, 2006

  • Dr. Seffinger:  Dr. Kammerman if you would like to just begin by introducing yourself, how you got involved with osteopathic medicine, why you even went to medical school and then some things that perhaps are on that questionnaire there.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I am Richard F. Kammerman. I am a native Californian born in Glendale, but lived in Eagle Rock until I was five when we moved to Alhambra. I went to Alhambra High School and played sports there. I went to Los Sierra College for a couple of years then finished my undergraduate training at the University of Utah took my bachelor degree in zoology. I applied to medical schools, UCLA, USC and the osteopathic school in 1951 and was accepted for the fall of ’52. I was interested in becoming a physician from the time I was about eight because my mother was chronically ill with one thing or another and I said, ‘Mommy, some day I’m going to be a doctor and I’m going to make you well.’ Well, that stimulated my attitude all through my life and I just kind of dedicated myself to study for that. I was on the alternate list at UCLA the first year it was being created. I had friends who had introduced me to Dr. Alex and Ruthela Wilcox who were osteopaths who had a practice in South Los Angeles in an Industrial Park, industrial work. He was a certified orthopedist in the osteopathic profession and she was a general practitioner. They interested me in osteopathic school. I visited and talked to the then Dean, Dr. Garrison. It was a nice interview. I also was interviewed at UCLA for their initial class there too. Their class was first at 28 members and the osteopathic school was accepting 96 people at that time. So I accepted the osteopathic appointment when it came in. I received a letter of rejection from USC and I also received a letter of alternate list at UCLA until I guess it was late August or something of that nature. And then I had been informed I was going to the osteopathic school. I really didn’t know what osteopathic medicine was - very much at that time because most of my medical care had been provided by MD physicians. I had never seen a DO, but I knew that they had an unlimited license based upon the fact that Alex Wilcox and Ruthela had really been practicing a long time. They graduated in 1941 from the College of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons in Los Angeles. Is there anything else I can tell you there?
  • Dr. Seffinger:  When you first entered into the profession as a student, what was your first impression? Do you remember what that was like when you first went to school at...?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  As a matter of fact I can. My first impression was that at the osteopathic school they were teaching more of a caring compassionate environment. Most of the medical schools were not that compassionate. As far as I can tell I had been treated by physicians who seemed to care, but they were a little curt. They wanted to do this that and the other and get it done, and get it over with. I guess my biggest experience with the MDs was the fact that I had my tonsils taken out in the doctor’s office. That was kind of interesting thing, breathing ether and the worlds going by , but when I arrived at the osteopathic school I could just sense a degree of camaraderie that was there. Dr. Henley was one of the first people to speak to us outside of the Dean and some of the other people. Dr. Henley had such a positive force; he was very enthusiastic individual. He had a lot of drive I guess you’d call it and he just made you feel welcome to the school. His approach was, “We have you here and we are going to teach you to be doctors. We are going to teach you to be caring doctors; ‘compassionate’”. That was what I was looking for basically and that is how it turned out.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Do you recall the training you went through in the next four years? I assume it was four years at that time.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes. The first year was pretty much didactic in anatomy, organic, biochemistry, physiology, and probably some other stuff too. In fact, they did have a course on the history of medicine and had various people come in and talk about various parts of the history of medicine. I wish I had kept all those notes because I didn’t keep them, but I’ve seen some books since then that are pretty good books on history of medicine from Time and Memorial and I really kind of enjoyed that part of it. They talked about Asclepeus and all the other people that had been leaders in medicine such as Hypocrites and other people. So these were the main courses that we had and they were pretty intense courses. The second year was mainly microbiology, virology, and immunology. It was also where you got your original pathology, where you get into disease processes, and pharmacology. They were also teaching us surgery, gynecology, obstetrics, and cardiology. In the third year we had clinic, at the clinic on Griffith Avenue and that would be mostly in the afternoons as I recall. We would have certain lectures in the morning and then we would be in the clinic most of the afternoon or maybe it was all day, I don’t remember now for sure, but we did have clinic every day in our junior year. We would rotate through various services such as orthopedics for a period and heart disease. I remember as a third year medical student I was on urology service and the first patient I saw was a male that needed to have a prostatic dilation. The urologist was Dr. Stonier and he said, “Well you just take this; you put it up the guy’s shaft, turn the screws and stretch the urethra out” and I said, “okay.” It was a Hispanic man and he had it done a number of times before. I guess he had some kind of restriction there; a chronic stricture. He knew what was coming and so I put the Zylocaine Cream and lubricant on the instrument, slid it in and turned the wheels. I asked, “Had enough?” He said, “You can do some more doc, do some more.” So I kept doing it and finally it got to the point where he said, ”That’s enough”, so we just let it sit there for five minutes then we let it off and removed the equipment. I think that was my first day in the clinic and it was very intimidating, but then after that I felt very comfortable in doing sounding (the uterus size) of patients.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So, right from the get-go you were working on patients as opposed to standing back and watching somebody take care of patients.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh yes. After about two weeks, we did circumcisions. We would watch one and do one and then teach the next student. It was quite an experience doing my first circumcision, but I felt real good about it and comfortable about it so it was no problem.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  I remember my first rotation was surgery also. It was totally different then what medical schools teach.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, now the kids get to hold a retractor and that’s about it. In fact, now that they don’t do many circumcisions on newborn males anymore. It’s just a different world.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So, did you do manipulation class as well?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, we had a class in manipulation; I think that it was incorporated with physical diagnosis in the second year too, We learned things like how to examine a patient and how to take a medical history. That was an extensive program in the 2nd year. We had manipulation; Dr. John Andrews was our teacher and he always had a smile on his face. He was a very pleasant man and he showed us how to gently manipulate and how to relax the tissues. I was very impressed with that and I found out that I was pretty good at it too. As a matter of fact, my pharmacology professor became my clinic patient and I would manipulate his back and his neck every once in awhile because they would get stiff. Even when I went into practice he came to me for manipulation down here.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Do you remember the types of techniques you were taught then? Did you continue those the rest of your career or did you learn new techniques when you went out?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I used mainly the same techniques. There were mild ‘launches’ or stretching and then pop. You used different techniques with thoracics - lay on the table or the hugging technique. We have them rest up against you and then you just put your hand on their back and push up and pop them. Then there is the other one, the full nelson thing, where you have them lean back on you while you are still standing and pop them that way. I used that technique quite a bit. It’s easy to do. I never had any problems with it.
  • Dr. Seffinger:   Was there an emphasis on examining before and after you used the technique?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, Dr. Andrews told us how to make the diagnosis of a lesion or whatever you want to call a lesion. I learned very rapidly how to run my thumb down a back and feel a little muscle spasm, a little tightness even a difference in moisture in the skin and I am very sensitive to that. I was sensitive to that even until the day I retired. I would still be practicing if I didn’t have to retire because of my own back. As a matter of fact, I manipulated the day before I retired. I manipulated three patients as I recall. I would never manipulate a patient if he/she was in a severe excruciating pain. I would try to soften the patient down, get him/her to relax or quiet down for a day or two or three before I’d ever manipulate the patient. Most often I would get x-rays before I would do anything.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So most of the manipulation in those days was high velocity?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It was generally high velocity, yes I would say so, and just rotating the neck.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did you know over the last 50 years a lot of new techniques have been developed that are more softer and different types...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, I don’t think I was ever really rough, tough on anybody. I was never rough on anybody.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did you learn any of the newer techniques that came out after?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I didn’t hear anything about them. I never heard of any of the newer techniques.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay, when you went into the clinics, did you do work at the county hospital?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, as a matter of fact our fourth year was spent at the county hospital, in Unit Two.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  What was your first impression? What did you see there?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Mostly just medicine, you didn’t do much manipulation there. It was mostly maternity, deliveries, medicine floor, surgical floor, the chronic/dying floor, or the urological floor, which smelled like urine all the time. Fortunately our nostrils would fatigue the smell after a short while and it didn’t bother us so much, but when we came home our wives could tell us, “You’ve been on the urological ward again”. In fact they had a TB ward there. The terminal floor was in the basement there and the TB floor was at the top. I don’t know why it was setup that way, but they had infectious disease in another area down below.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did you work at the TB ward?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  We did gastric washings and...
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Diagnosis?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  We didn’t actually do the diagnosis; we did the gastric washings..
