M.D.s and D.O.s Today

Dr. Stanley Golanty interviewed by Dr. Michael Seffinger, DO

at Pacific Hospital of Long Beach, CA.
July 1, 2005

Dr. Seffinger: This is Dr. Michael Seffinger DO, July 1, 2005. We are here with Dr. Stanley Golanty at Pacific Hospital of Long Beach. Dr. Golanty would like to share his relationship to the history of osteopathy in California. First of all Dr. Golanty could you start with who you are, where you were born and how you got involved with osteopathy medicine.
Dr. Golanty: My name is Stanley Golanty. I was born in Akron, Ohio. I moved to California with my family when I was 16 in 1949. I graduated from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles and then entered UCLA as an undergraduate. I was a premedical student at UCLA during that time. My introduction to osteopathic medicine I think is kind of interesting. My father was a kosher butcher. He had a store on 73rd and Broadway in South Central Los Angeles. It was a rather large Sephardic area of Jewish people, but he had started a business that involved delivering people’s meats to their homes all done by phone. Well, one of his customers was a physician who practiced in South Gate. I don’t recall his name but maybe it will come to me later...
Dr. Seffinger: No problem.
Dr. Golanty: Right. It turned out that he was a family doctor and a DO. He had a brother who was going to medical school and used to come to our store on Sundays to pick up lox and bagels for his family. My older brother was also working at the store and I would be there on the weekends from working after school. This guy came in, Morton Jacobs was his name I believe, and he brought with him a bottle of gallstones and he wanted to show that to my brother. He had just gotten them from a patient that had just recently had cholecystectomy. And when we did some conversation with him we found out that he was going to medical school and the name of that school was the College of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons. That was the first time that I had ever heard of anything called a DO; now back at UCLA again, I got involved with another classmate of mine, named Fred Krieger. Fred and I were intimately involved in starting an organization that didn’t exist for the undergraduate students called the Premed Club; in fact, we called it the PMA (Premedical Association). We published articles and we had, I think it was monthly meetings in the evening where we used to invite the premeds on the campus to come. At first we would get a hold of old films from the United States Army that was full of gore, blood, mainly operations and that was our excitement - to turn people away from the television programs of the day which were black and white - to talk about medicine. Well, it was at one of these meetings that a doctor was invited to come and give a talk about premed and how you entered med school. His name was Munish Fineberg and Munish Fineberg was an internist sort of cardiologist who was a member of the faculty at the College of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons. He was pretty active I believe at that time in the California Osteopath Association and so Munish was a liaison to premed people and at the university schools speak about the med school. So he came and talked about it and that’s the second experience that I had in understanding that there was a thing called osteopathic medicine and that there was a school. The school was located in East Los Angeles; they annually held an open house. The open house was for premedical students and their families to come down and visit the school. So sometime during the academic school year the place was opened up for visitors and we got to come through the laboratories and classrooms and meet students. I went to that meeting my first session. I remember that the med student that I ran into that time was a doctor who would later be influential to a great deal in my life. His name was Nicholas Papageorges and he was an internist here at the hospital I’m at now, Pacific Hospital, then known as Magnolia Hospital actually. So Nick took us around. He was very enthusiastic and let us hear and know what osteopathic medicine was about. That became then, I think in retrospect, my third experience. I had applied then to medical school, MD med school, at the end of the third year like most students do, had not gotten accepted into the school. Circumstances of that day was that there was a war going on in Korea that began during approximately the second year of school and so many of us were under the possibility of being drafted into the service and in fact, I actually got the letter of invitation to come. I was able to get a deferment, and an academic deferment subsequent to that, to complete my education and not having gotten into the MD med schools then turned to the osteopathic school once I knew about it and made the decision that I wanted to be a doctor and this was a way of being a doctor and I was satisfied with everything I had seen was going to make me a physician. My mother who was an older women at that time had a great deal of osteoarthritis, and that prompted me also to become interested in what osteopathic medicine might be able to do for my mom. So I applied and I did get in. The friend that was at UCLA that was in the Premed Club, Fred Krieger, the one mentioned earlier, had gone through similar circumstances as myself and I do remember that he had also the same difficulty and when it came time to enter into the osteopathic school I applied to, he declined.
Dr. Seffinger: Because?
Dr. Golanty: Fred decided that he wasn’t going to go. I’ll never forget him saying “Why, if you can have gold, why take silver?” That’s how he put it. It’s interesting that retrospectively he entered the school. We became grand friends. He was a member of Psi Sigma Alpha like I was...
Dr. Seffinger: Psi (pronounced sigh), Sigma, Alpha...
Dr. Golanty: There were two organizations Psi, Sigma, Alpha and Sigma, Sigma, Phi. Both were honorary organizations. So we were both in that and we both ultimately graduated at the same time. He went into family medicine in San Pedro. I don’t know if he is still in practice right now or deceased for that matter. But, anyway, that was kind of the background then; also around that time I had a close friend who I knew from Akron, Ohio, his name was Bill Korbin. Korbin was a couple of years ahead of me, a very bright student in high school and grammar school and I knew him. When I moved to California, I never knew that he had gone on to medical school at Ohio State University as his older brother did. They subsequently moved to California and through interesting and serendipitous means he found me again and we talked and it was actually his brother who said to me “don’t go to the osteopathic college; you are making a mistake”, but I can say happily for my life that was not a mistake and I didn’t listen to any of that type of advice and instead I entered in the school.
Dr. Seffinger: What year are you talking about?
Dr. Golanty: I entered UCLA in 1950, did one year of graduate school so I was there until ’55, so I must have entered the osteopathic medical school in 1955, graduated in 1959.
Dr. Seffinger: Okay, so you got out of school. Can you describe your training a little bit? You trained at L.A. County Hospital, did you?
Dr. Golanty: No. I trained at, well yes and no, I trained at the College of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons. This was an osteopathic medical school. It had been back in Los Angeles in the ‘20s or ‘30s at least. It was located on Mission and Marengo Street in East Los Angeles adjacent to the L.A. County Hospital. So the campus was, I think, an old converted grammar or junior high school of some type, that’s the buildings they were in. They were located next to a railroad track; which I must say that it is very reminiscent of when I see the railroad track at, ah...
Dr. Seffinger: Western University.
Dr. Golanty: Western University, right. I don’t know if Western has a classroom where you can hear the train going by...we used to hear the train going by at the school, it was always like we had to wait until the train passed before classes could take place. The beginning first two years of school was taken in those classrooms. The first day in school we were greeted by the president of the school who was Dr. W. Ballentine Henley. Dr. Henley was a L.L.D., not a physician. He was a rather dynamic individual. In some respects he probably was as dynamic as the current president of COMP – Western ...
Dr. Seffinger: Western University?
Dr. Golanty: Yes. Dr. Henley, on the first day, gave us a pep talk. He let us know right from the beginning that we were going to be great all-around physicians and I think that everybody after that first day felt very good about where they were and what they were about to embark on and very dynamic. Our first classes then, do you want to hear about those?
Dr. Seffinger: Do you remember anything different?
Dr. Golanty: Yes, lots about our first year, I mean those were very memorable times. Anatomy was a big class. The professor of the anatomy class, Richard Stuart was his name, was a fantastic instructor. Probably most people of the school felt that he was, especially in the first two years, the most dynamic outstanding professor in the school. And so, we were all in love with him, he was a fantastic artist, so he would draw the musculature and the bone structure and the organ structures on the blackboard using colored chalk. It was like a Rembrandt when they were done. He was just a fantastic anatomist. And so that was our first class. I remember that the first thing we studied was head and neck, he picked out a skull, he used to be famous for saying that as he is standing in front of the room he has a skull in his hand and he’s talking about the apertures of the skull and he says, “you may not appreciate what goes through these holes because you can’t see it, but I can from up front even if you can’t” and that is where we began. We had a class in histology taught by Dr. Blumberg, who was D.O. It was a thrill to have a D.O., in addition to Dr. Bell, to teach us a basic science class, not a Ph.D, because it was more clinically relevant. The other class we had was our physiology class with Dr. Grant who was our physiology professor, a Ph.D. He was assisted incidentally in the class by one of my classmates, Eli Castronova, but he’s down in Australia now practicing pathology. He would climb out of the class room and go up and give lectures and then go back to his seat and be a student in the class. The school class also had an introduction to ethics which Dr. Henley, the president of the school, taught and then there was a class in osteopathic medicine given by Dr. John Andrews, whose son later was a student then later became a neurologist who trained and taught and researched at the UCLA Medical Center. Dr. Andrews was enamored with a new toy at that time. I remember that we were being introduced to a machine that I had never seen before and I now know that was an EMG, electromyogram. He was using that device in some of his research in osteopathic medicine. So we had our first classes in physiology and pathology and understanding of osteopathic manipulation at that point. Chemistry was taught by a fantastic individual. She was the Dean of the school, Grace Bell, D.O., and Grace Bell was an unbelievable professor of biochemistry. After having biochemistry in undergrad school taught by non-physicians this was a real interesting class to me because I was learning biochemistry as it applied toward patients that we cared for in medicine and she, being the physician to teach it that way, was a fantastic individual. Dr. Bell subsequently was known as the first female Dean of an American allopathic medical school; this was a result of the amalgamation that occurred back in 1962. And if I’m not mistaken there is a chair and/or some edifice left behind at UC - Irvine right now in Grace Bell’s name. I’m not sure, you’d have to check out what the honor is to her, but the school clearly recognizes her at Irvine as a medical school Dean. The other class was in bacteriology and parasitology and the like, taught by a Ph.D. named Robert Greene. We also had a textbook that we were to read in osteopathic medicine. Everyone was kind of thirsty to want to know about the science of it and we’re hoping to see information about it. The text’s name, I forgotten, was written by ... I just saw that name a minute ago, the old lady that was an osteopathic physician at the school...
Dr. Seffinger: Dr. Louisa Burns?
Dr. Golanty: That’s right. It was taught by Louisa Burns, right, the book had a lot of information in it dealing with rabbits that she would create osteopathic lesions and sacrifice and try to demonstrate the somato-visceral reflexes culminating in disease. There was a little research laboratory that was on the campus that’s located behind our classrooms. I don’t think any of us ever really got to go inside the place where she was working. I believe she died just about the time that I entered the school so we hardly got to see her. So that was our introduction in that first year of school. I think I covered probably not all the classes that were in the first year. What else would you like...?
Dr. Seffinger: Then you went on into second year and clinical year...
Dr. Golanty: Second year was the events that you remember about the fact that second year in school was probably almost everybody will talk about our pathology professor, W. Harriett Davis, D.O. She was the professor, a very nice looking lady and enamored all the male students in our class but she was tough. She was a fantastic pathology professor and her toughness still played into knowledge and so I think everybody really appreciated when it was all over on how fantastic she was. We did have our traditional classes then in a patient oriented (case based learning) format that was more clinical than lab based. Then pharmacology was taught by a Robert Earl, M.S. in pharmacology. We started having further introductions to osteopathic medicine at this point, W.W.W. Pritchard, D.O., but this was when we began to see OMT being taught in a classroom and also in laboratories. Now, in my day, words such as muscle energy and fascial release, those terms were not used ourselves. We learned something called soft tissue massage as a preparation to manipulation. What we learned as manipulation is what, I believe, people today call high velocity and that is what we were taught and did. In the third year at our school we now were in our clinical years, the morning of the clinical years up until around 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning was like active classroom work. We had introduction to clinical medicine. I recall one doctor in particular, Richard Eby, D.O., an OB/GYN specialist, who taught a terrific class in obstetrics. He owned a hospital in Pomona. He was the advisor to the Psi Sigma Alpha honor society. I even went to his home for dinner when I was elected to it. At that time we had no idea that he would be involved with bringing osteopathic medicine and education back to California after the merger. The people that taught osteopathic medicine then, one of the principal persons was a man named John Schuck, D.O. Dr. Schuck was himself a victim of poliomyelitis and his entry into osteopathic medicine, I know, was initiated by his interest in structural medicine that came about as a result of his left-over changes that did happen to him as a result of his polio. That third year, we had a new clinic building that had been built on the campus, today it’s Norris Cancer Institute that belongs to the USC complex, but it was built adjacent to a clinic building that was already there. I’ll tell you a little bit more about the clinic building in a minute, but the adjacent building was a rehabilitation building. So much of what we did that was osteopathic in the way of manipulation was done in the rehabilitation center. There was still poliomyelitis at that time and so a lot of polio patients, post-polio were there and we were doing a lot of strengthening exercises and treatments at that time for the polio patients. I recall that I had one young kid around 13 with a lot of disease that I’d take care of as his doctor for his manipulation and treatments that we gave to him. There was a clinic on the campus at the same location where the medical school itself (the first two years undergraduate portion) was. That clinic was particularly run by the medical students under a few full-time faculty, Dr. Charles Dieudonne who was an OB-GYN doctor, Dr. Ernest Stebbens who was an internal medicine physician, Dr. Jack Scoles, a surgeon, and Dr. Merlin Brubaker, an internist- those are the names I remember. Dr. Brubaker trained at a Leprosarium in New Orleans, which was a government facility that typically did not provide training for D.O.s. He became a leprosy expert. I recall a story we all remember about Dr. Brubaker is that he would talk to us about leprosy that nobody ever thought we would ever see and years later one year in our clinical training at the L.A. County Hospital indeed the things he used to talk about finally did show up like we did see leprosy and said, “My God he’s right, these diseases do indeed exist.” Anyway, these faculty were in charge of our education and supervision but there was a large volunteer faculty that came in for free and they came long distances even as far away as San Diego to teach our medical students. I think that was an important part of what made our education good as compared to some of the things I see even in COMP today, because there was a strong clinic with lots of teaching. Across the street from the clinic I’m talking about was a county hospital. L.A. County had two divisions or two units of county hospital system at that time located in East Los Angeles; this is a part from the Harbor Hospitals that came later and the hospitals out in San Bernardino Valley, but on the main campus of the L.A. County system there were two units, Unit One and Unit Two. Unit two was the uniquely osteopathic hospital and out-patient clinics. It was separate from the Unit One complex which was run and housed by the University of Southern California and at that time when I started, shared by a school called the College of Medical Evangelists which today is Loma Linda University. They were two training programs in one house much as Arrowhead Medical Center right now. They shared several training programs from different universities in one building, but we were a separate and distinct unit. Patients were assigned to either the two units on some system that the County had developed. Once you were a patient in one unit you were a patient in that unit forever. You were transferred to one unit to another if you happened to arrive at the wrong one by mistake and if you were transferable. The County had funded this thing for years. The buildings on the campus when I started were very, very old buildings; in fact, so old that one motion picture company used it as the background for a movie called The Shrike (1955) which was supposed to be about a mental hospital in Sweden somewhere. It was a very old structure, truly, it had open wards like you saw in the old movies with 20 or 30 patients all lined up in beds on either side of the wards (hallways), but it was the L.A. County Osteopathic Hospital. There were a few little ward rooms, but not many. The beds were in the hallways. Like I said it had a large ambulatory section as well, so in our fourth year as medical students, we were there for the entire service. We did not really travel as the students seem to today to other facilities for training, a little. I think, for interest, in our third or fourth year we went to a public health clinic in East Los Angeles and one in Watts. A Dr. Robert Colts, Chairman of the Dept. of Public Health and Preventive Medicine. He was the head of the Watts Public Health Clinic. So we were all feeling good about the fact that it and the one in East Los Angeles, I believe, were directed by or at least housed then by many DOs in our public health system here in L.A., including Betsy McCracken, D.O. I don’t think there was hardly any other off campus training. In our junior year, if I go back for a second, some of the patients that needed hospitalization and weren’t eligible for county hospital would go to private hospitals for their stay in obstetrical delivery or for surgery at Pacific Hospital down here in Long Beach, then Long Beach Osteopathic, was one of the participating hospitals, but it was a very small contribution at that time. So, fourth year, as students, we were assigned to the big L.A. County Hospital. As fourth year students we didn’t have a lot of the privileges that the students have today. Our work day began early in the morning and our job was to draw the blood and start the IVs on all the patients in the hospital while the interns and residents and attending physicians went around the hospital and made the rounds on the patients. Our exposure was not by assigned patients; it was by being assigned a service and then hoping that some intern or resident would be kind to us and take us over some cases, and if we showed initiative we did learn. One of my classmates was named Leon Trunc. He had an older brother Al Trunk. Al Trunk had been a war victim of the Battle of the Bulge and lost a leg during the battle and had an artificial limb and he had the guts and courage to go to med school and was a graduate of COP&S and was now an internal medicine resident at L.A. County. Al was sort of an “in” (a way in, to enable access to experiences, ed.) for my classmate and myself because we used to hang around the hospital at night and we would always find duties at night. We’d come in on weekends and then try to see as much illness and have as many residents or interns that had a little time to teach us to learn the diseases - the pathology was there, tons of pathology. Obstetrics - we had tons of and we delivered as med students hundreds and hundreds of babies. There was more than enough to go around for everybody. The interns were tired and residents being the only deliverers - so we had a very good experience. The out-patient clinic was very busy and there were large numbers of patients and so there were innumerable opportunities to go to specialty and non-specialty clinics of all types and learn while we were students. One month we had spent time doing laboratory work only. All the CBCs and urines in the hospital were done by the med students. It was our little pee-and-chemistry laboratory and it was kind of a relaxed atmosphere in there. We used to have a barber shop in there and some guys who knew how to would cut hair for nothing and so we learned to get a hair cut in there and that was another service, so there was a variety of these empty services we served under in school and then our fourth year, again, was all in L.A. County Hospital.
