Heritage Snapshot: Part 153

Chauncey L. Smith. MD, was born on Feb. 8, 1923, in the OB cottage in what is now the basic sciences quadrangle of Loma Linda University. Lyra George, MD, one of Loma Linda’s early female physicians, delivered him. Chauncey grew up on Starr Street next door to its namesake, George B. Starr, a revered Seventh-day Adventist minister for 65 years. He attended the Loma Linda Elementary School and Academy for twelve years. Because he spent most of his life in Loma Linda, by 2005 Chauncey had witnessed about 80 percent of the University and Medical Center’s 100-year history. As a child, after church on Sabbath afternoons he walked through the 1929 addition to the Loma Linda Sanitarium and Hospital (now Nichol Hall) on the hill while it was under construction. That same year from his home on Starr Street he watched the construction of the landmark water tower on the hill. While Chauncey was growing up his parents never had a car. The family walked everywhere or took the local bus. For a while his ambition was to be a bus driver. For work as a teenager he did housework, maintained landscape, and polished cars at a Douglas service station where the Randall Amphitheater is located today. Chauncey was graduated from Loma Linda Academy in 1940. When he was a pre-med student at La Sierra College he lived in Loma Linda in the original Sanitarium building—at that time called the Sanitarium Annex. He graduated from the College of Medical Evangelists in July, 1946, and received his diploma as a member of the Class of 1947. In those days CME issued diplomas after one year of internship. Dr. Smith completed his internal medicine residency at the White Memorial Hospital in 1948, and served as a Captain in the United States Air Force from 1948 to 1952 in San Rafael and Long Beach, California. And he took postgraduate studies in physiology at the University of Michigan just before beginning to practice medicine in Loma Linda in 1952. Within three months Carrol S. Small, MD, the medical director of the Loma Linda Sanitarium and Hospital, asked Dr. Smith to read electrocardiograms for the institution, which he did for the next 10 years. Then Donald E. Griggs, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine, asked him to teach the course in Physical Diagnosis, which he did for the next 25 years. During these 35 years, Dr. Smith practiced Internal Medicine part time and then gradually assumed full time practice. On July 9, 1967, Dr. Smith made history as the Medical Officer of the Day during the move of patients from the 1929 hospital on the hill to the new University Hospital, now known as Loma Linda University Medical Center. He gave his resident physician a camera to photograph the event, but cared for his patients that day. Dr. Smith became known as the doctor who followed up with his patients by calling them periodically. He was known to start seeing hospitalized patients at 4 a.m., and worked on the basis that once a person was his patient he or she was always his patient. He would serve as long as the patient wanted. Dr. Smith eventually admitted so many patients to the Medical Center that one level of one of the towers was reserved for his clientele. A business officer once told him that for 15 years he produced more patient revenue than any other physician. In the late 1980s Dr. Smith had two bypass surgeries, his aortic valve replaced, and retired for one year. He then returned to the International Heart Institute and practiced Cardiology and Internal Medicine until a cardiac arrest forced him to retire again in 2004 at age 81. Dr. Smith and his wife, Lenna had two sons: Berwyn, a physician, and Frederick, a dentist.