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And did you notice a lot of people on the service or students contracting TB?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh no. It was just a TB section. We always had about 25 to 40 patients up there on the TB ward. It was just a kind of dedicated floor to TB patients.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Were you aware at all about what was going on in the MD side of the L.A. County Hospital, were you allowed...?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  We didn’t go over to the County - the Unit One. We went to Unit Three a few times because that’s where we received our psychiatric work in Unit Three and we would go over Saturday mornings usually. Oscar Jannigar was the main one who did all that and he would line up two maybe three patients for us to interview, see what was wrong with them, and see if we could help them. I think we did that about oh four week, on Saturdays....I remember one; first time I saw a young beautiful woman that had postpartum depression. Of course we had no decent medication for depression at that time. All we had was Thorazine and most of the people don’t even know what Thorazine is anymore, but we were using Thorazine on her. That was our exposure in that respect.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  At the county hospital, did they let the students do the work the deliveries and OBS and allow you to get right in there?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh yes, I delivered my first baby as a third year medical student. I was assigned to Mary Silosup, from England. She had her first baby over there. She came into the clinic as an OB and was assigned to me. She was to deliver at Glendale Community Hospital. When she went into labor, I just went over there and Charley DieuDonne, who was the supervisor at that time in OB at that hospital, came in. We were watching this gal and all of a sudden her water ruptured. We rushed her into the delivery room, put in a good pudendal block and delivered her. She had not been repaired well with her first delivery for she had just virtually no peritoneum at all. We took the time to do an episiotomy; go back in there to pick up all the muscles and bring them back together in order to give the poor woman a good perineum.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  A reconstructive peritoneum.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  A good peritoneal body on her. That was an experience to do that and to deliver that first baby. Because the head just kind of popped out, I hardly knew what I was doing. In my fourth year, at the county hospital we delivered a lot of babies. In fact, the residents were hardly ever on the floor except if we needed a section. Most often the interns handled everything on the floor and we’d have sometimes two and three deliveries going on simultaneously. After I caught my first one under the supervision of an intern, they said, “Hey, you go ahead,” and so I probably delivered, I don’t know, 12 or 14 babies for the month I was on that service as a senior medical student.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay and at that time did you decide what specialty you wanted to go into or what you wanted to do?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  That was a big problem in every service I went through. I thought I loved orthopedics because I already had reduced a few fractures and I really thought that was really magnificent. Then I went through OB and I said, “Boy, this is great” and then I went through surgery and I said, “Wow, this looks like fun especially working with people like J. Gordon Hatfield and some of the other people. When I went into cardiology, I kind of enjoyed it but it wasn’t as dramatic as I liked. When I got out and started looking around for a residencies; at that time you could be just have a rotating internship and go into practice and so that’s what I did. During my internship I had a situation where I delivered 104 babies. Attending - a lot of times they didn’t even come in. They said, “Oh, you know how to handle it, go ahead.” After awhile I was doing my own saddle blocks . I’d do the saddle block and deliver the baby and then call the attending on the phone and say, “Mrs. Jones delivered a baby boy,”. It was pretty exciting to have all that responsibility. Sometimes the attending doctor would be at another hospital so we’d have to deliver it. That happened fairly often because most of the guys were on two or three hospital’s staffs so they would be hung up from hospital to hospital. But there were no residencies available to me anyway as they were all locked up or at least not that I could find.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  What do you mean by ‘they were ‘locked up?’
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, there were people already assigned to the surgeries and this that and the other. I went to this rotating internship at Doctor’s Hospital at 325 West Jefferson which has been turned into an extended care facility and I’m not even sure the building is still there. I think I drove by there about 25 years ago.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  That’s in Los Angeles?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  That’s in Los Angeles, downtown Los Angeles.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And you couldn’t go to residencies at other hospitals that...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, they didn’t have that many available. Most of the specialty training in OB or surgery, or any of those things, were taken. The only place you had a true residency; there was one available at Doctor’s Hospital but it was occupied. There were several at the County Hospital, but I was not a veteran and they always took a veteran over the non-veterans. So when I said, “I’d like to do OB,” they replied, “Well, we don’t have anything available, they are all taken by this guy”. I didn’t even apply out-of-state.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  At that time, did you know that you could not get into an allopathic hospital for training?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No. I couldn’t get into an allopathic hospital.
  • Dr. Seffinger:   At what point did you learn that - that you had?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  After I went and practiced basically because I never even thought of applying to an allopathic hospital because I was going to apply to an osteopathic hospital.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Nobody told you, you couldn’t?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Nobody told me I couldn’t, no. I just assumed that ...I was an osteopath, I was going to an osteopathic hospital facility. Then I decided, well, if I can’t get a residency or preceptorship, because a lot of the specialties were done on preceptorships. There were orthopedic preceptorships, gynecology OB/GYN, ENT, a lot of the things were done on preceptorship, in fact, when I was an intern I probably took out about 40 sets of tonsils on a city maternity service not a city maternity, but this Dr. Jose Garcia, he had a weekend clinic and he’d line up about 50, 60 kids once or twice a month and he got an anesthesiologist from the county hospital come over and he would invite residents or interns to come over and learn how to do T&As. So he showed me how to do T&As. Then he watched me do a couple of them and he says, “Hey, go ahead, you take out that one, I’ll take out this one.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  T&A is tonsillectomy?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  tonsillectomy & adenoidectomy, yes. So I was doing T&As right and left and ah...even when I was an intern I did C section under supervision and did an appy, no, one appy (appendectomy?). I never did a gallbladder, but I assisted on a lot of gall bladders. I did do a vein stripping for varicose veins on...the attending showed up drunk and the surgical resident he took one side and I took the other side and we just did the patient because the patient...at that time they had admitted the patient the night before. The patient was already there. The doctor shows up drunk and Dr. Norcross said you are not operating on this patient today and so the resident, he was a second year at the time, and I did the case.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Was it common for people to show up drunk?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No. There was a couple who did. This guy did every once in awhile.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Dr. Norcross was the attending?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No, Norcross owned the hospital.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Which hospital was this?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Doctor’s Hospital.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Doctor’s Hospital.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  What was Dr. Norcross’s first name?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Howard. Yes. He has a son Robert Norcross and his son is probably retired now too. He graduated four or five years ahead of me. I think he graduated in 1952 or 51. I knew Robert too, because right after I finished my internship I spent a month working for a doctor in Gardena where Robert Norcross was and I had this case of a woman that had severe pelvic pain so I referred her to Robert and so we operated on her together.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Would that be Gardena Hospital?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  At the Gardena Hospital.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  They had a Bay Harbor Hospital out there.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I didn’t know anything about that hospital at the time.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Yes, Robert Norcross worked there.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, I’m sure he did.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And I had a practice next door to Gardena Memorial Hospital.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  You do?
  • Dr. Seffinger:  I did.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh, you did.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Yes, that’s where my practice was. I didn’t practice until the 1990s next door to Gardena Memorial.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  So you know all about that area then.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Not all about it. I know a lot of the MDs on staff there, well, not a lot, but there were several that were ex-DOs, it was a DO hospital in the past.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, I’m sure. I think Gardena had a dual staff; it had an osteopathic and an MD staff and a DO staff. I don’t know about Bay Harbor. And that’s what happened when I came to Santa Ana. We had a dual staff at Santa Ana Community Hospital. We met independently of each other, although in the board meetings the Chief of Staff of each of the staffs would attend the board meetings. So when I was Chief of Staff there, I attended both or most of the Board meetings.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Well, what happened to manipulation at that time period when you went out into internship and practice, did you carry manipulation with you?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh yes, oh yes. I was manipulating patients whenever I needed to. As a matter-of-fact the doctor that I came in with down here in Santa Ana had been a former...was a DO, Larry Young and he graduated in 1938 I think. Of course he had been deferred because of DOs being deferred.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  From the army?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  From the army services during the war.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  World War II?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  World War II, yes. And so I went in with him and immediately he told me about several of his patients that came in for manipulation all the time. They would kind of have a problem. One of the gals, she’d come in and I can’t remember her name specifically, but she went through an early menopause.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So when you went through school were you required to do a certain number of manipulations to graduate?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I don’t remember any requirement being made.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And when you got your license, id you have to demonstrate competency?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Not that I know of.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay. Internship it wasn’t an issue?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No. It was not an issue in internship. In fact, I think I remember manipulating a couple of patients in the hospital when I was intern for a stiff neck . So, I’d give them a rubbing and and then snap their back and neck. I don’t remember doing any lumbar, but I do remember doing cervical manipulation a few times as an intern.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Do you remember the investigations of the Cline Committee...?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I was aware it was happening. I didn’t know anything about it.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay. When did you first become aware that there was a difference between the two professions, in terms of where you could practice and what you could do and...?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  When I came and practiced down here in Santa Ana.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And what was that impression, do you remember?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, it was just a matter of fact. We had a DO staff and we had an MD staff, so I applied to the DO staff and...