Dr. Seffinger: Did you have an internship?
Dr. Golanty: Okay, when I finished...sure...when we finished school then a traditional internship is what you did. There were some, but small numbers of opportunities in the osteopathic profession itself for specialty training of any kind. In my own personal life things happen to you that sometimes turnout to be in the long run the best thing even though at the time it doesn’t seem to be. My classmates were predominantly veterans of either WWII or the Korean War and so special consideration was given to veterans who graduated in my class who were then seeking internship at L.A. County Hospital; it being a civil service type position veteran’s affiliation helped. I was one of the youngest students in my class I was either second or third youngest in my class altogether. And so when it came time for internship my desire was to be an intern at L.A. County Hospital was clearly the best internship in everybody’s mind, but being a non-veteran which I was I fell below the critical number they accepted. I actually graduated in the upper 10 percent in my class. The names of people you’ve interviewed already you told me earlier that were classmates of mine including Vic Passy who you now know as the ears, nose, and throat professor at UC - Irvine, Bob Steedman who is a cardiovascular surgeon at Western Medical Center are just the names of two people I know that you contacted already that were classmates of mine. So, not getting the internship where I wanted it, I was kind of blue and figured I don’t know where I’m going to intern. Graduates of the osteopathic school in California rarely found positions in hospitals in other parts of the United States that were osteopathic - that was a rare thing - maybe one or two students a year would leave our area. First of all there were enough slots in California for all the graduates of the school to enter into training in California if they wanted to stay there - that was true for most of the class. Other training hospitals, for instance, that existed then in California, included Rio Hondo which today is the birthright of the Downey Community Hospital Program. There was a little hospital called Maywood Hospital. There was a little hospital located up near the Los Angeles Zoo called Mount Sano Hospital. There was Burbank Hospital in Burbank; a hospital in Glendale, Glendale Community Hospital; one in San Gabriel, San Gabriel Valley Hospital. There was one that had just opened on Victory Blvd. in the San Fernando Valley called Victory Hospital and I think that at the very end of La Brea there was a little tiny hospital called La Brea Hospital. They had started a program there; I’m not sure when it began. I think that those were, within the state, the primary hospitals. Broadway had a hospital eventually. Broadway, I’m not sure if they had house staff there, but they did not for very long; I don’t think that there were many physicians. There was one little hospital up in Oakland that was like an old converted house that had house staff, I believe, I can’t remember the name, but most of the class - half were at L.A. County and some were distributed at Pacific Hospital at Long Beach then called Magnolia. But just before or just as I graduated, Magnolia Hospital - the doctors there had built a new hospital in Long Beach. They called it LBOH, Long Beach Osteopathic Hospital when the interns including myself did intern at this facility. Long Beach Osteopathic, that is where I did internship formally, was really two months at Magnolia Hospital in general medicine and 10 months in Pacific Hospital. My class was the last class to have any shared time at the old Magnolia Hospital. So prior to Long Beach Osteopathic, Magnolia was the training center down here in Long Beach and even before that they were affiliated with the obstetrical hospital who I think you have in your archives directed probably by Dr. Reese. I’ve just forgotten the name of the facility that was no longer involved in training when I came here. So, having not gotten my first choice, fate had it, that a long and unimportant story to your recording, I wound up at Long Beach Osteopathic Hospital. You can edit this out if you want but at Long Beach Osteopathic Hospital at the time I came here it was considered an anti-Semitic hospital and I am Jewish by background and so the opportunity for an osteopathic graduate who was of Jewish descent being an intern in this hospital was practically unheard of. I was encouraged to apply anyways and a Dr. Simonean, a general practitioner on staff of the hospital saw to it that - for the one position that was left open – that it was competitive for me to shoot for as he was blind to prejudice himself. So my year was spent here. I must say in the first few months I was uncertain to what my treatment would be. It turned out okay, um, more than okay in some respects; I just tried to do my best job and I hope and think that the people who were here felt the same. So I did a general rotating internship here - three months medicine, three months surgery, three months obstetrics, and three months potpourri of other things including a clinic that was here at this hospital that the residents pretty much ran. The experience here...there are lots of stories about the experience with the physicians - for one, this hospital...let’s see, to be sure I’ve got the graduation all done, I graduated from this school. I think that the ceremony was held at the Wilshire Ebell Theater because that is where we had the graduation itself. I won a senior award for service to the profession. I was in Psi Sigma Alpha; I believe that was the honor society when I graduated. Anyways, this internship...I ran into a lot of people that became idols, one particularly was a Dr. Homer Desaduleer. Dr. Desaduleer, these are all DOs now, Dr. Desaduleer was a family doctor who liked obstetrics. He had ladies travel from all over the United States to have him deliver rather than some obstetrician. He was Dr. Marcus Welby [a popular TV show doctor from 1969-1976- ed.], if Dr. Welby ever lived in a human being, and that is why I admired him so much. His daughter incidentally is my patient today and her daughter is my patient. Dr. Desaduleer wanted me to go into obstetrics and I liked it and I was going to do a lot of it. There was no obstetrical residency at Pacific Hospital; it was only at L.A. County. This hospital incidentally had ten interns, ten interns trained for one year and in my day after one year you rolled up your sleeves, went out and went to work and you were a doctor. Only a handful of people had opportunities for residency training. I believe that there was a surgical program at the Hospital in Maywood. I’m not certain if I remember correctly there weren’t any other residencies outside of L.A. County Hospital and if it’s okay I will come back to that in a minute on what’s there. We did have residents at Pacific Hospital. There was a radiology resident, a few anesthesia residents, a couple of surgical residents; and ultimately one internal medicine resident, George Wong. They were going to start an obstetrical residency just before my next year was to start, but it was not an approved program at my point. Since obstetrics was initially where I thought I would go - that meant back to L.A. County Hospital, but that position was easily given away to another classmate of mine who was an intern at the County (interns at County got first preference). Incidentally, I didn’t mention this earlier, but the L.A. County Hospital rarely took a graduate from another osteopathic medical school into their program, either one or two per year might come from a graduate from the other schools. So an obstetrical program wasn’t there but what did happen to me personally was that Dr. Papageorges, the name I mentioned earlier, and one of the doctors on the staff of this hospital, Dr. Orville Hastings - who was an internist and a graduate of the L.A. County program himself many years before and a close friend of the medical director of the hospital and a person who had prejudice all over him – apparently backed me for the program; I didn’t know that at the time. He probably thought I was Italian. Many years later he became my patient. I took care of him until he died. It was only towards the end of his life that I came to realize that he had made it possible for me to go back to L.A. County Hospital - this time in internal medicine. Dr. Papageorges encouraged me to do that since the obstetrical program wasn’t there and the internal medicine was my second interest. It’s kind of interesting how fate works in your life. So, we left here. Now the year was 1959 -1960 at that time I met the lady who I married who was the switchboard operator here at the hospital and who went to school at Cal State University. So, I lived in Long Beach. My children were born here. I commuted into L.A. County Hospital from Long Beach for the residency.
Dr. Seffinger: Your wife’s name?
Dr. Golanty: Is Lorriee. So we lived down here in Long Beach not very far from this facility. She went to work for a couple of the DOs on the staff as a medical staff assistant for them and I’m at the County. It‘s of interest to me that the position that the County that I wanted as an intern - there was one spot that was held until somebody who had been accepted, would make up their mind - they were waiting for someplace else to go as an intern, and this spot that Pacific Hospital was waiting for somebody to say they wanted it. So there were two people who wanted to be at L.A. County and Pacific who were, it turns out, switched and both were in the places with their second choices - that person’s name was Jim Altenas and he did his internship at L.A. County when he really wanted to be here. We met as residents, I mean as residents because he now started in anesthesia and very unfortunately, the first week of his residency, when he started, he had gone on vacation, hunting, and had a sudden death while hunting in Utah. Jim never did get to finish his training. Anyways, I started up there. The first service that I was put on was the service to prove surgical surgeries from the medicine point of view. I roomed with a couple of orthopedic residents at the county. We had a facility...now, at this point, the old county hospital, no longer existed, the one I trained in. The citizens of the County of Los Angeles had had a referendum, somewhere around the time of my third year of med school and passed a referendum for the building of a new osteopathic hospital, unit two - county for just the DOs. So, we now had a new facility. It was opened just before I left as a med student. When I came back from residency, of course, it was there and the old buildings that I’m talking about that were there, most of them were torn down. I believe there are still a few vestiges of a few of them left, but the majority of it has gone. The new L.A. County Hospital, now, Unit Two has a cornerstone on the left hand side of the building as you face the front door; lay inside the cornerstone to be opened 100 years from the time that it was laid, the history of the osteopathic profession. I’ve told a few people, you know it, I don’t know if anybody’s ever told you this before, but if they wanted to see a history of the osteopathic profession then possibly there’s stuff in there you’d be interested in if you wanted to break the capsule early and get the County to let you open it. It is the cornerstone on the left side on the bottom as you are facing the front door.
Dr. Seffinger: Okay, so you were at the dedication for the cornerstone at L.A. County Hospital?
Dr. Golanty: Laying the cornerstone, the dedication of the hospital, the whole thing.
Dr. Seffinger: Do you remember what was put in there?
Dr. Golanty: I was told the history of the profession was in there. The autobiography of Andrew Taylor Still, I think so. Again, I couldn’t validate that, I didn’t see it, but that’s what I understood was supposed to be placed in there. There may be the history of the profession lying in there.
Dr. Seffinger: Okay.
Dr. Golanty: You should get the County to break it open and take it out; otherwise you are going to have to wait 50 years. That was put in probably 1959 when I graduated so it’s getting close to 50 years already, half the time for it already. Well, so we practiced as residents. We were in the new building. There was a set of very old buildings located off to the north side of the County building where the residents who were from Unit #1, the MD’s lived. We lived inside the new County Hospital which was a very nice facility and had a nice cafeteria. They had the old buildings to trudge all the way up the hill to get to; so our area was called Shangri-La to them. They would come and eat with us. So, that was our first kind of crossing with them; MDs being with DOs, even talking to each other at a residency level, because they would come into our cafeteria and eat! They were jealous of course of our quarters. One day we came to work, I think it was in my first year, and their old buildings had condemned signs on them, and the buildings looked even worse than what they normally looked like. They were really shambles and we said, “Well, by God, they are finally going to take those things down, those poor guys are going to get something better”. Then, a few days later when we came - there was a movie set coming in and they had filmed at our hospital and in that unit of the movie called “The New Interns”. If you see the film, black and white, called the New Interns, it was filmed at the Osteopathic Medical Center and the Shangri-La was in the film, called the Shangri-La too. That they never did tear down, I think the buildings are still there, I’m not sure. So, that’s residency in first year, internal medicine. There are about twenty of us in residency in my class. There were two other internal medicine residents, one being Dr. Sheldon Zinberg. Zinberg is a gastroenterologist today and he is the president and founder of Caremore, one of the HMO’s in his area. The second person was Victor Covner, Jr. Vic Covner, Sr., his father, was the Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at the school and at the County. Vic is retired. His mother was also a doctor. He left the County Hospital training program when the amalgamation occurred. We’ll talk about that in a minute. He joined the Public Health System who was in Venezuela and than later he came back. When I left the residency at L. A. County, he took my spot to finish his residency. He practiced hospice medicine subsequent to that. His father just passed away I think a year ago. His father’s brother was a doctor named Leonard Covner. Leonard Covner was a surgeon. He was well-known because he was married to a famous lady named Esther Williams (from 1940-1944 –ed.), the swimming movie actress. That’s some trivia. I think he has passed away also. So, the first year was a very good year in learning. It was an exciting time. As far as the practice of osteopathic medicine, go back to the senior year and in our senior year we had one month where all we did was OMT on patients referred to us by the residents or interns to do; so, it was our job as med students to do OMT treatments on patients. In our training at the L.A. County, we had a rehab department and we had rehab residents and so osteopathic medicine at the manipulative level was practiced primarily in the rehab department at L.A. County Hospital. So, I would say that ambulatory OMT was done. I wouldn’t say that much was done inside on the hospital patients, the subject that you and I have talked about in the past. So, let’s see that’s sort of the first year.
