Page 43 - Delaware Medical Journal - March/April 2020
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LESLIE W. WHITNEY, MD 1920-2020
IN MEMORIAM
Dr. Whitney was a gentleman and I am proud to have been his son. Let me tell you his story. He was
born the son of a Baptist minister and into a family that served as ministers and missionaries. He wanted to do something useful in his life, so he chose medicine as his mission.
He met and married the love of his life, “my bride, Joan,” on March 13, 1943. They were married for 71 years! They started their family while he was a resident at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia. My earliest memories were of him pushing
me on a swing in the back yard on North Park Avenue in Philadelphia after he would come home from the hospital. Thirty-four years later, he would invite me to join his surgical practice. He was generous with his time and was encouraging to his family and colleagues. He educated all of his children through college and beyond.
Choosing Delaware as a place to practice was recommended by Dr. Wayne Babcock from Temple Hospital, whose friend Dr. Dan Preston in Delaware needed an assistant
for a year. Dr. Whitney signed on for a year and found himself immersed in Delaware medicine for the next 50 years. He was Wilmington General Hospital. While serving as Chief, he was able to designate cancer as a reportable disease and subsequently founded the Tumor Registry Program.
A visionary, Dr. Whitney banded together with a group of other surgeons to form Surgical Associates, the
Delaware. It was from this vantage point that he was able to form coalitions with broad reach, such as with the American Cancer Society, the Medical Society of Delaware, American Board of Surgery, and the AMA Southern Medical Associations, so they could help promote education and research for coordinated cancer and surgical care in Delaware.
This elevated medicine in Delaware to a national level of recognition.
In 1965, Dr. Whitney was once more able to envision a future of medicine and surgery that was truly capable of serving the people in Delaware and beyond; this time, with
a merger between Delaware Hospital, Memorial Hospital, and Wilmington General Hospital, to form Wilmington Medical discouraged by the AMA from moving forward with this merger, but Dr. Whitney was undeterred. Soon, this would be a model for other hospitals to follow.
Many of those surgical residents completed their training at the Medical Center of Delaware (now ChristianaCare) and stayed within the community, contributing to the ongoing development of clinical excellence. When I came to Wilmington to practice, it was my privilege to continue the tradition to interview, select, and train surgical residents.
My dad encouraged me to be an orderly
at the hospital during the summer of my experience in patient care. I was able to observe his operations and was keen to follow in his footsteps. After I’d completed my residency at Temple University Hospital and joined my father in practice, he found chair. He looked at me and thoughtfully said, “what took you so long?” I would earn his trust, but his patients, to whom he gave so much of his time and who loved him, were hesitant to give him up as their physician. One patient of his greeted me with, “Why do I get only the son?”
The last surgical procedure my father performed was an open cholecystectomy
in the surgical amphitheater at Wilmington Hospital. I was privileged to assist in this case. I had not operated with him before and this was a chance of a lifetime. During the surgery, with my father as the operator and I as the assistant, he said to me, “Please help the doctor and, if it is not too much trouble, could you provide a little traction?” As
he completed the case with the traditional handshake, there was not a dry eye in the assist that day.
Dr. Whitney’s legacy is the pursuit of clinical excellence, continuing education, and research, enabling us to provide exceptional care for all who need our help.
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
■ CHRISTOPHERJ.WHITNEY,MDisaretired general surgeon. He worked in private practice with his father from 1984-1988. Dr. Whitney retired in 2015 and lives in Landenberg, Pennsylvania.
thoracic surgery in Delaware, as at that time all the patients requiring that intervention went to Philadelphia. In the planning for the new hospital, he was able to obtain space
for a cardio-thoracic surgical suite. He was in what is now known as MAP 1. His thought was the medical center needed to build for the future and not for the past.
As there was no surgical residency program in Delaware when Dr. Whitney came to practice, he was instrumental in developing such a program, which became nationally recognized in due time. Recruiting talented surgical resident candidates by treating them nicely was important to Dr. Whitney. In 1988, Dr. Charles Smith invited my father to be the Vice President of Academic Affairs
at Christiana Care Health System. In that role, he transformed each residency training program in the Christiana system, expanding the size and scope of each program.
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