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did it affect your practice at all?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I don’t think so.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did you share patients back and forth?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Ah, we did some because a lot of our specialists were MDs. For a long time the DOs in Orange County, Santa Anta, that, they would have people come down from L.A. (L.A. practices) to work in hospitals, surgical patients
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Do you recall their names?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh I think Ernie Basher and a few came down
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Were these DO specialists?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  UV specialists, DO specialists, OBs mainly, some times surgeons, ah, peripheral vascular diseases, Costellos came down. They were brothers, Costello and they would come down periodically. In fact, I remember one of them coming down had a man with peripheral vascular disease. His femoral arteries were blocking off and at that time we were doing a sympathetic ganglionectomies for that particular procedure. We weren’t doing endarterectomies because nobody had the equipment to do it at that time, but I had a patient who was going to lose a leg if we didn’t do something. So I called Costello and he came down. We did a bilateral sympathectomy on him and that gave the guy quite a bit of relief for awhile, but we had a lot of people coming down from L.A. until about 1960, I started getting involved with the MD specialists there. We had DO urologists, but he was kind of a alcoholic and I didn’t really like using him, but we had a very credible MD urologist and he was happy to see my patients. As a matter of fact I had a young girl that came in and she had this chronic urinary infection so I did cultures and everything, it cultured out tuberculosis. Believe it or not she kept having this sickness and this back pain, so I sent her over to Carl Pearlman and his group and...
  • Dr. Seffinger:  That’s a specialty group?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  A specialty group, yes and he was Uhlman, Pearlman, Miller, Schmiessing. They took care of the patient and then referred her back after taking out the kidney because it was not salvageable at that time. Orthopedics, I had a couple of orthopedists that I felt very comfortable with using and actually I had been exposed to MD specialists at Doctor’s Hospital because we had a guy, Dr. Mino Satinsky that came in. He was a cardiac thoracic, as much as a cardiothoracic can be at that time, and had this patient with what looked like lung cancer and he came in. We took out the whole lung and the guy did real well except he developed subcutaneous emphysema. I went over the next day and he was all bubbly all over, but he survived that. We had patients that, we had one patient come in, the guy had hip pain real bad. We took x-rays and it looked like some kind of destructive process going on there. The intern examined him and he says, “I can’t figure out what’s going on.” The surgeon looked at the orthopedists and in fact Alex Wilcox was his doctor. He said, “Dick, take a look at this guy and see what you can find out and I found a little nodule in his breast. It was primary breast cancer. So we referred him to the City of Hope. It was working at that time. We kept getting letters back from City of Hope as to what they were doing with the patient. Of course they couldn’t do much with him; he was good as a dead man at that time because the chemo therapy was not established with the hood at that time.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Because I heard that in the ‘50s even across the country there were situations where DOs and MDs could not share patients and even in some rural parts of California they were not allowed to share patients, but it sounds like in LA you were allowed to share.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  We did it. I don’t know if we were allowed to do it, we just did it.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  It happened and there were no repercussions and no rebounds?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Not that we know of.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  I wonder if there is a different environment here.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, Howard Norcross was an alcoholic too, but he knew right from wrong and he never drank when he was coming on a case. He never drank when he was in his medical field, but he brought in Satinsky and some of the other MD specialists to work on patients.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So it was his hospital.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It was his hospital and he could do what he pleased and the fact that Satinsky came in and operated on was kind of an interesting thing because he didn’t care what the MD profession thought about him. He was a crusty guy, a very assertive man.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay, so then you were in practice in that area. Now Doctor’s Hospital was in L.A. right?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And then you had practice in Santa Ana for some time. How long were you practicing there in Santa Ana?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well I started off with Dr. Young on Broadway, at 917 North Broadway. The building is no longer there, but it belonged to a guy by the name Horace Leecing, just across the hall, and Horace Leecing would go out of town. He’d leave me on call for him and so I would take care of the patients. We didn’t have emergency rooms, so I’d be getting up at 3:00 o’clock in the morning on Saturdays and Wednesdays and everything else to go see patients at the house. We didn’t have a facility at the hospital even to see a patient, examine a patient, that actually didn’t come until around until the ‘70s as I recall, the late 60’s maybe, here in Orange County. Anyway, it wasn’t long they made me Chief of Staff there. I was Chief of Staff by year 1960. Then the information about the merger started growing and we started getting letters. In fact I think the first letter I received was from Dick Ebey. I knew him as he was one of our mentors at the college. He would come in and do a clinic in the afternoon. I don’t know as anybody did deliveries with him because I think he was in Pomona at the time. But there were pathologists out that way toward Pomona and that were teaching at the medical school, that’s the osteopathic school.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay, so around 1960 were you involved with the California Osteopathic Association or the School at all, at COP&S or were you in private practice?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes I was in private practice. I had been invited to be on the Alumni Association Board within a year after I graduated. In fact, I went to the COA convention right after I graduated when they had it in San Diego, the big hotel there, Hotel Del Coronado. I went to the alumni meeting they had there and they asked if I was interested in going on the Board and I said, “Sure.” So I went on the Board there, probably in 1959 or ’60. I was just barely out. And then in 1960 I was made Chief of Staff of Santa Ana Community Hospital for the osteopathic staff.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Is that hospital still around?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Actually no. It actually is a convalescent facility right now, an extended care facility. We started getting this information. Dr. Eby had sent a mailer out, “Do you know what’s happening? There is talk about amalgamating the DO and MD people afoot and would you donate some money to fight it.” I think that’s what it mentioned. I didn’t have that much money at that time so and then as I got to talking to people like, oh what’s his name, the big surgeon down Laguna Beach, Vince Carroll. Vince Carroll says, “Dick,” he says, “it’s got to happen,” He says. “In the last four or five years the AOA made us feel like we were step children out here in California.” So he filled me in. In fact, I had some cases with him. I called him for surgery now and then too.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  What kind of surgeon was he?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  A general surgeon, a very good surgeon I thought and a very ethical man. The first case I had with him was actually when Leecing had gone on a vacation and he had a patient with a class IV pap smear. It turned out to be carcinoma of the cervix and so I called Vince. He came up and saw her. Well, I had done a conization on her. I had coning privileges. I had D&C privileges. I had OB privileges. In fact my first OB delivery here was a breech, a frank breech. The nurse thought I had done beautifully, that’s my training I guess. But anyway I called Vince and he came up. He arranged to take out her uterus. I did her hysterectomy with him. So, I used him quite often after that. I didn’t use him exclusively though.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So he came up and said that looks like there’s going to be an amalgamation?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No, he knew there was going to be...
  • Dr. Seffinger:  He knew there was...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  He knew the amalgamation was in line, it was happening.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay. So what happened after that?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well after that, I talked to...well he had a preceptor with him, can’t think of his name, Ray Tiffany and he told me, “Hey, we’ve got to do it”. And so I investigated and I saw if we did go with the merger I would be able to get privileges at St. Joseph’s Hospital. We had one hospital, Santa Ana Community. It was there on Washington Avenue for a period of time and then it moved out on Tustin Avenue. They called it Santa Ana Tustin Community Hospital. Then there was a Tustin Community Hospital and they were angry because some of the patients who were scheduled to go to Tustin Community would show up at Santa Ana/Tustin in confusion and so they sued Santa Ana/Tustin to change their name so that’s when it became Western Medical Center.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Western Medical Center still standing?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes. It’s still a hospital functioning very adequately.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did you know that’s where I did my residency.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  You did your residency at Western Med? No I didn’t know that. Did you take your residence at UCI, then?
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Through UC – Irvine.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No I didn’t know that. Did you take your residency at UCI then?
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Yes I did.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh, okay, all right.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  That’s how I got involved with Dr. Van den Noort and the 41st Trust in 1990.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh. Okay. They had a free standing residency there at that time too.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  We did most of our training there at Western Medical Center.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Okay. Well, they still have residents over there now. I think they have two or four I’m not sure which they have. I think they have two pediatrics residents too. Well, anyway they had pointed out that I had patients Dr. Pearlman needed, some of the other specialists needed to take to St. Josephs. They just felt they couldn’t get the care at Santa Ana Community that they needed. One patient had steel syndrome up here and it was due to intravascular disease so a vascular surgeon that saw her took her to St. Joe’s. They let me watch the surgery, but they wouldn’t let me scrub into it. So I did that and then the patient lost her leg anyway, but that’s another matter.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So in 1961 around that time, they are trying to get the DOs to make a decision one way or another.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, I was president of the Orange County Osteopathic Society at the time and a matter of fact I got on the Board with that right away and within no time I was president of the society, seems like. We would call our executive committee together. Ray Tiffany he was one of the officers, of course Vince Carroll was a voting member and I think we had five voting members of the Orange County Osteopathic Society and I was still at the time of the voting in Long Beach. I was still kind of on the fence which way I really wanted to go.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Could you give me some incite as to the issues, how you weighed them?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  The way I weighed it was, “what’s best for the profession” and I think what really came down to it was I was at a caucus meeting with a bunch of physicians, and Munish Finberg, I don’t know if you’ve heard the name or not; he was a certified internists and he says, “Now we know that if we go and vote for this merger that AOA is going to pull our specialty ranking. They are going to pull away our certification and disown us basically.” But he said there is much more advantage to us being all in one umbrella then there is to be in two umbrellas. CMA offered the fact that any doctor that was certified under the DO approved plan could continue at the hospital on which he was working, he or she was working in the specialty that they had decided in the event that AOA did pull the certification status. With that in mind Mun Fineberg was an internists and people like Alex Wilcox and Marv Lottman, and some of the other people, certified orthopedists, they were in favor of the merger even though that they knew they were going to lose their certification, but they knew they were going to be able to maintain their surgical privileges.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  At the hospital?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  At the hospitals in which they had privileges at the present time.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  If they were osteopathic hospitals, but if they were....