Dr. Seffinger: When you finished the medicine residency there, did you have one year, two years?
Dr. Golanty: Okay, so the second year...let’s back pedal for a minute because you are taping this sort of information...between my third and fourth year, I was along with Fred Krieger, that I mentioned earlier, and Bob Steedman, I think, was part of this too. We were all honor students and so we were permitted to go back to Washington D.C. where the AOA was having its national convention. The convention was held, I believe, at the, I think they called it the Statler Hotel, but it was a hotel not far from the Washington Zoo. It’s where many of the Inaugural balls are held, very famous old hotel. I went back later to meetings there and revived old memories. At that meeting, the California Osteopathic Association had put through a resolution asking for the removal of Andrew Taylor Still being the major thing about the osteopathic profession; in essence, the MD profession, as we had heard earlier when we were freshman students, felt that the osteopathic profession were cultists. We were cultists because we supposedly, quote unquote, “prayed to the teaching of one man.” That’s how they defined cultism and so by saying that we were, in a sense, following everything back on principles of one person, that was cultism. By taking out of the preamble of the AOA references like that, that allowed, as I understand it, that the profession was no longer considered cultist and therefore the stage was being set for the continuum of what I didn’t know what was going on exactly, an amalgamation. I must say retrospectively before I started the school, there was a lot of rumor going around that something like this was going to happen, an amalgamation of professions. And in our first couple years a lot of the students thought that it was. Many of the students that entered in, as I became a third and fourth year student and an intern, were banking on that idea that they had heard that it was coming. If I can fall back before and tell you about 1962. I’ll try to think back to what we were told in our first year in school. In our first year in school we were told that osteopathic physicians who practiced south of the Mason Dixon line in the United States had restricted licenses. They could practice osteopathic medicine, but they could not prescribe medicine nor could they perform surgery. If they even wanted to practice in Texas or Maryland or Florida you would not be able to prescribe or to perform surgery even though that was taught in the schools. And in fact, the year that I applied for medical school (1953-54) in the state of Illinois where there was a school, the Chicago Osteopathic School, the State still had a limited license for the graduates of osteopathic medicine and they couldn’t perform surgery or medicine either in Illinois. I believe it was the year I entered school or just before (1954) that we were told that that had been overturned (the law in Illinois) and now that was the first year that this could happen (1955). So, we were left with just the Southern states that had limited licenses. It was during that time also that we heard or knew that MDs and DOs could not mix in hospitals together and they could not serve in the army, navy or military. They could in public health. One physician on the staff here at Pacific Hospital was president of the AOA for a time and also medical director...
Dr. Seffinger: Carroll, Vincent?
Dr. Golanty: No.
Dr. Seffinger: President of the AOA?
Dr. Golanty: Maybe so and he was Chief of Staff of this hospital; on the Board of Directors; his pictures in the Rogue Gallery; as we go outside I’ll show him to you. Russell Husted. He also was a patient of mine just before he passed away.
Dr. Seffinger: I didn’t know there was anybody after Vince Carroll.
Dr. Golanty: I think, I don’t know where in the sequence of things he came along, it may have been before.
Dr. Seffinger: Before that, in the nineteen forties?
Dr. Golanty: Right, he was an officer in the Public Health. As a matter of fact, he served as a member of the Board of Health for the city of Long Beach which if you remind me about the Board of Health story later I will tell you more. George Wong, Jr. replaced Dr. Husted on the Long Beach Board of Health. Each served a 9 year term. I followed their terms. Several years later, in the middle of my term, I learned I was in the “slotted position” as the token D.O. on the board, even though I was then an M.D. There probably still is a slotted position on that board for a D.O.
Dr. Seffinger: Okay.
Dr. Golanty: Because that set, time wise, comes later in things, but we were now told we couldn’t serve in the military. They would not take us into the army. I believe that it is rather common knowledge that that is part of what caused the growth of the osteopathic profession during World War II to begin with, the strength in those states like California that had lots of DOs that was because they were taking care of patients while the MDs were off to war. We had heard that one of the senators from the state of Missouri, I think it was Stuart Symington, I may be wrong on this Mickey, but had indicated that if his son were dying on a battlefield he would not allow a DO take care of him. That’s in the Congressional Record, and I saw it personally. I went to the UCLA library and found the citation and I read it, so I may have the person wrong, but I know the citation was right.
Dr. Seffinger: And the year was?
Dr. Golanty: Probably when I was either a senior or probably a junior or senior when I used to go out to that library to do studying.
Dr. Seffinger: 1957 or so, 58.
Dr. Golanty: Somewhere in that area, so now, back to that freshman year, we were also told that the American Medical Association had gone through the existing six schools at the time. The six schools were as you know were Kirksville, Philadelphia, Chicago, Kansas City, Des Moines and California. They published an article based on some research that had been done by some people; I don’t know who they were, probably AMA, who had gone to the six schools to look at the curriculums and teaching and said that cultism was not being taught in the school, that the first two years were rather comparable to what they thought were allopathic medical school training, but that the third and fourth year were weak and that they felt that that’s where strength was needed to improve the schools, but they did not consider this to be cultism and it was good education otherwise.
Dr. Seffinger: That was John Cline, M.D.
Dr. Golanty: Good. You know that better than I, but the fact remains that we were told that when we were freshman. Now, as far as an amalgamation, except for a rumor that something like that might happen, and the event that occurred in Washington D.C. when I went back there as a student; I had gone to the political meeting that was held aside from the scientific meetings because were all curious to know how things were done and we did not understand at the time what was happening with the California Medical Association putting through the amendment that they did, but they got it through and Munish Fineberg, for instance, was at that meeting and I think Dorothy Marsh was at that meeting too and I just didn’t know at that time what that was really all about. In any case, we are now in my first year of residency at L.A. County Hospital, we knew something had happened in the hospital, a physician, Adolph Surchin, MD, a nephrologist, had shown up; but, previous to this, there were no MDs in our training program. They didn’t come to our hospital for any reason. I found out later that he had been sent by someone in the CMA to check out our program and improve it in preparation for the amalgamation. There had been one MD/DO who was a neurologist who was known in the school way back when he was an MD first and he went back and got a DO degree. Do you know about that one? Gerdine, I think was his name, and I can find that in my yearbooks for your history purposes. It’s in my yearbooks. We never got to see him because he passed away before I actually got to the school, so that the mixing of MDs and DOs absolutely did not occur in the County. Back pedal for a minute to the internship and there were three MDs who came into the Pacific Hospital in Long Beach Osteopathic. One was Katherine White. Katherine White was a pediatrician in Long Beach, but long ago retired. There is a memorial lecture named after her at Memorial Hospital Long Beach. Her husband was Dr. Nicholas Oddo and Dr. Oddo was a D.O. and so they were married to each other and she used to practice pediatrics here as well as Saint Mary’s, then later Memorial Medical Center. Dr. Oddo was an internist here on the staff, not residency trained I don’t think, and after this amalgamation, I’m fast forwarding a little bit, Dr. Oddo became a member on the MD state licensing board. So an ex-DO became a member on the MD Medical Board of California.
Dr. Seffinger: The amalgamation has just occurred in the spring of 1962 and you had mentioned there were some people involved with that and what was new to you at the time. You also said that you had to get the MD degree or you’re not going to be allowed to stay there. Do you remember that?
Dr. Golanty: Well, not quite that way.
Dr. Seffinger: Okay, explain that please.
Dr. Golanty: When the amalgamation occurred you had your choice of staying as a DO or as an MD. If you wanted to be the MD, you had this fee that the DOs who had never had a license in California, which was $50; but you had to have a California license (there was no such thing as National Licensing then). If they happened, for whatever reason, to have taken the exam in California, and had it before practicing here, they had the one year option to pick up the M.D. degree. So, by now for instance, there was one doctor who never did it; didn’t pick it up, actually two, the guy in the Ohio State Penitentiary that was a famous neurosurgeon, who later became a wrestler, Sam Sheppard. Sam Sheppard was a graduate of the neurosurgery residency program in the L.A. County. He went back to Cleveland to practice neurosurgery. Then he got involved with this infamous, ah, his wife that died and for all these circumstances was put in jail. Subsequently, when he finally got liberated from prison, he came to California and by special legislation they gave him the MD degree long after that one year. There was another gentleman named Frank Rosso. He and his wife are patients of mine still. Frank was in Missouri when all this happened. He was really from California and his wife didn’t want to come back here. Finally, she conceded and came, but it was after the year. I met him at Bay Harbor Hospital and he had been trying to get his license changed. He hired Pat Brown Sr. to act as his council and I believe the legislation finally got through or something happened and he got the degree changed.
Dr. Seffinger: Like in the 60s...?
Dr. Golanty: When he finally succeeded, I don’t think it was very long ago. For the sake of your record, I could find out if he definitely got it and when, because I do know him.
Dr. Seffinger: Yes, I’d like to get that actually.
Dr. Golanty: I’ll try to get that from him if you want to you could hear his experiences in what happened to him when he came to California after 1962. Incidentally, in my own class two students chose not to pick up the MD degree. Both of them went to practice in Oregon where they practiced as DOs, so they didn’t find it necessary to do that. Everybody else in the class did and except for several hundred people, I believe that’s the number, but you can check that, chose not to retain the DO degree but to become anointed, so to speak, as MD. This has been a problem in many respects since, incidentally, because no state outside of the state of California recognizes that MD degree for licensing purposes. If I or anybody should leave the state now, we would have to be licensed in the other states as a DO. I believe in New York at one time they said that you could be licensed as both and you had to write your name as MD/DO. I know that one person in California, Alan Brown, who was a graduate of COP&S and interned here at this hospital Long Beach Osteopathic, ultimately after the amalgamation moved to Nevada. He was in Winnemucca today, just retired, and he has had an ongoing battle with the State for licensing as an MD. They won’t allow it. They made him be a DO. They told him since he had an earned degree, he could write MD on his letterhead, but he absolutely could not practice under the MD licensing board. He fought it, but I don’t think he ever won it. The thing is that very few people during that amalgamation time, left the state of California to test whether that was valid outside the state, but those that did... there was a guy named, I just forgot, Andrew I think, but it doesn’t matter. He was interning here at Pacific Hospital right after me; DO; practiced as an MD after the amalgamation here; went to Washington State to practice and they made him turn back to practice as a DO in the state of Washington. But not very many did, most of the people stayed here and I personally think that the thought was that with the legislation passed that prohibited the further licensing of any DOs in the state except the few that were left that time would lead to attrition and death, and there just wouldn’t be any more DOs in the state. I don’t know if that’s true, but I believe in my heart that that was part of the grand design and then this wouldn’t be an issue in the state, that no DOs could come back and be licensed in the state of California once that happened. So now we are MDs and the rest of the people besides those who were in training or at the County became MDs. Now, all the training programs that were osteopathic in this state then closed at the end of June or July when internships were over, such as the program here at Pacific Hospital Long Beach, no more, all of them shutdown except the County. The County was the principal training center of newly named California College of Medicine (COP&S changed its name in 1962 to grant the MD degree). It could hardly afford not to have residency programs because that’s what runs the program especially in a County situation. So then there was a need to quickly get those residencies credited from the medical group. The interns were all accredited as graduates of an MD approved internship and those who were in training during the amalgamation who were interns, they were approved also retrospectively from the beginning of their internship. It was my understanding that there was a precedent somewhere that some states did not license you until after you finished an internship. So on that precedent, these people were now from March or April from that spring on to the summer MD programs so that they would retrospectively say they were approved. So all the internships were okay, but the residents were not. We were not in an approved program by anybody! The fact that we chose to become MDs meant that any chance you had of being certified by a DO college was clearly gone. Any chance of being certified on the MD side was gone also because at that time the MDs required one year of an approved MD internship which none of us had and they also said that the residency couldn’t be approved yet, because this was not an AMA amalgamation, it was a California Medical Association amalgamation and did not include the specialty colleges which were self-governed, and national, and not related to the CMA. Each individual specialty college defined what it took for certification and they chose to say that none of us were eligible. So, there was a great deal of unrest upon the resident staff as to what they were going to do. They couldn’t stay in the program and be certified as DOs; there wasn’t any place really particularly for them to go and there was a serious thought that we wouldn’t be certified as MDs either. The people that now arrived at the hospital and then the school, Dr. Bostick became the Dean and quickly we had a surgeon, I’ve forgotten his name now, but he was a hernia surgeon here at Long Beach, he became the Chief of Surgery, Dr. Bellis was his name. They brought in Dr. Jack Berk, one of my idols from Wayne State University to become Chief of Medicine. They brought in a gentleman whose name I’ve just forgotten now to be Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology and now, in addition to Dr. Bellis, they had at least three of the department heads as MDs and now they approached the resident staff, this group, and said you’ve got to stay, if you don’t stay, we don’t have training. Then they “promised” us, that we would be made eligible for our Boards. Well the internship was approved quickly, the residency was not. The residency in Internal Medicine was approved in the third year of my residency. And it was the first program in L.A. County to get approved; all the rest of the residencies were not and so many of my residency mates quit. They had nothing. So Bob Steedman, that you interviewed, should have told you that he did an internship there, he did his residency, three years in surgery, and nothing to show for it, quit and went to the V.A. Hospital and then spent his time doing general surgery and vascular surgery so he was in training forever just to get to be where he is today. People in anesthesia left and many of them went to Harbor UCLA and started over. Many of the residents left and went to allopathic programs where they started their training over again. I don’t think I know anybody that transferred into an osteopathic program somewhere in the United States. To the best of my knowledge when the amalgamation year occurred, one student who I believe was from Kansas City, I’m not sure, transferred out of the school itself to enter into another osteopathic medical school; all the rest of the students who were in the school, stayed to be involved in allopathic training. So, I also remember that very shortly after we now had been anointed as MDs, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps showed up at the hospital and said, “You are MDs now; you’re ready to go into the military.” So it didn’t take very long before that little stigma was gone. I remember that one of our Internal Medicine residents who was first year, Saul Goldberg was his name, he was a polio patient with steel braces on his legs and they said “You are good enough to be a doctor in a training program; you are good enough to be in the military.” One, Gary Marsh, was a first year resident in Internal Medicine; they took him into the Army. He came back after I finished, long after I finished; finished it and today he is