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MEMORIAM Arnold St. Jacques Lee Professor of Anesthesiology, Emeritus Los Angeles 1921—2000 Arnold St.
Jacques Lee was intent from the moment of his arrival to have profound impact
on the Department of Anesthesiology at UCLA by designing, inventing and
influencing the instrumentation underlying peri-operative patient care as
well as a wide range of laboratory instruments. He is remembered with affection
for his generosity of spirit and for numerous deeds couched in an
uncompromising, seemingly unpredictable, and often undiplomatic style, rare
even in academic circles. Arnold was clearly an original; touched by genius,
undaunted by obstacles, and impatient with delays. He was guided throughout
his career by a truly philanthropic idiosyncratic manner that was immediate,
often overwhelming, usually cunningly eccentric and mischievously
confrontational, not because he was ill-tempered, but rather because he
enjoyed observing the fireworks. Not surprisingly he was generally described
as a ‘curmudgeon’. It served him quite well in continually attracting a wide
coterie of friends of remarkable diversity and he exuded joy in serving them
with kind deeds that extended from his desire to feed their minds, their
personal needs and especially their enjoyment of food. In all that he did,
striving for excellence verging on perfection pervaded his efforts, and
virtually everyone who knew and worked with him was recipient of his skills
as an imaginative cook, bread-baker and maker of gizmos, ranging from the
‘wacko’ to the indispensable. He described his role in life as that of a
“Professional Engineer” with the mission of using his gifts to altruistic
ends as broadly as possible. He
was born in Brooklyn, NY on October 30, 1921, and grew up on a farm in rural
New Jersey, the irascible son of a strong-minded Russian immigrant father
with whom he established the style of combativeness mixed with affection that
dominated his life. He obtained his education in mechanical engineering at
Lehigh University and received a BA in science after his wartime army service
at Temple University where he was taken under the wing of the professor of
Medical Physics. Arnold started as a lab technician who soon became the
physicist that reshaped the activities of the neurologists and neurosurgeons,
Spiegel and Wycis, designing and building the earliest human stereotaxic
apparatuses, later devising more sophisticated models for Philadelphia brain
surgeons George Austin and Francis C. Grant and later in New York a
skull-attached model for Irving Cooper for whom he designed, built and
patented the first successful cryosurgical instrument, the “cryoprobe”; the
original can be found on permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, DC. Thus
began the career of one of the earliest ‘bioengineers’ before the term
entered common usage, but the description he identified with in a productive
career of amazing diversity. It included several forays into the business
world of engineering including design, construction and measurement of highly
accurate linear potentiometers for what became Litton Industries and in
Bomarc accelerometer development for Boeing. The remainder of his career was
largely devoted to instrumentation for hospital operating rooms and medical
research. In 1965 he founded a Medical Instrumentation Laboratory at Columbia
University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and established modern
standards of safety and design at Presbyterian Hospital. The
sojourn at Columbia also led to the great romance of his life, meeting an
exceptional Anesthesiology resident, Dr. Shirley Markee, whom he married and
who lured him to California (initially to Stanford), and ultimately to Los
Angeles at a time when the UCLA Department of Anesthesiology was undergoing a
sweeping transformation, with a new chairman recruited from Columbia
University. Some of the OR instrumentation developed were love tokens for
Shirley, supplements to the inventive, and sometimes weird lunches he
prepared for her at 4:30 AM for the rest of his life. He designed and built a
new advanced respirator, a long-term infusion system for automated drug
delivery, and devices for automatic, indirect monitoring and display of blood
pressure He also obtained several important patents for ballistocardiography
and electroencephalography. The impact of these and other instruments as well
as the numerous patents developed by Arnold did much to change anesthesiology
instrumentation in surgical facilities throughout the US, but his greatest
delight was in educating the residents and especially the senior faculty and
their laboratory research projects. These include precise measurement of
muscular relaxant effects and applying them during anesthesia (with RLK); a
variety of valves and flow-meters that led to a new approach to
ventilation-perfusion distribution and its relation to blood gas tensions
(with RDF); and a device for measuring intraneurial pressure for models of
inflammatory injury in compressed peripheral nerves (for LK). The last series
of patents were aimed at developing a home medical surveillance system, by
telephonic connection initially, for non-invasively monitoring such things as
blood glucose for the home-bound geriatric population. These projects were
pursued in his latter years as an emeritus professor of anesthesiology,
without (as he insisted) remuneration. His teaching throughout his career was one-on-one
and ranged from high school kids in the labs to the department chairs;
consistently demanding, brilliant, funny, cranky and inspiring. Arnold’s
legacy includes legendary accounts of how he singularly influenced clinical
anesthesiology techniques, the admiration and thanks of his many colleagues
who became his devoted friends, and the love of his wife Shirley, who
continues to practice anesthesiology at its best, happily surrounded by
instruments bearing Arnold’s imprimatur. Lawrence Kruger Ronald L. Katz Robert Kaufman |
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