  • Dr. Kammerman:  If they were MD hospitals, they weren’t sure. But when I, as a matter of fact, as a DO I could not belong to the staff at Children’s Hospital or St. Joseph’s Hospital, either one. Well, as soon as the merger occurred I submitted applications to those two hospitals and I was accepted immediately. I think this...
  • Dr. Seffinger:  You weren’t a specialist; you didn’t have to worry about that.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  That’s true and I applied as a general practitioner.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  But if a surgeon, a DO surgeon did that, certified by the DO profession....
  • Dr. Kammerman:  That was possibly a problem, I don’t know. We didn’t have that many specialists that applied to St. Joseph’s Hospital because people that were in the County like Rudy Gallardo and Marv Lottman who were orthopedic really good people...well Rudy was trained at the County Hospital in LA and Lottman was a preceptor with Alex Wilcox. But they joined together when they came here to Orange County and they were very happy with the hospitals in which they were practicing. They practiced in a hospital down in South County; I forget the name of it. But they were able...hospital in Garden Grove, Brea, they had hospitals they could work in, they didn’t care.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay and those hospitals that were primarily DO hospitals, did this affect them at all. Did they all of a sudden begin to admit MD more so and MD physicians into their hospital after this.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Most of them had MDs on faculty. They already had them there. They already had them on staff.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Didn’t affect them too much.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Didn’t affect them at all.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did the referral processes change much after the merger in terms of who you would refer to or was that was pretty much the same?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It was pretty much the same. Vince Carroll was kind of cutting back. He had just lost his son, so he really didn’t want to come up here anymore. He was also involved with developing a program at San Clemente Hospital.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay so eventually you decided that...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  So I used the MD surgeons in the community at that time... used people like...well almost all of them. We had the Ball brothers; one was an orthopedists while the other was a general surgeon. There was a cousin who was a vascular surgeon, that’s the one that did the case that I was talking about a few minutes ago.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Could you explain to me, there was one phrase you mentioned that I need a little more explanation on, you said that you were thinking of what would be good for the profession, and when we talked to people who were involved with the OPSC group that’s a phrase they used to, you know, “We were doing what we thought was good for the profession” to keep the profession going by forming OPSC which became the new DO state association. Then you are saying the same phrase but your decision was to amalgamate and get the MD and become separated from the AOA.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No, we did not do it to get separated from the AOA; No, AOA had already separated from us.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay, could you explain that process (that thought process) of how the profession fit into that concept? You could see that it wasn’t going to affect your practice and personally it would open more doors, but what then when does the individual benefit change to a professional benefit? How does that work?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, it didn’t really matter too much because we were already using the MD specialists in the county. As a matter of fact the guys up there in LA stopped trying to come down because they were too busy. It was a long drive with the traffic. That was before the freeways so it was difficult for them to come down. Once we had the specialists available, and they are all ethical people basically, we would just go ahead and refer to them. So, we thought it was best that it would make it easier for those of us who were DOs that we could get consults because I guess there were some who still had difficulty in getting consults down here.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So, when you say it’s better for the profession that you are talking about the group of DOs that would be affected if they went on there own.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well it would open up doors to them. It would open those doors so that they could go to different hospitals. All we had as a DO, well actually we had Riverview Hospital which was very proprietary and we had the old Santa Ana Community Hospital. Those were the only two hospitals we had except when they opened the one in San Clemente and that was a dual staff hospital. The Riverview Hospital which is now the Santa Ana Community Hospital, at least they call it that, it was created by a DO. It was built by a DO. It was a hundred-bed facility. There was a group of us trying to buy it. The owner, Dr. Thayer was here and one day he was there and the next day he would be there and he’d say, “Okay, well we will accept this price and then two days later, “Naw, I want three times that much money,” so we just, I finally dropped out of that group. I just couldn’t tolerate that anymore and I don’t know if...I think some people finally bought it from the guy. But he was very difficult to deal with and I needed to get on with my life, my profession.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay, so let’s...when you talk about my profession you are talking about the physician as a profession?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  The physician as a profession, not as a DO or an MD, neither one it didn’t matter.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Right, as a physician as a profession, so you are talking as to the benefit of our profession, was there a little bit of thought about maybe this is a benefit to the patient as well, that was part of it?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, that was part of it, I’m sure. Yes, we thought of the patient. It would make it easier for us to get appropriate consultants. We wouldn’t have to depend on somebody taking an hour to drive down from LA. We would call somebody and they would be there in five minutes or they would be available in five minutes or whatever. And neurosurgery was a serious problem down here. We had to use the MD neurosurgeons because the guys up there couldn’t come down here. Albeck and all those people, they were too busy up there they couldn’t come down to Santa Ana to take care of the patients.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  If you were in your hospital, this is a question that came up from a relative of some DOs that were in that time period and the question was, if a person was in an emergency situation, they needed to be seen in a hospital, but there DO hospital where their doctor’s practice was far away would they still be able to get emergency services at a nearby hospital, but even though their doctors didn’t have privileges there, how would that work and did they have to go to the DOs where the DOs worked.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  If they called the doctor, the doctor designated what hospital the patient would attend. And if they couldn’t get to that hospital then that was another problem. At that time, since there were no emergency rooms, there was no way for a doctor to evaluate a patient in the hospital. You’d go to the hospital...they weren’t going to call...”who’s your doctor?” “Well doctor so and so,” “well, he’s not on staff here, you can’t come here.”
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Oh, I see.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  And that happened a lot of times.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  I see and did that change then after the merger?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  After the merger that was gone. Of course that is when the emergency room started to develop.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  At the same time, so.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well after that, quite a bit after that.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  The whole emergency medical system...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  The whole emergency system changed after that. Up until that time the patient had to call the doctor. The doctor designated which hospital the patient was to attend or go to.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  One of the aspects of that Proposition 22 was they promoted then saying then the patient care would be better.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, the fact that you would be able to use a closer hospital in other words...I did OB for Richard Taylor. He had a little clinic down in Costa Mesa, a one man clinic and he needed somebody to do his OB. So I would go every other Wednesday to see his OB patients Wednesday afternoon and see his OB patient’s pre-partum and then I’d deliver them up at Santa Ana Community and that’s a pretty good drive for some of these girls that have fast labors. In fact, I remember delivering a couple of them in the elevator that came up from there because when they would call me I’d say I’d meet them at the hospital so I would meet them in the parking lot or where ever they parked. One guy parked in the street and his wife’s water blew out and he just bought this new automobile. It really made a mess.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So those kinds of experiences ceased after the merger?