a cardiologist at Downey and in Long Beach. Gary Marsh was somebody who got pulled out of the residency, but now he was an MD and he could go off to war. Vic Covner, my classmate, who’s Dad was the Chief in Medicine, quit. Said “There is no future, I’m not going to be certified” and joined the Public Health Service. He subsequently, when the program finally did get approved, came back and took my place at the County and went on to become board eligible. I was never allowed to become Board eligible or Board certified at the completion of the training. I finished my third year there and then Dr. Berk had now started the fellowship in gastroenterology which I was really interested in, but Sheldon Zinberg was a better doctor and smarter person than me and he was only willing to have one fellow so he took Shelly to be the fellow. The V.A. Hospital in Long Beach was now taking DOs, ex-DOs if you want to call it that, into their training program and that was the year that they filled when they never used to fill up to that point. So the V.A. was not an open opportunity for me. Dr. Berk arranged for me to be taken to a program at Beth Israel in Boston and I just didn’t feel that I wanted to be the first DO to go into the state of Massachusetts and a prestigious hospital in Boston, newly married with a child and try to prove myself to others so I didn’t have the courage to do that and I did not go. Instead, he said to me, I will make you a chief resident, if you would like, and so I spent the fourth year in addition to my internship as a chief resident designing my program to fit my own interests which included gastroenterology and that’s how I learned to do endoscopies and many things. Anyways, that was an approved year so I had two accredited years but the Board of Internal Medicine still would not certify me because I didn’t have the internship. Even though I had two and a half years of approved residency it still wasn’t enough. Dr. Berk was never willing to go to bat with the medical board to try to plea my case and this was true for all the people that were in my genre or who had graduated in their residencies before me who were also in the same spot, they didn’t have approved residencies. There were probably maybe 20 or 30 of us in that whole program in all the various specialties that never got to be certified in Internal Medicine or any of our specialty programs. Jim Scarborough, for example, a neurosurgeon, practiced neurosurgery, but he was limited to where he could go all these years of his practice life because he did not get certification because neurosurgery was one of the last programs to be accredited at the school. Mickey, in my opinion, the reason why the amalgamation didn’t go across the United States, because I think it would have, was because the specialty colleges on the MD side could not come to terms with the DOs in the state who were already specialized and board certified as DOs or to deal with those who were in training programs working towards certification. I think that they would not deal with it and I think that’s what finally led at least one group of people, those who were specialists from even thinking about the idea that they would go to the amalgamation because they would have no careers. I finally had to leave; I had a child; I was married and had responsibilities; and I couldn’t stay there forever. I had five years of training since school at that point. The hospital in Long Beach where I had trained people had indicated to me that you had a life back here, I lived in this place and so I was back on the idea of coming into Long Beach and practicing Internal Medicine. I brought with me a Dr. Seligman. Fred Seligman was one year behind me. He was a graduate of Des Moines School, had done his internship at, what was then known as Detroit Osteopathic Hospital, DOH, what was to my understanding the largest hospital outside of L.A. County for training of DO residents in the country, a prestigious hospital. I don’t know what ever happened to DOH, but he was a graduate of that internship program and applied to L.A. County for the residency and he was one of those few people from, “not from the California school” who got in. Interestingly enough, there was a person who came along as another first year resident with him, I just forgot his name, but this fellow also was at DOH and he was a resident in Internal Medicine at DOH above Seligman. He was a resident of medicine, Seligman was an intern, they both came to California to our County and both were first year residents. The other fellow demonstrated something I think was also interesting in that L.A. County Hospital Osteopathic never recognized the training of any other osteopathic training program as far as advanced placement is concerned for your residency. As far as L.A. County was concerned if you didn’t start your internship there you had to start over, kind of reminiscent about people who finish osteopathic programs and then want to go on to allopathic programs, and many of them in the early days of this had to do that year all over again because they didn’t recognize the osteopathic training. Don’t you find it interesting because I do, that the osteopathic hospital didn’t even recognize the graduates of out of state osteopathic institutions, or schools, in those days. It didn’t recognize internship training from other osteopathic programs. Anyways, Joe Turcillo that was his name, joined us as a resident and it was odd that someone that was a resident to an intern was now a co-intern in medicine or resident, first year. Joe got his Boards, incidentally, because the story of the Board Certification came many years after graduation from the residency. In fact, what I have to show for this - I don’t even have a piece of paper that said I finished the fourth year. The County never gave out a piece of paper that said I even put in a fourth year. I have one document from the California Medical Association that refers to it, that I had a fourth year, but it’s not an official document. It is just a statement that I had done a fourth year program. So we’re out, we’re ready to practice and we come into Long Beach to practice and Seligman joins me and now we come to Pacific Hospital. It’s now called Pacific Hospital, it’s no longer called Long Beach Osteopathic, the internships are gone and residencies in the hospitals; they pulled it in 1962; people who were in training had to get placed elsewhere or just quit and went out into practice. Now we are in practice and we want to be on the staffs of other hospitals as well as here, and the first hospital was St. Mary’s Medical Center. We applied down there and because of Dr. Unger, that was a cardiologist that had a relationship with us here, he backed us and we were able to get on staff; Long Beach Memorial Hospital, no way, you were an ex-DO you can’t do it. And the artificiality that they put up was that you had to have belonged to the Los Angeles County Medical Association in order to become a member of the staff; well, all DOs when they finished, when the amalgamation was over were all put into this thing that you know, called the Forty-First Medical Society, okay. The Forty-First Medical Society, to my knowledge, was created as a political arm of the California Medical Association to allow the minority amalgamated DOs to have a voice in their future, so, we now had forty component medical societies and now a new one that was across the state not geographic and we were all put into that and none of us were in the components society in the area where we lived and so we were not in the L.A. County Medical Association and Memorial Hospital used that as the barrier to keep us off staff. There were at the time of the amalgamation several doctors who were in Long Beach who became part of the faculty of the now CCM program. One of them was the cardiologist at Memorial Medical Center, Mervin Ellestad, M.D., the cardiologist there joined and also a Dr. Mann, a neurologist, and they were on staff at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. They became my sponsors to join when we finally did break the barrier down. It took a long time. Dr. Berk finally backed us. The school, now Irvine, using Memorial Medical Center as one of its teaching centers, and my partner and I, after several years of fighting, finally got on staff of Long Beach Memorial. We were the first ex-DOs to come on staff at that facility.
Dr. Seffinger: Do you remember the year?
Dr. Golanty: Sure. I finished in 1964. It was probably two years later or maybe even three, 66 – 67, probably, when we got on staff. It was hard times then. So, we were in practice. I am still a faculty member of the college and so I went back to L.A. County that now was CCM School. The plant of the college itself was sold to USC. Like I said, most of it is the Norris Cancer Center today. The last time I traveled up to that area where the train was and where the school was is a freeway now, I think. Gone! The clinic buildings are still there. So, I went back up and taught at that facility. Now, the school right shortly after the amalgamation wanted to move its campus away from USC. They wanted out from their influence as much as the College of Medical Evangelists, which became Loma Linda University ultimately. They cast their eyes south. Dr. Surchin and Dr. Berk and a guy named Sid Rothman, who was a dermatologists and he was the head of the student program at the County. He was the one who oversaw students in training in the third and fourth year at the County. We were driving, I don’t even remember where, I think to Orange County together in a car, where they told me that the school first wanted to set their feet where Long Beach State University is, that they wanted to make COPS a med school associated with Cal State Long Beach. That was in the book except the Cal State University decided their mission was not doctoring, law, medicine, or PhD, and this wasn’t a good idea and so Irvine had opened as a school. It did not have a medical school, I think that it had planned on having one but it was in the future. There was a free standing training program at Orange County Medical Center. I don’t believe it was directly, strongly anyways affiliated with any school and it was ripe for the taking and so California College of Medicine went down to that facility and took it over and used that as its teaching facility. There was a lot of ill will at the beginning between the staff that was there before the medical staff and now the new university staff moving in and ultimately that resolved itself. In the meantime, we abandoned the new so-called County Osteopathic Hospital. It was my understanding that USC coveted that building right from the get-go and had dreamed of turning it into what it is today, an obstetrical hospital. The pediatric new hospital was built, new when I was there, got hurt in the Northridge earthquake, and so the pediatric hospital, I believe, also was inside the former osteopathic hospital. So my heart is sad every time I drive by Marengo and I see the building and I remember my very fond years as an osteopathic resident and med student at that facility and knowing that it’s an MD program and belongs to that school - USC. It’s too bad that the osteopathic profession couldn’t have maintained it. Somehow, in some way the osteopathic profession in California has to come up with something similar to that facility to strengthen its training because the County Hospital represented a large population of very sick people, a large permanent teaching faculty with a large number of residents. We had path, and radiology, and neurosurgery, internal medicine, rehab medicine and whatever the residencies were and ultimately we began to develop the fellowships as well. We had all that and so it made it a very strong school, osteopathically. We had a very strong volunteer faculty for that clinic and for the county hospital that wanted to come up and teach, wanted the opportunity to learn themselves, do things in medicine by being at a university center as volunteer faculty. So, they were good times.
Dr. Seffinger: Can I ask you a question?
Dr. Golanty: Yes.
Dr. Seffinger: The referendum in 1956 that was a bond measure that gave funds to build the osteopathic hospital that was specifically for the county of Los Angeles, the people of Los Angeles, how can that be sold to USC? I mean that is basically a measure that put up money to build a building; that building belongs to the County...
Dr. Golanty: Yes, it never was...
Dr. Seffinger: Isn’t it still designated for osteopathic care?
Dr. Golanty: Ha, ha, ha! Well, isn’t that an interesting question. It wasn’t sold to USC because it is County, so you are right that’s County. What was sold was the private school that we went to; the land that the private school was on which today is Norris Cancer Center and that belongs to USC. But did the County somewhere in its legislation or in that proposition say that was designated for DOs only, well that’s a research project for you to go into and find out what is the legalities of all of that. I mean, are you suggesting that the DOs go back and claim something was theirs like Indian rights to my land because this was my land all along and never should have been given away? Man, I doubt...squatter’s rights would probably make that difficult to do, but that’s an interesting question because I don’t know in the terms of the amalgamation. I would bet that there was something in the terms that would allow that to happen...no...well then I don’t really know how, when they moved, you see when they moved out not as osteopathic, remember that the building became MD for at least two years it was operating as an MD hospital anyways, approved by the MDs, and all the training of MDs. Everything about it was allopathic for the two years, subsequently to that and there was no osteopathic profession in California except the four hundred doctors that stayed, whatever the numbers were that stayed behind, and I don’t think that since many of them were in Pomona area that there was a strong interest in trying to fight the facility. It wasn’t a school anymore so what would they need it for?
Dr. Seffinger: Yes. One interviewee brought that question up.
Dr. Golanty: Which question, about why they lost the hospital?
Dr. Seffinger: No, is that hospital designated for osteopathic medicine?
Dr. Golanty: That’s ah...
Dr. Seffinger: I just wondered if you knew.
Dr. Golanty: No, I don’t. Thinking back on other things about who those were that stayed behind, one of them was Dr. Eby. We used to call him OB-Eby and Dr. Eby was a professor of obstetrics. He owned a little hospital where he did deliveries out in Pomona. He was also the sponsor of the honor society so I had an opportunity to be at his home for dinner being part of that honor group I was talking about earlier. He was disappointed when the amalgamation occurred; vowed not to change his degree; went to, I believe, Missouri for a while and practiced and then returned to California and was part of what was the resurrection of the school – that’s COMP today. I’m not sure about the rest of the people that helped put COMP on the map, whether how many of them were from the original left behind group, but I know he was one of the major ones. The people who I was exposed to that came to understand also were involved in that amalgamation was a professor of OB-GYN at our school, a very tough professor, Dorothy Marsh. You know all about her. She was part of it. The other names were not really around my training. So, Dr. Grunigen, for instance, I never saw him in my training time and knew little of him other than at the time the amalgamation was now taking place. The physician from Long Beach Dr. Russell Husted talked to me quite a bit about he being involved with Dr. Marsh in whatever was going on that was turning this profession over as an MD program. You have interviewed Dr. Sam Reese who practiced his last days of medical practice in my office as a family doctor before he retired in the 90’s; he is still alive and I see him every once in a while. He is sick. You interviewed him more about the history of his day because he did turn some materials at least temporarily that you probably have seen over to me, his year book and other documents, have you seen those?
Dr. Seffinger: He showed me his yearbook. He didn’t give it to me or anything.
Dr. Golanty: He gave me a couple of documents which I have in my office too that go back to the early days. I think they were just articles, AOA type articles of California.
Dr. Seffinger: Did he give you his ECT machine?
Dr. Golanty: No.
Dr. Seffinger: He wanted to give it to somebody.
Dr. Golanty: I tell you that he did manipulation in our office when we had him over there in his 90’s. The room smelled of wintergreen. He seemed to feel like that you were supposed to apply that ointment to the skin so it smelled in our office and you could tell he was doing OMT on somebody, but he still practiced it right until the very end.
Dr. Seffinger: Was he a psychiatrist?
Dr. Golanty: He was a family doctor who limited his practice ultimately to psychiatry, but he did a lot of family medicine, too. Some of his patients are still patients of mine. He, anecdotally, was involved in that one story that’s very wonderful that he may or may not have told you, I’ll remind you for your taping purposes. Los Cerritos Hospital is the name of the obstetrical hospital that was associated with Magnolia down here. We had an intern here at Pacific Hospital, Yasmina Boyd; she graduated about five years ago or left our program about five years ago. She was married to a man much her senior, a Dr. Boyd. He was an allopathic emergency room physician. He used to be at Long Beach Memorial. She came in here one day just after she finished and she said to me that her husband was born in Long Beach. I said well that’s really interesting. Do you know where he was born? She said no, but she would go ask him. Well, she said Los Cerritos Hospital. I said, well, you know what; he was born in an osteopathic hospital. I wonder if you know who delivered him? She didn’t know, but they went home and found his birth certificate. It was Sam Reese. I said, did you know Sam Reese is still alive? And so, a couple of years ago now it was that I arranged for Dr. Boyd, Yasmina, his wife, myself, and Dr. Reese to meet at a restaurant in Palos Verdes, the Ocean Trails and the two did not know what this set-up was about, just his wife and I. So, we had dinner together and remarked that the doctor had delivered the other doctor. They brought pictures and Dr. Reese remembered and to tell the younger doctor about his mom. He had not forgotten.
