Heritage Snapshot Part 217: Ellsworth E. Wareham, MD

LOMA LINDA >> Ellsworth E. Wareham, MD, the son of a farmer, grew up in Alberta, Canada, during the Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He attended a one-room elementary school where one teacher taught ten students eight grades. Following his high school education in a very small local high school and with financial help from his grandmother, Wareham attended Canadian Junior College for one year. That summer when he was 17 he earned a scholarship by selling religious books door-to-door. Getting an education was important to Wareham, but lack of financial backing made going to medical school seem out of the question. Following two years at Canadian Junior College, Wareham dropped out of school for two years. During this time he developed a definite conviction that he should become a physician. The thought was not just a vague idea; it was as strong as hunger. There was no other option. His dire financial situation did not impact his desire to study medicine. He had to do it, no matter what it took. After taking additional pre-med courses, and with the equivalent of two years of college, Wareham applied to attend the Loma Linda College of Medical Evangelists (CME). He started medical school in 1937 after working one more year as an orderly at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California. In 1940, he and his classmate, Clifford Anderson, produced an annual which was named The March of CME and published it in 1941. He graduated from CME in 1942. Following a stint as a physician on a destroyer in the United States Navy, Wareham became convinced that if he were to become a surgeon, he had to be well-trained. Following a three-year fellowship in surgery he began a residency in chest surgery at Belleview Hospital in New York City. As he finished his residency, cardiac surgery was just beginning. Despite council from his chief, Wareham had a definite impression that he had to have additional training in cardiac surgery. It came from within. He just knew he had to become a cardiac surgeon. When Wareham started performing open-heart surgery in New York, he had no access to a heart-lung machine. By cooling the surface of the patient’s body he could operate on the heart for only six or seven minutes. In 1958, with a heart-lung machine he and his colleague Wilfred Huse, MD, themselves built, he started the open-heart surgery program at the White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles. He brought the program to Loma Linda in 1963, the same year he and C. Joan Coggin, MD, started the Loma Linda University Overseas Heart Surgery Team. (The team has now performed more heart surgeries in more countries than has any other similar organization. They not only performed the surgeries, but also taught local physicians how to continue the life-saving procedure and the teamwork necessary for success.) In 1974, Wareham sent one of his protégés, Leonard L. Bailey, MD, to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, the largest children’s hospital in the world, for additional training in pediatric cardiac surgery. When Bailey returned to Loma Linda and wanted to conduct research involving heart transplants in newborns, Wareham approved of him setting up a research laboratory with financial support from 40 fellow surgeons. Together they donated monthly for seven years and invested a million dollars of earned income to prove Bailey’s theory that the newborn has an immature immune system and is less likely to reject a transplanted heart. Through Wareham’s protégé, Loma Linda University Medical Center became the world pioneer in infant heart transplantation. Today, Bailey’s team has performed 334 infant heart transplant surgeries. Wareham retired from Loma Linda at age 74, but for the next 20 years, from age 75 to 95, he continued as an assistant in cardiac surgery at a hospital in Los Angeles. (An assistant in cardiac surgery in California legally has to be as competent as the heart surgeon.) In 2008, Wareham was featured in The Blue Zones, a book on five places in the world known for the longevity of their citizens. Wareham is now almost 102.