  • Dr. Kammerman:   That ceased after the merger.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  We were talking about the decision to be part of the merger, to get the MD degree and how that was helpful for the patient. It was helpful for the doctors as well. It was mentioned in your discussion with Dr. Carroll about the AOA probably taking away specialty privileges. We talked a little bit about that and there was something you mentioned about that it wasn’t an issue of leaving the AOA. Could you explain what the relationship is or was, your thoughts at that time. What was the relationship with the AOA anyway and then you said by the AOA’s actions it caused the group to make decisions otherwise or differently. Do you remember the time period of what happened and what was your relationship...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I wasn’t really much involved with a lot of the issues at that time I was mainly informed by Vince Carroll, and Ray Tiffany, and of course Mun Fineberg and some of the other people about the issues that we knew that the AOA would almost banished us from...because we were consorting with allopathic physicians, and we are calling them for referrals and that even though there were certain areas in the state that we could not get, an osteopathic specialist. I’m sure that was happening up in the Bay area and Sacramento and all over.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So you were told that the AOA was concerned that you were trying to merge or just that you were trying to interact with?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I don’t remember exactly how that came about. I don’t think I should be an authority on that particular thing.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  In case you had a clear thought. if you don’t know that’s not a problem.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I don’t have a real clear thought; it was just that I was aware that there was some disenfranchisement going on. At least that was the impression that was given to me.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Something I heard was that the AOA told the group of COA that if they were to merge with the CMA or give up their DO degree that they would be...that their membership and their accreditation of their school you know would be taken away, their specialty privileges, their certification would be taken away. They would not be allowed to be members in the AOA. Those things I’ve heard were occurring before the merger actually occurred. These things were stated at the end of 1960 and I’m aware that Dorothy Marsh and Counselor Hufstedler went to Kansas City in the summer of 1960 to try to convince the AOA to merge with the AMA at that time and they were unsuccessful. They did tell us that the AOA was then telling them that if they continued these talks of merger that the COA would also not receive any further support from the AOA and they asked that the talks be stopped at that time. There was a vote in November of 1960 amongst the COA to either continue the merger talks or not based on the fact that the AOA was saying that we are going to remove your charter if you continue talking and the COA at that time voted to continue talking and the AOA then in December 1962 took away the charter and gave it to OPSE and then the members of OPSE were kicked out.. Well, Dr. Ebey was the president was then kicked out of the COA at that time forming his own organization.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I didn’t know that he was kicked out of the COA. I do know that he was rather vociferous in his opposition to the merger and Dr. Eby was a very special man, absolutely, he had the utmost respect from me especially. I respected the man immensely, but I don’t remember anything specific being stated. I remember vaguely hearing that the AOA would pull its charter. Well, we really didn’t know if that was going to be a problem because CMA had promised that we would maintain a charter, the school would be converted into a medical school. The legislature had passed everything that we could need to have so we wouldn’t necessarily lose our autonomy except we would be MDs instead of DOs.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And at that time you didn’t have much of a relationship I understand with the AOA anyway except through the COA.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, that was the only relationship we had was through the COA at this point. The only representatives that we had of the AOA were the COA officers. They’d had no arrangement for non-officers of the COA to be members of the House of Delegates at the AOA. As I recall, we must have had five members or something of that nature who were members of the delegation. That’s as best as I remember it.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Oh, excellent, excellent. Okay, so you had an interesting perspective because you were involved with osteopathic education at first, the 1950s didn’t have much interaction with MDs in your internship. Then when you went out to practice you began to be involved gradually the next five to ten years with MDs in clinical practice day by day interactions and so you have a good perspective as to any similarities or differences between the two types of medical care if there was any. Could you comment on what your impression was of the professions as they began to merge in that time period?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I’m not too sure I understand your question that well.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  The similarities and differences as you merged, do you understand what I’m saying, as historically looking back I see your life as being in the transition phase between a segregated or separate profession that then became amalgamated or involved with another profession. Then you became interactive with this other profession and therefore you were in a good position to make the observation of what is the same or different and how we are, you know, what was different before and what is different now, and what is the same between us and the education of the MD versus the education of the DO, the practice of an MD versus the practice of the DO, was there a difference, could you tell a difference was everybody in the same or, you know, practice pattern. I have no idea, but you would have that kind of perspective.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I continued to manipulate patients and I did that up until my retiring day as I told you before and I found it to be very beneficial to patients. As a matter fact, I did have some MDs who referred me patients for manipulation.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  After the merger?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  After the merger. And it was kind of interesting because I had already established a very good relationship with most of the MD physicians. When the merger occurred it just opened the doors to St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital, and any other hospital I wanted to belong to - Santa Ana Doctor’s Hospital. There was a small Santa Ana Doctor’s Hospital - a 50 bed facility or something of that nature. It wasn’t very big and there was a couple of orthopods, Jack Blaisdell was one that liked to use that hospital for his orthopedic cases. Of course, he got into a big fight with St. Joseph’s because they wouldn’t order some equipment that he wanted. It was kind of a personal issue for him, but I used Dr. Blaisdell on a number of cases, but it didn’t seem to make any difference because I had already established that relationship, so, I didn’t see any major transition of physician, it just opened the doors.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  But with your differential diagnosis, your treatment plan was there any thing different there between the way the MDs practiced...?
  • Dr. Kammerman:   Well, I don’t know about the other general practitioners because they didn’t recognize things the way I did as far as orthopedic or back strains. I certainly treated things a lot, I think, more appropriately than a lot of those guys. If a person hurt their back, they would put heat on them right away which is the wrong thing to do. Any acute sprain or strain you put ice on it if you are going to put anything on it otherwise you wrap it up, keep it from moving around get the irritation to settle down and then you work with it. They said, “Well, you put ice on a sprained ankle and heat on a back.” I said, “No! It’s the same thing for both.” And this is what I tell the other general practitioners in fact I had an emergency room doctor tell me that. I said, “No that’s wrong.” I said, “You are just creating more problems by putting heat on an acute back sprain, you are going to prolong their rehabilitation, their recovery.” And I was not bashful about saying that. I’m not really a very forceful person myself, but when I thought something was being done that should be done more appropriately, I would say something to the people. I wouldn’t go out in public and say that. I’d say it in a private situation. I wouldn’t...nobody would hear me say it to anybody else.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Was there any journals or writings about osteopathic care in those days that we could look back at and see how the practice patterns were that DOs had?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I have no idea.
  • Dr. Seffinger:   Okay did you notice, read any journals that DOs had at that time that you can remember?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I don’t remember receiving any except the COA Clinician.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  That’s the state journal?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, that’s the state journal and they had some vague articles. Occasionally they would mention manipulation. There was one old timer that, gosh if I could remember his name. He was up in Burbank. I was in the Atlas Fraternity and, in fact, I was president of that one when I was in my third or fourth year.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  You had a lot of leadership positions.
  • Dr. Kammerman:   Anyway, what was his name, I can’t think of it. He was an old timer and so we, about five or six of us, went and visited his office one evening. We talked about manipulation and this was before the merger occurred. And he looked at one guy and says, “You’ve got an L4 lesion. Lay down. So, he laid him down. He said, “See the angle of the feet; they’re not identical so you have an L4 lesion. So, he squeezed him over and used a real soft technique. He didn’t use a thrust or anything of that nature, but then the guy felt better after he had it done.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  You wondered how he figured that out.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I wondered how he figured it out. He tried to tell us, but we were too young to recognize it. We were still just medical students. We were just barely getting into the philosophy of manipulation.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did you ever meet Herbert Spencer or T. J. Ruddy?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  T. J. Ruddy, I watched him do a T&A (tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy) and I have his equipment when I did my T&As. Actually Dr. Larry Young had the equipment and when he died I just used...In fact, I was trained to use his equipment down here and so I used the Ruddy hook and screw and everything for doing T&As. He created his own instruments and as a matter of fact, here is an interesting side line. A number of years ago, probably in maybe the late 70s, a couple of ears, nose, and throat guys come into the community and they could not get one of the guys to proctor them so they could get privileges at the old Santa Community Hospital. So I was wondering through doing my rounds one morning and the nurse came out. She says, Doc Kammerman, we need you. I says, “Okay,” She says, “This is doctor so, and so. He’s an ear, nose, and throat doctor and he needs to be proctored for doing these tonsillectomies. The patient is on the table ready to be anesthetized and I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” So I called the office and told them that I would be a little late and so I watched him do this T&A and he was very proficient at it. And he says, “You are a general practitioner? You do T&As? I said, “Yes, I’ve been doing them for a long time.” I said, “But I don’t use your equipment like you use I have my own equipment.” He says, “Hey, I want to see what you do one time. So when I had one scheduled I had him come in and he watched me. He said, “Man that is slick.” I used the ruddy hook, the screw and pulled it back and then the anterior pillar and slide it back and peel down the plane there and then just slide the old snare on and hook it off and it’s gone. But anyway, so he saw me do that and he says, “Well, you were skilled at doing that, but I’m not going to do it that way,” but he says, “That is wonderful,” So actually I proctored him on three cases. He had to be proctored on six by at least two different people so the other ENT guys said, “Well, okay he’s going to be proctored so they came in and proctored him on the other three. Then I had another ENT guy come in do the same thing. He had trouble getting somebody come and proctor him so I proctored him. Okay, so here is a family doctor, a general practitioner proctoring a specialist for a procedure.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And that happened continually for the next 10, 15, 20 years where you had...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, it didn’t happen that...