Dr. Seffinger: Oh, my God.
Dr. Golanty: It was wonderful. It was an interesting time and it’s a small little anecdote story of what was in Long Beach, an osteopathic profession. Also, my son-in-law was delivered by Dr. Desaduleer, the one I honored so much about obstetrics here at Pacific; he was born at Magnolia Hospital. My two children were born here at Pacific Hospital and delivered by Warren Daily who was a DO and so the coincidence even within my own family, or just osteopathic medicine itself, is still all intertwined in my own personal life.
Dr. Golanty: So, the question that was asked here was what did I see different or unique about DOs when I started or even now and did my perception change? So, I think that the first thing that you noted when you started the school was how much older the people were that were classmates of mine as the fact with few exceptions most of them had already started doing something else before they were in medicine. So, we had chiropractors, pharmacists, nurses, physical therapist, optometrists, people who had been in allied medicine, especially, or older people who were now in this school, so, it was quickly noticeable that the people in there were what I would call second chance people. They were people who probably for whatever reason couldn’t or didn’t enter directly into medicine and now wanted to be directly involved in medicine. The podiatrist became an orthopedic surgeon, one of them for interest, and the optometrist became an ophthalmologist. So that was one thing that was uniquely different, they were mature, they had been around the world, they understood people better. I think then the osteopathic philosophy of treating the patient as a whole and all the things that we were told about were probably much more receptive to our student body then say the young kids that just came out of undergraduate school, daddy’s were doctors and so they were supposed to be one or who wanted to be research scientists or probably went to med school for the prestige of it all or the money that they were going to make. Most of the people that went in the osteopathic profession knew at that time that prestige was going to be something a little bit harder to handle because we were going to have to explain what a sick bone doctor was to people and how come you are not a chiropractor. So I think that is what we saw and I think that is still there. I personally still think the student body generally speaking is still made up of the same type of person in large proportion though the allopathic medical schools are changing somewhat. I teach at UC – Irvine still and have medical students with me from UC - Irvine and I see some of the change in them, but they are still younger. I do see more graduates directly out of medical school entering the osteopathy school and obviously the biggest change has occurred in both schools is the high proportion of women that are in the schools. The osteopathic profession in my class we had two women and one didn’t make it but in fact neither graduated from our class. They both dropped out, but also I was pointing this out to a woman, UC - Irvine student that was with me just last week that as we went through the annuals there were a large number of DO women that were in the school that I think was still disproportionate to the number of students who were MDs that were women. So, that is what I saw and still think I see of the osteopathic profession and in fact, my personal belief is that if there is a reason for there to still be two professions, it’s that. I don’t personally believe that the manipulation issue is what it’s about anymore. I think that we all thirsted and wanted to know in school about manipulation and osteopathic medicine. We all wanted to see it practiced and used and we didn’t see it then. I think you see it in some degrees even less now. And on the other hand you see the allopathic profession beginning to embrace alternative medicine and so all these things are getting blurred to me personally. Let’s see that was the answer to one of your questions is that did you see a perception of change and the changes I just sorted of mentioned, but that is what the uniqueness was about being a DO. I incidentally bought into everything that was told to me when I was in school. I was a very strong osteopathic proponent. I was not a very good manipulator. I wasn’t a very good surgeon either and so my technique wasn’t very good, but neither was my surgical technique very good either. My obstetrical technique was pretty good and so I think that some of that is skill and OMT is still a skill. It’s not a cognitive thing. It is important knowing when to use it and when to apply it, as far as OMT is concerned, which is one thing but actually performing it, that’s another skill. Anyways, that’s the thing, now, if I were to pick up then on a little bit about what happened after the amalgamation, I was practicing, and how I got influenced by what happened with the amalgamation. First of all there was difficulty in getting on some of the staffs, but that finally resolved and Memorial Hospital, the last finally capitulated. I had no difficulty in maintaining my staff appointment at UC – Irvine and to this day I am not Board Certified but I’m still in the Department of Medicine and the school respects me to this day as an Internist. When the advent of HMO medicine came that became another fantastic challenge in trying to explain how come I’m not certified because I am not, but on the basis of my background and record, and achievements I’ve done, I’ve done okay with that. I was appointed to the Board of Health in Long Beach and it was only a few years after I was on the Board, I served nine years for them, that I learned that I was their token DO. The city of Long Beach had a slotted position for DOs on their Board. Dr. Husted, a past AOA president, he was on the Board since he had been in public health. When he retired from it, George Wong, who was a member of this staff, took the position. When George quit, he asked if I wanted to take it, well, the amalgamation’s on now, so I just thought, well that’s nice, I’m serving the city of Long Beach, in a nice way to get on the Board of Health and it only was later that the Board told me that “you’re the DO of the Board”, and I said, “oh really”? And I’m not sure today whether legally they’re supposed to have a slotted DO on their board. I’m not sure there is a DO on their board right now and I think that legally they’re supposed to have one. For a short period of time they had a DO, Dr. Mandell who was the director of the Health Department in Long Beach. So, there were some of those good things and impediments that stood in your way but the biggest impediment is this board thing. What happened was after I’m out, it’s clear that you are not going to get certified because you have not met the requirements to the American Board of Internal Medicine. It’s potentially harmful although without HMO’s around credentials committees here in Long Beach area never stopped me from practicing as an internist. They all respected me. I’ll give you another aside story when I come back to the amalgamation on how that thing still trails you though. Many years ago I got involved in a mal-practice law suit. The attorney on the plaintiff’s side started to grill me during the pretrial period on my background and he just totally lit into me for being a DO. He was implying that I was something less than a physician because of that and he wanted the jury to hear it that way too. What is interesting is that when the pretrial discussion was over the guy takes me aside says Sam Reese is my doctor and Sam Reese tells me that you are a great physician and I’m sorry I’m doing this to you, but that’s my job. That’s a true story. Sometimes it’s hard to live it. Anyways, we are practicing and wishing that somebody would do something about all of us poor little wastes that finished the County program or who are eligible to take the DO Boards, but weren’t allowed to because of all these little road blocks that didn’t allow us to get to take the exam.
Dr. Seffinger: Did you ever think of giving back your MD and getting a DO degree?
Dr. Golanty: Right, first of all, the DOs felt that when you did what you did you were a traitor. My letters started coming to me as Dr. Stan Golanty or they came to me as Stan Golanty, little m, little d. They were not about to let me forget what I had done.
Dr. Seffinger: Letters from whom?
Dr. Golanty: The DOs.
Dr. Seffinger: The different DOs on the panel?
Dr. Golanty: No, the official organizations. The AOA even sent the letter out or a magazine came to me or something still, they did, they sent that stuff to you. They would always let you know that you were a traitor. The state, incidentally, you were branded in the state because when you got your license it said AO in front of your number, no one else had that except DOs, ex-DOs, so if you wanted to know whether you had been a DO there is something on that state license that brands you today.
Dr. Seffinger: DO.
Dr. Golanty: Then the school, the degrees we got said California College of Medicine as the paper and many years later the ex-DOs in the state agitated that the degree be changed to read the University of California and issue new Certificates of Graduation. So I have one of those documents in my office on the wall that says, Stan Golanty graduated UC California and it has the date and its signed George Deukmejian, Governor of the State of California. The thing, it says that I graduated in 1962, but Deukmejian was the governor long after ’62.
Dr. Seffinger: And UC – Irvine had no relationship in 1962, to the college.
Dr. Golanty: So, I think that archivists will find the document one day and try to understand how Deukmejian could have signed the document long after the actual event took place. They’ll have a little fun playing with that document and then they will understand that it was a reissued document many years later. It came as a request, I don’t know if it was the 41st Society or who, pushed through the idea of setting out new papers. Well, we’re ah...
Dr. Seffinger: So you couldn’t, at the time you had no choice, you could not return your MD degree to get into DO programs, then DO residency program wouldn’t take you anyways.
Dr. Golanty: No, I think they would have.
Dr. Seffinger: They would have taken you?
Dr. Golanty: I think so.
Dr. Seffinger: To get certified, I’m just thinking of what pathways you had choices...
Dr. Golanty: Well, we were promised by the Deans and the Chairmen of the Departments that we would all be okay.
Dr. Seffinger: So, the medical society, the specialists’ societies decided not to give you any certification or you couldn’t sit for their Boards and the DO specialists’ societies said you couldn’t sit for their boards...
Dr. Golanty: Anymore...
Dr. Seffinger: Anymore?
Dr. Golanty: Because you were now an MD.
Dr. Seffinger: And if you became a DO, could you do that?
Dr. Golanty: Yes, if I had decided to stay as a DO. If I had gone...
Dr. Seffinger: If you changed, you couldn’t go back.
Dr. Golanty: No, I think that I probably could. I think even to this day that people from the schools, you know, throw it back at me, why don’t you give up the MD degree and become a DO, join the society, and you can be a DO and enjoy all the things that a DO could. I couldn’t do that today because my life is what it is today. I’m an MD and that’s what I’m known as and I don’t need all of that. You know and I know that there is only one reason that I’ve ever wanted to have some recognition from the osteopathic profession that where I’ve been, so you can hear the story now, that one. It is where I think that the DOs have been unfair to us that chose to do what we did. We did it because that’s what was done in California. This was where it was going and everybody thought that this what was going to happen. We were in a training program; I’m not going to leave L.A. County to go out of state to an osteopathic training program just because I wanted to stay a DO. As I said, one student did that in the medical school but nobody in the residency did it, not right away. But understand that one of the prices I paid for that was that I never could be anything in the osteopathic profession in the academic world. I could never be a Director of Medical Education for a residency program. It hurts me to know that because I have devoted the last 30 years of my life to the profession and training. I believe in my heart, no matter what anybody else believes, that I’ve done more than most and a lot more than a whole lot of people to advance osteopathy in this state especially at a training level and the osteopathic profession throws it up to me that thirty years ago I did this thing and unless I change, which doesn’t make any sense right now, I can’t be involved in medical education. Now, they made a mistake, the AOA, a couple of years ago. This was just before I got sick with the cancer, so this would have been 2001, it came out that a DME had to be a graduate of an osteopathic school and have an osteopathic internship. It didn’t say anything else, just those two things, so with the help of Dr. Krpan, who was AOA president at the time, I approached him to talk to the AOA, Dr. Opipari, about the idea of why can’t I be DME of my program. And then they said to me, “Well prove it, that you had these two things”. Now proving it is pretty hard because all the records are gone. Apparently the records from what I heard have been destroyed as far as the state of California is concerned. That is what I heard. It is very remindful of me as if I was a citizen of the Soviet Union and when citizens of the Soviet Union defected and came to the United States who had graduated from medical school there, their records were burnt, they were non-existent, and they can’t go back and find their records because they’re destroyed; you got the feeling that the DOs were like Soviets, that they just turned on you for what you did. It turned out that I found a little piece of paper about 3” x 3” that was my California License as a DO. I got it after I finished my internship and I still saved it. I couldn’t find my graduation papers, they were around somewhere but I couldn’t find them. But I petitioned the profession, saying, well if I’ve got a license in California I had to graduate from an osteopathic school and I had to have an osteopathic internship, how could I get a license. That was my alleged proof now that I had met those two qualifications. So, we sent that back to the AOA. I never heard from them. COMP had their usual fund raising dinner at the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena the year I got sick, 2001, and the night of that dinner which was a Saturday night, Dr. Krpan says to me, you’re okay, you can be a DME, but I never got it in writing. Two days later I’m in the hospital with cancer and there was absolutely no interest in my time trying to pursue that little detail. Nine months passed before I was even through with my cancer ordeal and then when I started trying to approach the AOA, I got nothing from them and to this day they have never acknowledge the fact that I could be a DME and I think what they did was changed the requirements that exclude me forever. This is Michael Seffinger, DO, interviewing Stanley Golanty, MD, over at Pacific Hospital, Long Beach on July 1, 2005. Continuing regarding Dr. Golanty receiving word about being eligible to become a DME from Dr. Krpan, then having been diagnosed with cancer and not pursuing this any further with the AOA, and then later thinking that probably the AOA no longer allowed him to be eligible for a DME. So if you could start with that and then we will talk about Dr. Russell Husted and also some doctors that were prominent in his training, Marvin Kaplan and some other doctors that helped bring MDs into the COP&S school to teach in stealth and then later allowing some DOs to be able to be trained in MD hospitals also, who were the first ones to be accepted, and so forth.