  • Dr. Seffinger:  more and more specialists...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  about every ten years, yes.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  more and more specialists come in and...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Once the more specialists guy come in then they would help each other.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Then the GP would do less and less of those kinds of surgical practices...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes. That’s right.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Over the years.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  And the family doctor and general practitioner got out of doing a lot of procedures.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  All right. Whatever happened to those instruments that J. Ruddy created?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I still have them. I still have mine.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  You know the San Bernardino Museum, the medical museum, the curator is an MD, pediatrician, and he asked me, he wants to set up a little booth, a little window in the museum for osteopathic innovations or history in the region and he asked me if there was anything that the DOs created, like surgical instruments or things like that, that we would like to display there. I asked him, does that include LA County or Pomona area or what not, you know, I didn’t know if San Bernardino was out there really. How much osteopathy...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  They didn’t have much osteopathic people out there. In fact, they did not have the DOs specialists out there at all.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  I wonder if there are these kinds of inventions that were made by some DOs that you know about besides what you have.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I don’t know of anybody that has anything specific. I just have the stuff I use, that’s all.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Well, at some point think about whether you want to put it on loan to medical museums around because each county apparently has a medical museum. I don’t know about the LA County one or the Orange County one
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I know the Orange County does not have one.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay, then the San Bernardino County is interested displaying things like that. So if you have any interest in that to put it on loan for awhile.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I have nothing to do with them. I’ve got some old, old OB stethoscopes that we used to put on our head and listen to the heartbeat. The rubber is all used up, rotted out on those.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  He was particularly interested in inventions, things that were created by the osteopathic profession that were not available.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  T. J. Ruddy I think he created his own instruments. And he’s the one that when I watched him do it, in fact I was at the Glendale Community Hospital when he did that and, or was it Burbank, it might have been Burbank, anyway, he had a way of taking a 4 x 4 and folding it up and putting it into the fossa of the tonsil where he just removed it and he would tuck it in there and just leave it and then he’d go do the other side. He wouldn’t worry about bleeding. He just tucked it in there, pack it in real tight and do the other side. I started to do that and the nurse said, “Where did you learn to do that? Aren’t you going to use the cotton ball, not a cotton ball, they had a cotton ball with a little muslin or something wrapped around it, not muslin, kind of like a gauze thing. They had a gauze ball.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So you could tie...?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No. It’s not a tie. It’s just you put it in there until the bleeding stopped then they’d pull it out and check for bleeding and if you have more bleeding you might want to put a stitch in or use some Mont so Solution, something of that nature. But, I hardly ever had a problem. I had one kid that bled postoperatively over the hundred that I did.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  All right so that takes us into the 1960s, beside the manipulation, okay, were there other aspects of the osteopathic training you had that made you think that you had a different outlook on patient care or you interacted with patients different then the MDs that you began to be involved with in clinical practice in the 60s.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, I think we had a more holistic involvement with the patient than a lot of the congenital MDs had at that point. One thing I can tell you about, a surgeon came into the community, a really well-trained guy. So I had called him to operate on this gallbladder or something, and he went in and took it out while I assisted. So, I’d see the patient every day and so would he, of course, postoperatively, until she went home. This was the old open technique. It wasn’t laparoscopic. Anyway, she said, “That doctor, he is cruel. I said, “What do you mean? She said, “He talks to me mean.” I say, “What did he do?” So, she told me that he was kind of rude to her and cut her off and all that sort of thing. So, I called him up on the phone and I said, “You know, I had a complaint from Mrs. So and so about you. He says, “So what?” I said, “Well, you know if you are going to be short and curt with people, they are not going to want you to work on them very much. You are going to develop a reputation as being a very cocky and uncaring physician.” He says, “Yeah.” I said, “Think about it.” So he thought about it. He called me back a few days later as I recall. I don’t remember how many days. It was sometime afterward. He said, “Dick, I think you are right.” And then about 35, 40 years later he retired and he called me on the phone. He said, “Dick, I’m going to retire.” He said, “I want to thank you for telling me how to take care of patients; how to be kind to them, how to be caring. He said, “You’ve made my practice so successful. So I felt real good about that. I’ve done the same thing with a couple of eye doctors. There was an eye surgeon that I actually had sent...somehow he is from South Africa, a black lady came in and somehow my referral service center over to this guy and she came back. She said, “I don’t want to see that man again I said, “What’s the matter?” She said, “He was rude” and I presume he was a racist. So I called him on the phone. I says, “Do you remember so and so.” He says, “Yeah.” She thought you were very rude to her.” I’ve never been rude to anybody.” I said, “Well, she said you were rude and he says, “Well, maybe I better think about that. So he changed his attitude and I had another eye doctor that came in the community and he’d just taken over a practice of another eye specialist, Dr. Tiricho and did the same thing. He was real rude to the patient and curt and everything and I called him on the phone and he says, “Well, I thank you for taking your time to call me and tell me about that sort of thing.” So I hope that I created a little more a holistic environment for the specialists as well as the other family doctors that I‘ve dealt with and a lot of family doctors recognized how I dealt with that situation because I’ve talked to a number of them about the art of caring not only of providing care, but caring. And I think that was a lot of my success.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Were you involved with the new school the medical school that developed here at UC Irvine?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well the school is...sure, yes.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did you talk about that that would take us up to through...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I do that with my students. I do it with my residents I work with.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So you took...you started talking...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I have had students in my office for a long time. I did clinic before that and I would always try to instill upon them the idea to treat the patient as a whole. This is not x, x, x with a gallbladder. This is Mrs. Jones with a gallbladder problem or this isn’t a hot “appy” this is Michael Jones with a hot appendicitis. I think that’s kind of rubbed off on a number of my residents, maybe not all of them, but a good share of them.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay. So after the amalgamation and the COP&S changed to an MD school you were here in Orange County at the time and then the school moved to Orange County in the mid-1960s. Did you become involved with them at that time? Could you talk about how that and how that came about?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, I was already on staff at the County Hospital. I was attending...
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Orange County Hospital?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Orange County Hospital and we would volunteer our time at Family Practice Clinic with the residents or interns in their clinics. They would see the patient then we would kind of evaluate them. They would come to us as kind of a consultant then we would help them just like we are doing now. I was already on staff here because it opened this hospital, the County Hospital to my status too, so I could become a member of the staff here.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And before that?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Before that, no way!
  • Dr. Seffinger:  But the L.A. County Hospital had a place for the DOs, but not the Orange County Hospital?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No. There was no place for osteopaths on the staff at the Orange County Hospital at that time. I don’t know. Nobody had tried I guess. In fact we had referred a lot of our cases out here. Doctors here would see our patient’s indigent. I remember one lady that had a big old polyp come out of her cervix. She was bleeding. She was about 80 years old. She had no money. She was living on social security whatever it was then, $180.00 a month or . Sent her out here and they took care of her and called me back and sent her back and everything.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  That is very enlightening because in 1922 the DOs argued that they should be allowed to have their own unit at the County Hospital which then became reality in 1928, but I had thought that was a statewide event that the DOs could...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Then become part of the hospital so was only a local county event...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And then in 1956 the people of LA County voted to upgrade the DO hospital there Unit II.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  As a matter of fact, I went out talking to service clubs about getting that passed. I spoke to probably two or three service clubs. Doctors would be members of service clubs so I’d get up and come out and give them about a five minute presentation as to the benefits of putting that new hospital in. It was going to be an issue on the ballot. It was going to cost 9.22 million dollars to build it.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  You know when I look back at first to this whole process I was really surprised that the DO profession seemed to be growing and thriving. At the county hospital the building was going to be renovated and enlarged...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No, new building.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  The new building was...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Total new building.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  (? 1:25:36 Dr. Kammerman clearing his throat)
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Total new building from the ground up.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  L. A. County built a DO county hospital. They were supporting this measure and only within a few years the DO’s gave it up and I couldn’t understand that. That they had fought for many decades to build the profession in the state and they were separate. They were building up more and more; had great residencies; had great training...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  See, that was only a county issue. That only happened in L.A. County.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  I didn’t know that.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  That was not state wide.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  I see.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It was not state wide. So that was only L.A. County that did that.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Was the success of the DOs that enabled the amalgamation, that whole process of the DOs becoming so prominent or successful that it was an easy transition to become totally amalgamated at that time. Did it have anything to do with it or was it totally not related?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, it made the MDs in the community know that we were a force to deal with and I think that’s why they came to the table and said, “Hey, we want you. We want you to have MD degrees. And we want you to come practice in our hospitals.” They found out that we are not all growing horns on our head and long tails with forks on them or arrows whatever you call it; that we had normal incisors. So I think that’s what happened in L. A. County anyway, now...
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Well, Orange County is another story.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Orange County was a different story. We had virtually no real hospital outside of Santa Ana Community Hospital. When I came to the County...