Dr. Golanty: The end of that DME story was simply that it never came to be, in writing. I think that ultimately the AOA closed the door on the possibility because by closing the loop hole of just being a graduate of an osteopathic school when taking an osteopathic internship and putting in other requirements that I can’t meet like being Board Certified as a DO or belonging to the AOA, so that is gone. I think it is a shame for the service that I have put in to the profession for all these years since the amalgamation. Then as far as the school was concerned I had mentioned that there was a Dr. Delmar Daniels, a DO internist on the staff of the hospital, who subsequently after the amalgamation came down here to Long Beach, joined the afore mentioned Dr. Oddo I had talked about, subsequently passed away, but he was a person who was able to mix with allopathic MDs especially at conventions and meetings of one sort or another and through his personality and their willingness to want to teach for the sake of teaching now started to come down to our school and teach. Amongst them was a man named Bacharach, a gastroenterologist from Cedars Sinai who spent a lot of time teaching in our sophomore year, a G.I. We had Dr. Aldo Luisada, a cardiologist from Chicago, who came out as well and spent time teaching at all the levels for med school all the way up to the residency. And the famous cardiologist from Mexico City, whose name I’m still forgetting who came up and taught cardiology to us as just examples of some MDs who came through the back door and taught. They defied their own medical society; crossing over and teaching at a “cultist” school because they were good people and wanted to teach. And they enhanced their own education by doing that. They opened one, particularly Dr. Luisada, opened the door to a person I mentioned earlier by the name of Marvin Kaplan. Marvin came from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine to our program. He was one of the best residents that hospital has ever had and he was my number one idol. When you asked the question here about who did you feel was your mentors, there was no question that Marvin Kaplan was my mentor. If I could have been half the doctor he was, I would have been a happy person. Frankly, I took his place as the resident, incidentally, when he left my position that I got that was his. Marv, through Dr. Luisada, had impressed this man so much when he was on the wards, that Luisada arranged through a public health grant to bring him through the back door to the Chicago Medical School where he was on the faculty, the man who was an author, a famous man author of textbooks of cardiology and Marv did a fellowship in cardiology. That fellowship with the amalgamation, well even before the amalgamation, allowed him to come back to County and set-up a heart catheterization program; however, he was stymied at Unit Two of the County, the osteopathic unit, because there was no surgical program. So, he befriended a Dr. Jerome Kaye, a well known Cardiac surgeon at the County, who then accepted all of his data from catheterizations to allow surgery to go on, open heart surgery to go on at USC –Unit One. Marv was invited to participate in their teaching at their clinics. Dr. Kaye always thought that Marv was probably the best clinician and auscultator, and I believe that, ever existed. Anyways, ultimately he left the County when opportunity occurred at the V.A. Hospital in Long Beach where he became the Director of Cardiology and after several years of being there, Dr. Kaye, whose private practice was at the St. Vincent Hospital in Los Angeles, a prestigious hospital for open heart surgery. Dr. Kaye was considered by L.A. magazine as being the doctor’s doctor if you were going to have valve surgery done. So, Dr. Kaye convinced him to leave the V.A. to become the Director of the Cardiac program at St. Vincent’s which he did for years until he moved up to Santa Maria and subsequently retired. As I told you earlier, I felt so strong about this man that when a catheterization of my own heart came up, I had Marv Kaplan do the catheterization on me, that’s my respect to him. Now, that’s a DO! I’m trying to emphasize the fact that this man was DO trained except for that one year of a fellowship. So, then talking about those people, you mentioned Russell Husted, that’s the name I couldn’t say all the way through your conversation who I believe was involved with the amalgamation in the state of California. He who was a family doctor, and subsequently, was officer in the Public Health Service during WWII and so on, and was here at Pacific Hospital. In his last days of his career, he was the Director of Medical Education and Medical Director, both, of the Hospital. When he left Pacific Hospital, we did not have osteopathic training incidentally, so later, when I tell you more about the history of Pacific and its relationship back to osteopathic medicine, I’ll tell you where he fit into that story. In the meantime, what did we miss?
Dr. Seffinger: Okay, so we talked about Marvin Kaplan. We talked about all the people there, right? So, we are moving into what happened in 1974 when the DO profession came back in a sense, right?
Dr. Golanty: Yes.
Dr. Seffinger: How did that affect your career and what did you start doing; what was your involvement at first? I think I also asked you if you could go back into the DO profession, remember I asked about whether you could have gone back into the DO profession to become a DO and then get certification through the AOA somehow and you were talking about the difficulties with that decision and also the decision whether or not to change back at any point in time, that people were saying that you probably could.
Dr. Golanty: First of all when we became MDs, we sealed our fate, in the sense that if I didn’t say this earlier, we could not leave the state and practice as an MD, none of the other states recognized the amalgamation in California. The possible exception was New York which wanted you to be a dual MD/DO, both somehow placed on your letter heads and what have you. I’m not sure. I mentioned earlier, a friend of mine, Alan Brown, D.O., who tried to go to Nevada, could not. He fought legal battles for a year to try to get his license under the MD Boards, but they wouldn’t allow it. Two of my classmates after graduation went to Washington so they never picked up the MD degree. One person from this staff, Pacific, Dr. Anderan, D.O., moved to Washington years later and he stayed in Washington. He was never able to practice as an MD there. He had to switch it over. For me personally then, I had no intentions of ever leaving the state, so I was reasonably content to just stay as an MD. But, if I were to do that now, my brother keeps saying come and live in Nevada. If I went to Nevada, I’d have to go as a DO and I don’t even know what my fate would be under the osteopathic profession for doing this, but to the best of my knowledge I could not qualify for DO Boards at this point for what I did. They wouldn’t recognize anything I did. They would welcome me into the fold, if I wanted to go back to utilize my DO degree. I believe that they said to me if I was willing to go from MD to DO and get licensed under the DO Board that they probably would do that. The only advantage for doing that right now would be to rise in academia within the osteopathic profession. I don’t feel that it’s necessary for me at 72 years of age to rise in academia. It would have been nice to been able to say for all that you’ve done you can be a DME of your program down there. That would have been just a nice thing on their part to have said we thank you for what you’ve done, but for my own personal aggrandizement and everything else, it matters not because I will stay in osteopathic education as long as I’m allowed to and I’m healthy enough to. [addendum added 11/08/08 by Dr. Golanty, now 75 years old, in writing: “But three years ago, shortly after the taped interview, I was removed as Director of Academic Medicine in the PHLB education program and am no longer involved with the AOA program and the California osteopathic medical schools-COMP and TOURO. I have returned to UCI and teach medical students in their program.”]
Dr. Seffinger: How did you get involved with osteopathy? Let’s go back to 1974 and take a look at that.
Dr. Golanty: All right. What happened was Pacific Hospital was dying. As the DOs became MDs, the primary care doctors, were leaving the institution to go into the MD hospitals in the area and the new doctors coming into town, they kind of knew this was an ex-DO hospital so a lot of them didn’t want to come around the place. Seligman, my partner, a DO from Des Moines and Jim Scarborough, a neurosurgeon (who never did get his neurosurgery Boards as a DO and was kind of locked into this hospital), they felt as if many of the sub specialists, that their days of consulting were going to come to an end if they didn’t have a referral base and something needed to be done to try to improve the staff here. Well, the way it evolved was the following: It is a long story, but if you are willing to hear it... The amalgamation is over. I was going up to L.A. County for teaching when the change occurred, but when the campus moved to Orange County, I went down there and taught at the school. It turned out, well there’s another part of this story, when I got out of the residency, came down to Long Beach, we had no more training program. This was an academically sterile institution now. I was used to education and I was in charge of the educational program for grand rounds and the like, as chief resident. So, I thought it was a good idea that we just start to do something here. I resurrected the tumor board, started a case presentation conference, got a seminar going annually and started bringing in some of the most famous doctors in the United States. Maxwell Wintrob, the man who created the Wintrob indices, and the father of hematology, was at Pacific Hospital. Who incidentally said, “What’s a DO?” I had George Crile, Jr., the most famous thyroid surgeon in the world came out here to Pacific Hospital to lecture. So, we set up a program of education for the physicians. It had nothing to do with continuing education or credits for licensing because there was no such thing then. I got my buddies from the County, like Marv Kaplan and the rest to come down here and give lectures for nothing, just because it was good. And the staff recognized me for that too. It caused me personally to become Chief of Staff ultimately of the hospital early in my career for, I think, for those accomplishments. But now we had the basis of an education program here for the medical staff. Later, when it became known that continuing education is something that could be accredited and lead to a license, there’s another whole story behind that, Pacific was one of the first hospitals in the state to become an accredited hospital for continuing education because the program was already in place and easy to just qualify for that program as we now had an education thing going here. Now, I’m going out to Irvine and teaching there. The med students are presenting overdoses, drug addicts, alcoholics and that’s what I’m hearing and seeing. I said “Don’t you have anything here like Lupus or something else?” They said, “Well that’s what we get here at this County Hospital”. I said, “Look, if you want to come down to the hospital in Long Beach where I’m at, come down on the weekend on your time and I’ll take the time and we’ll make rounds and I’ll teach you on different patients”. And they did. A bunch of the students who really cared started coming down to Pacific with me and making rounds. Well, a bacteriologist at the hospital saw me doing it and she said, “Would you mind taking around a student with you who is going to medical school in Guadalajara”. What’s Guadalajara? I had never heard of it. After I learned about it a guy named Steve Richardson hooked up with me for the summer and spent running around with me seeing patients. I also used to take him out to UC – Irvine to the VA because I did some teaching over there, too.
Dr. Seffinger: Was this the 1970s?
Dr. Golanty: I would say this is in the late ‘70s.
Dr. Seffinger: Okay.
Dr. Golanty: When did the school open?
Dr. Seffinger: Western University – College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific?
Dr. Golanty: Yes.
Dr. Seffinger: That was 1978.
Dr. Golanty: All right, well, this was before the first class probably was even taken.
Dr. Seffinger: That was the mid ‘70s.
Dr. Golanty: Somewhere in that area. So, we are training that one kid and he is very good and in fact he is a critical care specialist in Coos Bay, Oregon. I met him for Thanksgiving dinner last year up there in Oregon. He fondly remembers his days when he was a student here and I remind him of that - what you did was become the seed for this training program – here, now. In fact, I’m trying to convince him to see that residents and interns might be able to come through Coos Bay Hospital. He’s a born teacher, himself, and it would be nice if we could hook that place up to the profession. Anyways, well now Steve’s there and others started to hear about it from Guadalajara including, I didn’t even know, a distant cousin of mine who is going to school there. His name is Jim Feld. He’s a family doctor in Orange County today. He finished his residency in family medicine at Western Medical Center, but he came here and trained, too. He was a classmate of this Steve Richardson. Before you know it, we have a ton of Guadalajara students who want to come train here on their one-month rotations, they call them Guardias down there. Well, we had so many of them applying and wanting to come that we sort of said, “wait”. We had to put a halt to this. We’re just going to start interviewing and accepting limited numbers of people. They needed surgery and neurology as part of their training; so, I enlisted Dr. Bonomo and Dr. Frank Horowitz to help in the training, besides myself. We had a little thing going here and for a whole bunch of years ‘Guad’ students were coming through here. We even got to the point of internships for an entire year under the auspices of the Guadalajara school. They came up here and met with me and we had faculty appointments. I was even given the opportunity, but my wife turned it down, to go down and teach there as a guest teacher. She didn’t want to go to Mexico for fear of “la tourista”. Well, we’re now tied up with having that program and there is a little bit of academia going on here. We started having more academic type programs and the next thing I know is that I get a call from Roger Thill, a family doctor, ex-DO. Roger says to me that he’s got a student from, I think it was Kansas City or Des Moines, a DO, who wanted to come to California and take residency training. I said, “he can’t come here; they don’t license DOs in this state”. Well, it turned out that the California courts had overturned the legality of the amalgamation of 1962, but principally the part that said that no DOs could be licensed in the state, that was the principal part. Because of that, the profession was now re-licensing DOs in the state. We are in the desire at Pacific Hospital of strengthening the hospital and being an old DO hospital, it made sense to make this a home for DOs. Why not come to a hospital that had a DO tradition, a bunch of ex-DOs on the staff and come here? That’s even before the student I’m telling you about with Dr. Thill, actually, because there are some other preceding parts of that story. Are we still on tape? One of the doctors in town was retiring and now that the DOs could be licensed in the state, his name was Kanning. I don’t remember which school he came from, but he came to California and he took over the retiring doctor’s, Dr. Neuschitz, practice, who was a rectal surgeon on staff. He also did general medicine. Kanning came and then later he brought a friend of his, Norm Vinn. Norm Vinn is very active in AOA politics today, but Norm joined him. Subsequent to that, a Dr. Jack Thomas, a classmate of my own partner Dr. John Adams right now from Philadelphia, comes out here and there is a Dr. Magnall on the staff of our hospital who is looking for somebody to help him in his office down in Belmont Shores, Naples. Dr. Magnall incidentally was appointed by Governor Deukmejian to the Board of Medical Examiners; so we have another ex-DO from this staff that went up in circles in allopathic medicine after the amalgamation. He has since passed away. That became the foundation of the Naples Medical Group because that’s where the office was down in Naples, which is part of Long Beach, CA.
Dr. Seffinger: That’s what about 1970?
Dr. Golanty: Yes, I think we are still in the ‘70s. I don’t believe COMP started yet or if it did, I must tell you, I didn’t know the school had started when it did. I didn’t even know that. We are messing around here with people from Guadalajara; we have the DOs returning, particularly the three because Dr. Jack Thomas went down to Dr. Magnall’s office. About that time a doctor showed up in town by the name of Dr. Ungerliter. Where he came from and why he came here I don’t know, but he came in from Detroit, opened an office next door to the hospital, a DO. He is still practicing in town. He was on our staff. Then two more doctors showed up, a Dr. Stuart Chesky and a surgeon, Dr. Asorian. Chesky was an obstetrician from Chicago by way of Ohio and he came to California and joined our staff. Later I found out that he was head of the obstetrical department of the new college that had opened. I did not know personally that a new college had started at that point. I believe that he was sent here, I can’t prove that, but I think he was sent here in part to explore the thought that this could become a teaching hospital for the newly opened Pomona school when they were ready for third and fourth year graduates. They had no hospital to train their people in. This had been a DO training hospital so it was logical that this could be a place to use. Given that the hospital was in a little declining state, its rejuvenation could be by DOs coming on staff. People like my partner Seligman, and neurosurgeon Dr. Scarborough, thought that was a good idea. They agitated trying to bring DOs into the community and onto our staff. The surgeon came, Asorian. Asorian was also at the school. He was Chief of Surgery, I believe at the school at the very beginning, but his “house” was down here in Long Beach at this hospital. The other actor involved in the story, and I don’t know still to this day how, was David Molina. Dr. David Molina was one year ahead of me. He was a graduate from COP&S, who came down to Long Beach and practiced. He was from this area to begin with. He practiced general medicine. He was not a very good physician, but he was a good administrator and ultimately took over the emergency room at Pacific. He was advised by another ex-DO by the name of Paine, David Paine, who was a psychiatrist from COP&S and who practiced in Long Beach. After the amalgamation he remained as the Dean of the post-graduate school of the college, the California College of Medicine.
Dr. Seffinger: Oh, the old...UC – Irvine...