  • Dr. Seffinger:   So they just had that little hospital.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  That was the only hospital that was available and it was a small hospital at that time. They added another 100 beds after I arrived here.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Right and the County Hospital was not opened to you. After the merger, it became open and you became involved with it. Then you became involved with the school and the residency programs in the1960s teaching and you became an attending physician...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I was attending. I would come to the meetings here, but I didn’t come to the hospital and do any rounds or anything of that nature. I would have students come to my office or I would do a clinic, actually we had a clinic down on Walnut Street. That’s where we started out and I’d go down on the clinic and used half a day a week for a three month period or six month period or something of that nature.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Was that at the Orange County Community Clinic?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It was one of them, yes. They had about three clinics at the time and I think the Walnut was the biggest one.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Was that down in Santa Ana?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It was about two blocks south of First Street, in Santa Ana.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Yea, I think that was still there in the 1990s.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It probably was.
  • Dr. Seffinger:   I trained there.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, it was. I’m sure it was.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So, I didn’t realize that was a DO clinic before that. It didn’t
  • Dr. Kammerman:  No, it was a county clinic.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  It was a county clinic.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It was not a DO clinic at all.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay, but it was a county clinic that the school then came down to Orange County and used for training.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes. We had students and residents training...rotating through there. I also had a nurse practitioner there too.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay. You were attending there.
  • Dr. Kammerman:   We would attend there, yes.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  From time to time, to time...I understand now. Okay. What was some of your greatest challenges in relation to the osteopathic profession in California while you were a part of that profession?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  The only really challenge I felt I was having a problem with was being on staff at Children’s Hospital, St. Joseph’s and some of the other hospitals that I felt could provide services for my patients. That’s where the patients would want to go too. Well, they would go to Santa Ana Community because I was on staff there, but if it was somebody that needed some special services that they didn’t feel was available at the Santa Community Hospital, so sometimes the preferred doctor would take the patient to St. Joseph’s.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay. So tell us about your life and after. You had a good another 30 and 40 years of practice after 1960s.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, that’s right.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And did anything different or change in that time period? Was it pretty much day in day out or the same? Did you do different things each decade? Did you notice a change in this?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, I did obstetrics for about 25 years plus the rest of the medicine, pediatrics, everything else, heart, everything for about 25 years. Then I got to the point where I wasn’t tolerating being up all night two or three nights in a row. Had a spell where I went through about three nights virtually no sleep and I got up one morning and the walls were moving and the floor was moving and there was no earthquake so I figured it was time to give it up. I couldn’t tolerate that kind of activity, but I was one of the very few doctors, family doctors, that had privileges to do T&As (tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies) at Children’s Hospital. I was one of the few doctors who had privileges to do conization at St. Joseph’s Hospital. I did D&Cs (dilations and curettages) at St. Joseph’s Hospital and that was privilege that was very easy for me to get because I had the experience.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So they accepted your experience and your training I guess.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I went through one proctoring case in T&A at Children’s Hospital and I think I didn’t have any conization or D&C proctoring at St. Joseph’s because they already knew I was doing it at Santa Ana Community Hospital. So, I really didn’t have any major challenges as I recall except that it did open doors and of course I had T&A privileges at Santa Ana Community or SATCH, Santa Ana/Tustin Community and so I really didn’t have any major challenges that I can recall.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did you get involved with the COA or the CMA or the OPSC any of those groups after the 1960s at all?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, I became a delegate to the CMA House of Delegates.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I was invited to become a staff member of the OPSC facility, but it was just too far for me to go.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Were you involved with the MD or DO profession much in your career?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, as a matter of fact, I president of the Orange County Medical Association. So I thinks that probably kind of a rare thing to be president of the Orange County Osteopathic Society and president of the Orange County Medical Association.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  When was that?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  That was 1991, ‘92.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And what was that like for you. Most of the people at the time in these associations of DOs that became MDs or were they mostly MDs or did they accept you pretty well.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh, they accepted me fine. No problems. No, I had been on the Board of the Orange County Medical Association for a number of years. In fact, I was invited to the board. I was invited to fill a position. One of the orthopedists was going up the ladder. I was in the right district and they asked me if I would like to be on the Board, so I said, “I guess so” because I was going through another crisis at that time of a religious crisis and I needed something to distract me. After a while, the position of secretary/treasurer opened up at the county at the Orange County Medical Association and so I was selected and then about the time - 1991, 92, 93, somewhere through there, they were having severe problems with the state supported the Medical population and the indigent population here. So Orange County Supervisor, Harriet Wiederand a number of other leaders in the community probably about 30 people would come get together and create a solution to the problem. Well, what we did was we created Cal-optimum which is a county wide organized system to take care of the Medical population and so every patient is assigned to a primary care doctor. They have a choice of what system they want to be in and they have a choice of their physician within that system and that’s where they are suppose to go for their primary care. So they don’t have to go to the emergency room. They’d call a doctor’s office and say, I’ve got a sore throat can I come in.” Yes, come in and see us.”
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Is that something you personally campaigned for and created or were you just part of the process?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I was Chairman of the committee that developed that program.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  That was about 1991?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Got it up and operating. We had it completely operating. It’s been about 11 years now.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay, so the process began at that time.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Began at that time when I was coming in. I was president elect at the time of the Orange County Medical Association and we developed that program. We secured consultants and they came up with a plan. They interview all the parties and developed the overall plan. The County hired a CEO of the program. And I was offered a position as Medical Director if I wanted it. I said, “No.” Then I was offered a position on the Board of the Cal Optima and I said, “No.” So we therefore we got a couple of other doctors that were involved.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  That decision was because of what, the time commitment?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I wanted to stay in private practice at that time.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Does that still exist?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh yes. It’s functioning very well. It’s about a billion dollar operation here in the county, well, about 900 million.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Is there any other things that you feel you had a significant impact on?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  That’s the main thing I had an impact on. That program would not of happened if I had not been president because the previous guy was a plastic surgeon and he didn’t care. He didn’t care because he didn’t do MediCal anyway and the guy that followed me was a dermatologist and he didn’t really care, so I was at the right place at the right time to develop that program. At least I feel that way and my predecessors like the other presidents before the plastic surgeon none of them were even interested in doing anything to solve the indigent problem.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Do you have documents that can substantiate your role in that process of developing Cal Optima?
  • Dr. Kammerman:   I don’t know.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Do you have papers?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I may have thrown all that stuff away, I don’t know. I could look and see if I have it. I can make it available to you.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Something that you had perhaps signed as Chairman or some kind of proposals, policies, whatever, that would indicate that you were involved with the groundwork.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I don’t know. I’d have to look in my stuff. I may have something somewhere.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay is there any other documents you think you might have that is historical in nature that would corroborate facts you mentioned.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I don’t think so.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay. What advice do you have for future allopathic and osteopathic students in their training?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  The osteopathic students and physicians use their manipulation. Do it wisely. So many of them get in the MD training programs and never use their manipulation and then either lose the skill or lose the ability to think about it. They don’t think about doing it when they get into private practice Oh, I tell you, I have kept a lot of people working; got them back to work sooner; got them feeling better sooner because I do know how to manipulate them. In fact, I could still probably do it. But I think that that would be the one thing that I would suggest to the osteopathic students, especially in the osteopathic physicians, “use the manipulation”. “Don’t rely on organized medicine or the regular medicines. You can do so much with your hands that you. It’s unbelievable what you can do. You use the medicine to take the edge off the pain for a short while or get them to a comfortable point where you can do manipulation, but use the manipulation wisely because you can manipulate somebody and rupture a disk or something of that nature. You created a problem if you have ruptured the vertebral artery or something along that line, you have a major problem. I can say I never ruptured anything in that respect.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Were you aware of any other DOs that ever caused a problem in manipulation?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Not that I know of. Not that I know of. As a matter of fact, one of my associates that I took in with me before I retired, he is a DO from COMP in fact, he graduated, one of the first grads who graduated, Richard Bond. Do you know of him?
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Richard Bond is on the Board of Trustees at Western University. He was one of the first graduates.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, he was one of the very first graduates.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  He was one of the first graduates. He received the first diploma in 1982.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  1982. As a matter of fact, he was.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And he was your associate or he was when you when he took over your practice.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes he is my personal physician now.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Oh, I didn’t know that.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  As far as the other doctors and every doctor, “patient advocacy,” You must be a patient advocate, you must think of the patient first. Treat that patient as though you would wanted to be treated the same way or treat the patient as you would one of your loved ones as you would want one of your loved ones treated. I don’t tell them to treat them like your brother or your sister because they may be having a battle with those. You’ve heard that term before, I’m sure. They might not like them when they are growing up but they tend to get better when they grow up. Anyway, think of the patient as an individual not as an entity. And those are some of the things I would think about.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Anybody else you think we should contact that was instrumental in osteopathy in California.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, I’m certainly glad that you were able to talk to Hufstedler. I think that he’s afraid that he may be violating something by giving us some additional information, I don’t know. If we could just some way guarantee to him that the information he has would not hurt anything as far as confidentiality as long as he recognized that anything he gave to you would be kept extremely confidential that could be damaging in any direction.
  • Dr. Seffinger:   He was very open in his interview and basically he was very straight forward in what his roles were and basically what I think I would like him to offer us is these documents that he helped create. He created...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, he wrote all of the articles. He wrote all of the legislature. Some of those are in that box. Some of those are in the box.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  I don’t think he is withholding anything.
  • Dr. Kammerman:   Yes, I think Tom Nelson some how we’ve got to get to him and say “Hey look Tom this is an important project. This is a really important project. We know that you were hurt badly. Tom was not the easiest man to get along with when he was here either, in a way. He was a tough nut and he had his own world so to speak. He did his own thing.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  He’ll come around.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Hopefully he will come around and give you that information because he is a wealth of information. He’s done so much research on the school and everything. He made a presentation at the 100th anniversary at the medical school back in 1998 and it was really impressive what he had done. So I think that’s an important thing for you to get that information out of him too. Anybody else, most of the people I know, like Munish Fineberg have all passed on. Vince Carroll, of course he’s gone. We were fortunate to have Forrest Grunigen.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Forrest Grunigen?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Forrest Grunigen, yes.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Did you have much interaction with the 41st Trust, ah, Committee or Fund?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Not actually, not that much. It was pretty much taken over by the COA executives at that time. Paul Yates was kind of the trustee. I think he was Secretary/Treasurer of the COA at the time. I think they just entrusted it with him and the guy, Hustead was on that for awhile.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Russell?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Russell Hustead. I don’t remember who else was on that. I’m sure that Dorothy Marsh was involved, maybe Cosentino.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Joseph Cosentino?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Joe Cosentino.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  And then were you much involved with Forrest Grunigen and Dorothy Marsh after the merger, much of the development the new school (UCI) or any of the other interactions?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Well, as a matter of fact, I was on the alumni board at that time. One of the actions of the Alumni Board I guess Warren Bostick had kind of planted the seed because the state had essentially taken over the school as a Board of Regents which was good for the kids because tuition dropped about half of what it was originally. But it was sitting there up in the shadow of USC and USC was rapidly taking over the entire county facilities up there and there was talk of either closing down California College of Medicine or moving it to Watts. Now the Alumni Association Board and I think Walter Hopps who was president at that time or maybe...It was about that time anyway. We had talked at board meetings about the future of the school. Warren Bostick got the message to us that the Board of Regents was thinking about moving it, as I recall. I’m not totally...This is what I heard. So we went to C. P. MacGreger who was Chairman of the Board of Trustees at that time and said, “We’ve heard this issue” and he says, “Well, I’ve haven’t heard anything about it.” I said, “We’ve heard about it.” He says, “Well, what do you think we ought to do?” And I said, “Well, we think we would like to talk to UCI and see if UCI wants a medical school, we’d like to move it down there if we could.” He said, “Well, let me talk to the Board of California College of Medicine” because apparently the Regents had allowed the California College of Medicine Board to exist. So it was a dual operated situation at that time. The Board of Regents was the ultimate, but they were listening to the California College of Medicine Board at that time.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  At that time the California College of Medicine was a separate standing school.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It started as a separate standing school. And then the Board of Regents took it over about two or three years after that as I recall. And then so a group of us came down, well we didn’t come down here, Chancellor Aldrich who was Chancellor of UCI Campus in fact the campus was only a couple of years old at that time. We called him and said, “We need to see you.” So we met him up at the athletic Club in downtown L.A. We said, “We have a proposition for you, would like the medical school on your campus.” He said, “Oh yes.” We said, “We will put it in motion as to what we can do to get the school moved to UCI campus and that was when it came. It wasn’t very long after that that the whole operation was moved down here. Now, not all the professors came down from there. There was the bacteriologist, Dr. Greene, and Dr. Earl and a number of them came down, and a Dr.Stuart, an anatomy professor. Anyway, he didn’t want to come down because he was retiring anyway. And so we were starting up fortunately, Bostick had hired some really top people various departments like Jack Berk, and a few others, a couple of people in anatomy up there and they were pleased to come down here, they were thrilled to come down here. So the Alumni Association we think had some input as to get the school moved to the campus here at UCI and I was part of that.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay. So after you developed the school here and it worked its way to considerable stature over the last several decades to become an outstanding institution. Do you recall in the 1970s when the DO school in Pomona started up again? Do you remember the impressions amongst those DOs that became MDs? What they were saying and thinking and what was going on at the time the profession was starting to rebuild again in the state at the end of the ‘70s.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I didn’t have that much exposure to former DOs that even talked about because most of them were off doing their own thing at that time. Of course the doctors up in the northern county were able to go to hospitals up there. Doctors in south county were able to go to Hoag and some of the other facilities that were developing. We really didn’t have that cohesive force of the former osteopathic physicians in the community here. And the one thing that I think that came across my mind was the fact that we had taken ex-former DOs and they have had developed privileges at regular MD hospitals because they have MD degrees. When the students started graduating from the osteopathic colleges they came out, and just as you did, you could get an MD residency. You could go on staff at St. Joseph’s Hospital, hey Children’s Hospital as a DO, (as a DO). What we did - we opened doors for DOs in this state. We opened the doors for every DO that’s graduated from that school or any other osteopathic school in the nation, so a DO wants to come to California he has no problem getting hospital privileges. They join the medical association. We probably have about 20 DOs that belong to the Orange County Medical Association plus their own Orange County Osteopathic Society.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  In the 1980s you could see that start happening.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes it was happening.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Was that a strange sensation?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh, that made me very happy. It made me very happy because it proved to the world that the osteopathic trained physician is just as good as any MD trained physician.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So in a sense, the purpose of the merger was accomplished, but in ways that was unforeseen.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes, I would say so because when we had the merger occur, we were really not worried whether the DOs continued as developing a new program or not. We weren’t really concerned with it. It seemed to work out very well for us in our patient modes. We could get patients to the hospital we wanted to go to.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  You didn’t mind that the DO profession in the state was to cease to exist and that was okay?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It seemed to be an acceptable situation. I don’t know as it was desirable because there were really credible people like Ebey and other. It was kind of a trade off. The majority of the physicians of the 3300 physicians took the MD degree.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  2,000.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh no, it was closer to 3,000.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  3,000?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Yes I think it was closer to 3,000 because I think there were only about 253 – 300 people that did not take the MD degree. And some of them didn’t take it because they were not in a favorable circumstance. One of my classmates is still a DO because he was under investigation for some, I don’t know, a misdemeanor or what it was.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  He wasn’t...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  He couldn’t get his MD degree because he was not in good standing.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Right.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  He was under investigation by the Board of Osteopathic Examiners at the time.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  So in the 1980s when you saw these DOs coming out and they were getting privileges that you had to fight for in other ways and you had to give up your degree in order to get these privileges and these guys were getting it because of what you did in a sense and that felt good in one sense...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It didn’t bother me in the least.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  It was actually...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  It was actually a pleasure to see that...
  • Dr. Seffinger:  To see that happen and how forward, between 1962 and 1982 within twenty years, things had changed so much in the country for DOs and in the military and everywhere else. You had twenty years under your belt in practice and you could see, I think, at that time that the things that were an issue back in the 50s just didn’t exist.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  They were gone. The problems were not there. There is some resistance for certain specialties not to accept DO graduates into their training programs. I think orthopedics is still closed. Neurosurgery probably is still closed. If a DO wants a neurosurgical privileges he has to train back in Kirksville or Kansas City or some osteopathic programs.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  No, we have neurosurgery residency at Riverside Hospital.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh, you do? I didn’t know that.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Yes, and also orthopedics as well.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Really, you do? Okay, that’s fine. I think that’s wonderful.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that we haven’t covered or you can always add things later or write them in the transcript we have.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I think we pretty much discussed most of it, anything that I know about. I knew a lot of the old timers and when I went through a lot of those pictures I could identify some of these people that they didn’t have names on the pictures or any thing of that nature so I was able to do that for a lot of the physicians.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Were any of those Dr. Reinsch? Did she get all those down?
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I worked with her months anyway on that issue.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Oh good because we need because there are a lot of photos in those files.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  If there are more, I can do it again with her.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Great.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  I can do it again with her sometime.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  Okay, well, I appreciate you spending the time...
  • Dr. Kammerman:  Oh, I appreciate you spending the time doing this. Gosh, I think its marvelous to have somebody as talented as you to do this.
  • Dr. Seffinger:  My pleasure. Thank you very much sir.
  • Dr. Kammerman:  My pleasure.