Dr. Golanty: Before it moved, Dr. Paine was the Director of the Post-graduate school. He survived the amalgamation as far as his academic position at CCM. There had been a small post-graduate program, osteopathic, at COP&S. So this evolved. David Paine left here to become the administrator of this hospital and Chief Executive Officer and also Medical Director. He had that hat, too. Dr. Husted was then relegated down to being not the Medical Director, but the DME of our program, aimed at mainly education of the practicing doctors I was telling you about, and later the Guadalajara program. Dr. Paine convinced Dr. Molina to go to UCLA and get training in hospital administration. He tried to convince him that the world was really waiting out there for HMO’s and that’s what he should get involved with. Dr. Molina did just that. Dr. Molina died a couple of years ago from lung cancer, but David Molina’s family is intricately involved in the Molina Medical HMO organization. A couple of his children are doctors; one who graduated from UC – Irvine is now the wife of the new owner of PHLB. Dr. Molina’s family is the 10th wealthiest Latino family in the United States, did you know that? He built an empire. He didn’t live to see the empire he built, but this little guy from Pacific Hospital and from COP&S, Molina Medical is known nationally. It is in Colorado and a bunch of states, not just around here. Molina, somehow, I don’t know how, was involved with the school and its resurrection. I don’t know the connection, but he knew the school had started in Pomona. I didn’t know it. One of the reasons I was surprised about that and disappointed was because my wife at that time was a frustrated “want-to-be doctor”. Women weren’t getting in to allopathic schools especially if you had taken your training down the line. Lorriee took 7, 8 years to get through college, little bits at a time. She ultimately went to law school, but at the time that she started law school, COMP had opened its first year class. I would have supported her to go there. She took the MCAT exams and she did okay on them. She could have gone. She would have been happy to have been a DO physician. Fate had it that that wasn’t in store for her. She went to law school and became a lawyer instead. The new school had taken this J.C. Penny’s Department Store in Pomona where Dr. Eby was and where I think the vestiges of most of the left over DOs after the amalgamation found it comfortable to get things started again. That seems to me the reason why it was in Pomona. The law had been overturned in California restricting DOs coming into the state. Students are coming in and Dr. Thill sends me this med student from Kansas City and he rotates through the hospital with me for a month. Well, no DO showed up at PHLB. A DO I don’t remember where he went to school, joined Dr. Arthur Bowman, an ex-DO, as the first, one of the first DOs to come into the state and join up with one of our staff members. I’m not sure he preceded Dr. Kanning, but anyways, I don’t remember his name. He left and went back to psychiatry in Arizona somewhere. Well, we are getting a few DOs coming in on staff, and now another osteopathic medical student shows up from Des Moines. He’s looking for some training and I take him under my wing and his name is Dr. Andy Manos and Dr. Manos is now the DME of this program at Pacific Hospital; he was a former student of mine who was going around with me back in the days when DOs as students were beginning to matriculate into the state. They could now come and they could get training at an old DO hospital, Pacific Hospital.
Dr. Seffinger: And that was 1978?
Dr. Golanty: Something like that. He could tell you the date exactly, but maybe in the middle ‘80s because I think he mentioned the other day that it may have been the early ‘80s. It had to be before the osteopathic school was back, though.
Dr. Seffinger: Well, the school came back in ’77, they opened their doors to classes in ’78, they graduated in 1982 and your first internship class from that school...
Dr. Golanty: He wasn’t in the internship class, he was here as a student. Suffice it to say what happened was that a lot of the DO students started finding their way here before we had an internship. The Guad students were still here so we had them mixed, the Guad Squad as we called them, and the osteopathic students are now in training together. I had a party at my house and we had law students, DO students and Guad students all together for the kids at the house. Then the Guadalajara program started to shrink in ways that I don’t quite understand and we’re building the osteopathic student program so we started making the decision that we were going osteopathic and not Guadalajara as far as future growth of the hospital. We were approached by the school for students I think first. Then we were approached about an internship. Dr. Chesky and Dr. Asorian are the two principal people from the school and Dr. Chesky helped engineer this thing. I think that Dr. Molina knew or helped in getting this set-up here at this hospital. I think he knew Dr. Pumerantz somehow. We decided to have an internship here at PHLB. It was built on the background of the Guadalajara experience. Everything was in place, the teaching program, the conferences and so on; it was just a natural switch and the doctors were already getting tuned to the idea, that training was going on here, like Dr. Bonomo and Dr. Horowitz. So in the spring of that first year, I don’t remember the year right now that we took our first interns, we got approved by the AOA for the internships. It was already after the match was done, therefore, what we got was leftovers. There were three people that approached us as far as internship. One was Doreen Gateless. Doreen Gateless graduated from the West Virginia School and had spent the last couple of months of her training at Pacific Hospital as a student. She came from California. She didn’t even know there was an osteopathic hospital here. She came on a lark and she spent time with us and then she liked it so much that she wanted to be an intern here. She was a late person in the match or something so we took her. Doreen Gateless was, in my opinion, for that year that she was here, severely picked on by the medical staff, as a women a little on the flighty side. Doreen Gateless is a neurologist in Colorado today. She took her training at Detroit Osteopathic Hospital. She started a surgical residency at DOH, got in an automobile accident and wound up in a neurological intensive care unit at the Detroit Osteopathic Hospital. The residents there convinced her to give up surgery and go into neurology. She did. She took a fellowship in neurology at the University of Washington – Seattle, practiced in Olympia for a while, but I believe she is in Colorado today. When we had a reunion of some of our graduates, maybe ten or fifteen years ago, I called her on the phone, hearing from Dr. Bonomo where she was and what she was doing. He saw her at a medical neurology meeting somewhere and was surprised. I said to her, “Doreen, I want you to come down and give a talk to our medical staff.” I arranged an alumni meeting to have people come back and give talks. “If you wouldn’t come incidentally, I was going to personally go up there and corral you and bring you back down at my expense.” She came down and says, “Can I give the charge to the graduating class the next night” and I said “sure”. She gave the charge. She sat up here and talked about her wonderful experience here at Pacific Hospital. I couldn’t believe she was saying all those wonderful things given how much she was tortured while she was here, but she was our first graduate. The second and third people in that same class there was a guy named Scott Warner who came from your school, Michigan State University. He had not matched. He wanted to go into an MD Internal Medicine program , but he didn’t get one. He heard there was a program in California and figured, “Oh well, I can come out here and beach it, sit in the sun and have a good time, and maybe get an education along the way”. He got a very good education when he was here, to his surprise, and Dr. Adams, my partner, convinced him to join the army so he could get into an internal medicine program. He did. He subsequently had difficulty in the military. He developed laminitis post surgery from a back problem. He got mad at the military and quit them and today he is a lawyer in Orlando, Florida. He is also the Assistant DME of a family residency program in an allopathic hospital as well. I found that in a medical journal where he had written a letter to the editor and signed it as an assistant dean. The third person was a guy who went into dermatology, Mike Federman, who was from the Kirksville School. He was kind of a misfit for society and didn’t find an internship anywhere. He came out to California and we took him. He was a bright kid. He was a misfit, but a bright kid. He died of a heart attack as a young man in Florida after a career in dermatology. That was our maiden class. The second year we had a larger class, but all made up of non-COMP graduates. That second class had to be before COMP graduated anybody. That class had some super stars in it, like Ron Phillips who was from Chicago and is now on the staff here. There are other great names without going through them all. I hear from many of them even now; what they are doing. They are all great doctors, somewhere. And now by the third year there are graduates coming from COMP. Tom Horowitz, who is a family doctor today at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, became an intern and later when we started our first residency program, he was our first resident in family medicine. Dr Horowitz’ father was a family doctor, DO, practiced in Los Angeles, and was one of my teachers when I was a student. He was one of the volunteer faculty at the College of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons. Another graduate, early in our program, was a Dr. Bradley Davis; Brad Davis’ father was Ross Davis, who was a DO on the staff of this hospital, who graduated from the College of Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons. So, we are beginning to see a Father-son situation here at Pacific in those very early years. In those early years, we were very heavily wanted hospital for training. It was the only osteopathic training hospital, initially I think, in the state. I think that the hospital in Pomona was later involved.
Dr. Seffinger: Rio Hondo?
Dr. Golanty: Well, that came later. Rio Hondo Hospital came when I went up there to give a talk to their medical staff on quality assurance. I took those guys aside and said to them “You’re stupid, whey don’t you start taking med students here? This is an old DO hospital. It was a good training hospital in those days. You ought to have med students and interns like we do down at Pacific.” They didn’t want to at first. They fought it off. Shelly Zinberg and group; but ultimately one of our graduates – Mike Martelli went from here up to there and helped start the program - that’s when Rio Hondo came on board. The other guy that was at Downey for years as the head of their program, a family doctor, whose Dad also was an ex-DO family doctor...
Dr. Seffinger: Sechrist?
Dr. Golanty: Sechrist! Sechrist took over afterwards. Back in Burbank, Joe Turcillo, a former LACH resident in internal medicine one year behind me, I convinced to start taking residents as well and a a guy named Wineberg, a former classmate, the two of them got an internship program started at that hospital, but after awhile they gave it up. Going back, because you reminded me when I talked about Turcillo, I think this is a story you would want to hear, about what happened to us graduates who were in internal medicine that finished the County and who had “nothing” when it was all over. I better tell you that story. You see, I’m out and nobody is interested in the disenfranchisement of the ten or twenty people who had “nothing” when we were through as far as certification. Many started over again in different programs, like Bob Steedman. Those of us particularly in medicine who had stayed at the County to keep the program alive and lied to in a way, were disenfranchised, and there was nobody speaking on our behalf about trying to do something for us. If you talked to organized medicine they could care less. So, one day, I am now Chief of Staff at the Hospital, and that’s in the 70’s, 72, 3 or thereabouts, I went to a meeting of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals. The purpose of going was to find a tool by which we could have recertification of our continuing education program here at the demand of the JCAH. We didn’t know how to base our education program on the principles they were talking about which was to educate on needs. And since there was no knowledge how to do needs assessment, I found out from the medical records people here at the PHLB hospital that the Joint Commission was coming into town. They were going to talk about a tool for measuring quality care. Turns out that was the first program that they ever did in the United States on the subject. I went to the meeting and I learned what I went there for, the tool. I went down to the man who was running the meeting. His name was Charles Jacobs. He was an attorney and he was in charge of the quality assurance program at the Joint Commission in Chicago. I said to him, “I really want to thank you for what you taught me here this weekend, I really learned a tool and I’m very excited to get it started at our own hospital”. Jacobs said to me, “How would you like to join in this thing and teach with us”. I looked up there to see who they were; it included the Chairman of the Joint Commission itself! “What do you want me for; I’m just a little doctor down in Long Beach?” I’m looking up at that faculty, I’m not in that league. Jacobs says, “Are you a good doctor” and I said, “I think so”. He says “Then why don’t you join”. And then I said to him, “I don’t think you want me because I’m an old DO. I’m in an amalgamation mode from California and I’m not Board Certified and I’m never going to be”, this is approximately 8 to 10 years after finishing the residency. Dr. Berk, the Chief of Gastroenterology and Chief of Medicine, who I trained under, never wanted to back the handful of us Internal Medicine residents for certification as MDs. As a gesture, he sent out a letter to the American College of Physicians, saying, ”I’ll nominate you for that”. So that’s fine, that’s a club, representing internists. But then the American College turned us down because in order to be a member you had to be certified in Internal Medicine. Dr. Berk was on the Board of Directors of the American College of Physicians and that’s why he thought he could pull it off. So I went back to Dr. Berk and I said, “Sorry, I can’t get in”, and he said, “Sorry, I can’t do anything about that”. Now, I’m at that Joint Commission meeting and I told Jacobs I can’t even get into the American College of Physicians. He says, “Wait a minute”. The JCAH faculty doctor was on the Board of the American College of Physicians, Dr. John Porterfield. He said, “I’ll introduce you to him, he’s right here and you tell him why you can’t get in”. So the guy comes down and says, “What’s the problem?” I said, “Well, I’m an ex-DO, amalgamated in California and nobody cares about us. I can’t get certified in Internal Medicine and therefore I can’t even get in the American College of Physicians. Jack Berk (who he knew very well) nominated Dr. Seligman and myself to be in the ACP, kind of a concession to not being able to sit for the MD Boards.” I detailed it to him the issues. He says, “Put it in a letter; really write it up and send it to me”. So I went home and I wrote up the letter about the whole story including all my classmates by name who were in the same spot I was in, I included them all, in internal medicine. I get a letter back from the guy. It says, “I turned your story over to Dr. Futcher, who is now the head of the Internal Medicine Board; and Futcher has heard your story” and he sends me a letter saying we can make you eligible for the Board of Internal Medicine, in order to do that though you have to be nominated by the Chairman of the Department of Medicine of a med school and you have to be involved with their program.” Well, I’m on the staff of UC – Irvine and Dr. Berk is the Chief of Medicine so I run out to the school and I say to him, “Dr. Berk, now’s your time”. He says to me, “I don’t believe it unless I see it in writing”. So I get Dr. Futcher to write him a letter and I see Berk at a G.I. meeting and he says, “You’re right”, he says, “but I’m sorry, Stan, I’m no longer Chairman of the department; I’ve just retired”. And I’m sitting there thinking, “Ten years have passed, I’m waiting for somebody to help me; I finally got somebody who is willing to help me and you are the road block.”
Dr. Seffinger: Oh no!
Dr. Golanty: Well, I honored him, but he wasn’t helping me. So then he says, “I’ll tell you what, there is a new Chief of Medicine, his name is Gerome Tillis and he’s the new chief of medicine at UCI, and you go talk to him”. So, Tillis invites me to come to his office and I go out there to the campus and I meet with Dr. Tillis. He’s from Boston, Harvard, and he doesn’t even know what a DO is, he says. I’m now with the Chairman of the Department of Medicine of a former medical school that was osteopathic and he doesn’t even know what a DO is! So he says, “tell me what it is all about”, so, I sat there in his office and I told him everything that I could think of about what we were, training, and everything else. He says, “I’ve talked with Dr. Berk”. He said to me, “I’ll nominate you if Dr. Berk will back you and he would also nominate those who stayed at the school to continue to teach after the amalgamation, which was my partner, Fred Seligman, and Nick Papageorges, way back when. Those three, Tillis would nominate for the Board because there was a new exception to the Board rule that had just gone into effect that said, “by exception if you have equivalent training and you have been nominated by the Chairman of the Department, you can be eligible”. So, we get nominated that particular year. Fred and I talked about taking the Boards. We quickly learn that you don’t have a shot at this unless you take a lot of time off to study, and mind you, its ten years later. The chances of doing very good on that exam are not too good. A recertification exam, that’s easy. You might pass that, but not this one. We started taking review courses and it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t going to be possible for both of us to sink back into education and be able to run the practice, so we flipped coins and Seligman won the flipped coin, went back to the American College of Physicians review course in Chicago for two weeks and took the exam first. I stayed home. I got involved in my first malpractice suit ever at that time and I was a banshee over the whole thing. That’s the one I talked about earlier. That Dr. Reese story. I was unlivable with at that time. To think I could possibly be sued on this case. There was absolutely no merit to it what-so-ever. It did end with me being dropped off. But during all that time when the opportunity came to take the boards my mind wasn’t even thinking about it. Seligman took the Boards and flunked it. He told me, “Stan, you can practice medicine all you want and it doesn’t have any thing to with boards of medicine. They ask you all this minutia. It doesn’t have anything to do with things that we see in practice and unless we dropped out for a year it wouldn’t happen”(passing the exam). So, all right, I’ve got a family, I can’t drop out for a year, and so I didn’t take it. I did take the oral exam that they required as a prerequisite to the written. I went out to the V.A. of Long Beach and examined a patient out there under television and I got through that okay, but never tried to take the written exam. It didn’t affect my career as I told you here until...it really hasn’t affected it at all. One HMO has given me a hard time about it, but otherwise my career is okay even with UC – Irvine. Maybe even better at Irvine than it is at COMP. [Addendum written in by Dr. Golanty, 11/08/08: “I just got an award as the outstanding teacher of the year to 3rd year UCI medical students.”]
Dr. Seffinger: Do you have a copy of that the letter you sent to the American College of Physicians?
Dr. Golanty: I have a copy, I think it is in my desk today, somewhere.
Dr. Seffinger: The letter you sent to him, you don’t have a copy of?
Dr. Golanty: No. I never kept the copy of that with all the people’s names and everything else.
Dr. Seffinger: Have you ever written anything about all of this or is this...
Dr. Golanty: No. I’ll tell you that afterwards the others --

Tape ended. New tape.

Dr. Seffinger: You were talking about the letter you sent to the American College of Physicians and the fallout from that letter.
Dr. Golanty: That discussion was for my own self, but the question was really what happened to the rest of the people in that letter that I wrote about who were, I feel, just as disenfranchised as myself. Well, if you were on the staff...teaching at Irvine you were nominated by Dr. Tillis originally there were just three people. Sheldon Zinberg squeaked in later, so now there were four. Shelley never believed that we would be able to take the board exams in internal medicine. What I had said to him about what they had told me was a lie, he said. In fact, the whole group of them thought it was a lie. I mean I’m the one who opened the door and they didn’t want to believe it. Zinberg never did take the board exam. Seligman of course has died long ago so it’s not an issue and Papageorges died a year or two after the door was opened for him, so nobody in that original four ever did get it. But Vick Kovner comes out of the Public Health Corps and he hears about it from me and he starts to believe me. So he took a year off and studied for one whole year after he finished his last year of his residency and went back and followed my position as Chief Resident of the hospital and got in another accredited year. He took the exam and he passed it! So, he was certified. Joe Turcillo who was Seligman’s classmate from DOH that I mentioned earlier, got support from a Dr. Tranquada at USC who backed him. He took a year off and then I believe he passed the exam. So of the very many that were involved three I think then have taken the exam and passed it. The rest of us did not try. Only Seligman took it and failed it and most of us have retired and died so it doesn’t matter. To me, it’s kind of like the DME thing. It isn’t important enough in my life to want to go fight, but I do think that that still is what inhibited in part the amalgamation in other parts of the country. Because the specialists were treated so badly. Now today, if you graduate from osteopathic med school and you take training in an allopathic hospital you’re forgiven and you can be certified by the DOs and the MDs both. Times have changed and those who took an allopathic route for specialty training are forgiven. I’m not, but they are. I find that also very hypocritical and the need for amalgamating maybe less compelling if opportunity for DOs is open in allopathic training institutions. I personally believe in my heart of hearts that the one thing that made that happen was the California experience. No one will convince me otherwise that the fact that DOs after the amalgamation were welcomed into the MD world they shined like I just told you in the MD world academically and otherwise. I mean some of the others that stayed behind in academic medicine as DOs now MD besides Vic Passey who you’ve interviewed at Irvine, included a whole bunch of them who stayed at L.A. County where they had tenure; Ethel Fink in radiology, Frank Fink in pathology, and John Mohler and Ralph Jung in pulmonology. Senori Yamada stayed in gastroenterology. These people rose within their ranks once the opportunity was open. I don’t think that the MDs found that they were bad people. Au contraire, the opposite, therefore I think personally that the MDs in California now working for the first time factually with DOs saw what the DO was all about. They said, “Pretty good!” I think that that’s what opened the door to training and residency opportunities for DOs. You’ll never convince me otherwise. There may be other parts of this story, but I’ll never be convinced of that. I think that the positive thing for DOs today, if they think its positive, is that MD opportunities for training opened, in part, because of the California experience. Because I don’t think in other parts of the United States except California that MDs and DOs were mixing within their hospitals except through back doors. I don’t think they were. In Philadelphia, Shelly Zinberg and Kaplan both used to tell me that they used to take off from the Philadelphia College and go over to Jefferson and sit in the classrooms on the weekends and try to pick up stuff. They had to sneak in to do it. They weren’t invited to come in. People like Dr. Daniels that snuck into allopathic meetings, snuck in to get their education, but this wasn’t a welcome and an open thing. Some mixed staff hospitals started - Rio Hondo was a hospital that defied, I didn’t remember how they did it, they defied the notion that MDs and DOs couldn’t be on staff together prior to the amalgamation. I know when I applied to Rio Hondo for internship it was called mixed staff. Well, mixed staff turned out really to be a pathologist and a radiologist who was an MD on the staff and a cardiology group from Beverly Hills who was on the staff. So four MDs, I think, were on the staff and were welcomed in the hospital. It was a DO teaching hospital. So something had happened. I don’t know what that was that allowed osteopathic training hospitals to have MDs on staff. The barrier is some how breaking with the MDs.
Dr. Seffinger: That was in 1959, ’60?
Dr. Golanty: It’s during my internship time and before, yeah slightly before. I graduated, you’re right, ’59 so I would bet in ’57, ’58, ’59 some where in there you began to see MDs legitimately on DO training hospitals. Now is that true in the rest of the country, I’m not sure. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, but I think what made that happen was the lifting of cultism which occurred at the time of that meeting in Washington D. C. and that was at the end of my second year. So if I started in ’55, it would have been ’57 it seems to me or close to that that the cultism thing was taken out and DOs and MDs could legitimately mix and not offend the medical professional societies.
Dr. Seffinger: Well, could you explain to me then that if the cultism label was removed at the end of the 1950s and if the DOs and MDs started to mix and MDs were allowed to be on the staff of DOs hospitals and visa versa...
Dr. Golanty: Not vice versa, yet...
Dr. Seffinger: MDs at DO hospitals, only, so you started to see a separate, but equal situation beginning to emerge. At that point what would be the need for amalgamation if you could see it happening already as being a separate but equal...
Dr. Golanty: Well, the DOs still can’t go on the MD staff; the MD could come on the DO staff.
Dr. Seffinger: I see. So they held that as a carrot and said you can come on our staff if you became an MD and if you got rid of your DO degree then you could...
Dr. Golanty: Well, that would be a reason to want the amalgamation - for why did the MD come on the DO staff or why did the DO welcome the MD on the DO staff? - because the DO hospitals were shorthanded in specialists; they don’t have them; they need the sub-specialists and they don’t have them. There are not enough DOs trained in path and radiology and sub-specialties so they come on to the DO staff to provide service, but the DO is not going on the MD staff. They are not being welcomed into the MD institutions. The reason for doing it was still prejudice. It proved true because opportunity opened for ex-DOs once they were MDs now had doors opened that were never opened before. They got on the staff of MD hospitals. The California MD/DO went into specialty residencies from their general practice that they were in. They really wanted specialty medicine. They weren’t going to travel to DO hospitals out of state to get the DO training. And the second thing which sold the public on buying into it to begin with was - what the hell is the difference between the two; why should we even have two professions? It doesn’t mean anything to the public - a doctor’s a doctor’s a doctor, and if the doctor can do OMT all the better, but the doctor’s a doctor is a doctor and why get confused by the word “sick-bone” and the DOs, let me tell you now, the DOs are staying in this area especially family practice doctors. Why is it that I have to explain to everybody what I am? I’m not a chiropractor, I’m a physician. Or you could do what Dr. Jack Thomas does right now, you can do what a lot of doctors did, they wrote Dr. Jack Thomas and never wrote DO after their name or they wrote Jack Thomas, DO in such a way you couldn’t read it; in that way they were hiding who they were.
Dr. Seffinger: So they wouldn’t have fear they would not get discriminated against or have to explain.
Dr. Golanty: Sure, to the patients they didn’t have to. You know even today there are DOs that are in the phonebook who are listed as MDs, did you know that? Dr. Becker is listed in the book as an MD right now, do you think he’s changing it? He’s not at all interested in changing it. He’s not so proud of that degree sufficient enough to tell the phone directory - to take my name off. I’ve seen quite a few DOs who have gotten mistakenly put into the MD phone book. They are perfectly content; I mean it’s just that’s reality of what you were up against as to why you had to be a very strong believer in osteopathic medicine and osteopathic manipulation to say let’s keep it separate. Are we being frank right now and you’re allowing me to speak my opinions? You won’t be offended, Mickey, yourself right, I mean I consider you a friend. I think that its stupid to have the two professions still and I think that the reason for the amalgamation is waiting there to happen again. I’ve been saying it at meetings I’ve been at recently and still believe it. I mean I believe that since the med students 70% or whatever they are crossing over into MD institutions for their training, why is there separation? Why didn’t the amalgamation happen across the United States? I’m convinced that the reason it didn’t happen across the United States is: one, the specialty thing; they didn’t know how to handle that. The AMA was the one that goofed on that one. Their specialty colleges they couldn’t control them, and secondly, if you’re a big fish in a little pond do you want to become a little fish in a big pond? So you have a lot of positions in the AOA and all the various committees and subcommittees and what have you and now an amalgamation occurs, who are you? You are no longer the big shot that you were. It’s funny how many of the people that were DOs in California became the big shots in the MD world. They did become big fish in a big pond because talent would show, but I think that there was fear. I think there was still more fear of the idea that the AOA and all the people that represented the hierarchy of osteopathic medicine were afraid to let amalgamation occur and then there were the real true believers. I know at that meeting in Washington D.C. there were a lot of older DOs who were primarily OMT doctors; they were very unhappy. They knew what that was heading to and they went around kind of sad at that meeting. Again, I wasn’t totally appreciative at that time of what I was seeing, but they didn’t like. They didn’t like California for what they did. But most of the DOs in California wanted it. Do you know from your history maybe better than I, but my understanding is this was hoped to be a national amalgamation and the California docs wanted it to happen, the way I understood it, and it wasn’t happening so that’s when they did it and went on their own. The mistake from it was they couldn’t make that license in California fit out of state. That was the biggest limitation that occurred from it. Washington I understood attempted to do it, but they didn’t have a medical school in Washington, osteopathic medical school, that could be changed into an MD school so they didn’t have a route by which to give the degree out. So, my own personal bias is, though I have another take on osteopathic medicine, my own personal bias is that the reason still exists - the loss already mentioned. I will continue to believe for the rest of life that the loss of doing it would be, the thing that I mentioned much earlier in this discussion, that the character of the graduates would change; this more mature older type of individual who tends to constitute a lot of what is in the osteopathic schools today probably, if it became a standard osteopathic school, might change. I mean I think Irvine changed. The character of the class at Irvine became much different, although all of medicine is changing - older students, women and all that stuff; they are all getting in and all those prejudice barriers are breaking down. It again speaks for the argument for - lets just go for one. That’s my argument, but you know again the term of the amalgamation as I understood it was that Irvine was to have a school or a chair or something on osteopathic medicine. They were supposed to research it. They were supposed to consider it in their curriculum. The money that went from the sale of the school was supposed to go to Irvine for funding research. That’s what I understood and yet it never took off until your project now, frankly. If that’s a vestige of what that was about, although you are saying the 41st is funding it not the money that went...I’d like to know what happened to the money for the sale of the school that went to UC Irvine. What happened to it? There’s several millions of dollars that USC paid for that property. Where did it go? It was supposed to go, if you look at the terms of the amalgamation, it was supposed to go for continuing the osteopathic teaching in some way.
Dr. Seffinger: That became the 41st Trust Fund.
Dr. Golanty: Yes, well maybe that’s where it went to the Trust Fund, but it was supposed to be geared towards UC – Irvine not losing its osteopathic identity. Unfortunately, the model for that happening was the Ottoman School in Philadelphia and the San Francisco School, both of which were homeopathic schools and who quickly lost their identities even though, from my understanding, they were supposed to be stuck in the curriculum, homeopathic teaching in some fashion, it’s gone. So, you know, I would like to hear from the DOs what the strength of what it is that should keep them separate and the strength is the philosophy. I don’t believe it is the philosophy because everyone who wants to be a legitimate doctor wants to treat the patient as a whole. Don’t tell me that osteopathic sub-specialist treat them as a whole. They treat them as a kidney, or as a brain or as an eye. Where is the pathologist doing OMT? So, if you say philosophy, yeah, there’s philosophy, but the students at UC – Irvine, many of them I talk to today, they are very much committed to the whole patient and have the same concepts. So, if I take a DO student and I take an MD student and shake them up in bag and throw them out in the street and if they are unwilling to talk OMT to me, I can’t tell which school they went to, osteopathic or allopathic. There are some crummy allopathic students who are selfish and poor. I just had a med student with me now from China, a fantastic lady, and her predecessor fantastic, but her predecessor pretty crummy as far as attitudes of treating the patient as a whole and so on. One of my UCI students from her second year stayed with me on third and fourth year rotations, invited me to her graduation. She had me at her family dinner after graduation. She’s going to be a great doc. She’s a very fine human being. Her sister is a graduate of Touro University, so she has absolutely no qualms about what the DO/MD thing is - they are all the same to her. The girl that just left me said that she was at Memorial and her Senior Resident in pediatrics was a DO, at Memorial!
Dr. Seffinger: Do you think that the students at UC – Irvine have a little more holistic education or strive to treat the patient as a whole person because of the heritage of the curriculum of that college?
Dr. Golanty: Oh, I wish it were so, but I don’t believe that.
Dr. Seffinger: It’s just part of what’s happening in all medical schools?
Dr. Golanty: That’s what I think!
Dr. Seffinger: I appreciate your time.
Dr. Golanty: I appreciate yours too.
Dr. Seffinger: Yes, so we can come back and revisit things that pop into your head over time.
Dr. Golanty: Like some of these questions that I can’t answer.
Dr. Seffinger: Yes and we have time to think about these and you have documents you may find that you want to send along or make copies of it that we can utilize for this project. Anyway, we will continue this at another time. Thank you for several hours, five hours of discussion. Thank you very much.

Dr. Seffinger interviewed Dr. Golanty at Pacific Hospital of Long Beach on July 1, 2005. Subsequently, Dr. Golanty made the final corrections and clarifications to his transcribed interview on November 8, 2008.