Fye was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. A collector from a young age, he developed an interest in old books, and following qualifications in both medicine and history of medicine from the Johns Hopkins University, he pursued a dual career in cardiology and medical history, where his particular interests have included 19th century professionalization of physiology, the American medical education in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the history of cardiology, specialization, and the Mayo Clinic.
Fye is the sole author of more than a hundred articles. In 1987, he published his first book The Development of American Physiology: Scientific Medicine in the Nineteenth Century. He contributed more than fifty biographical sketches to the "Profiles in Cardiology" series in the journal Clinical Cardiology. These were reprinted in a book titled Profiles in Cardiology which was co-edited with J. Willis Hurst and C. Richard Conti. Other noted publications have included his 2006 article titled "Troponin trumps common sense" and “Women Cardiologists: Why so few?”
In 2014, when Fye retired from Mayo Clinic, he became emeritus professor of medicine and the history of medicine. he later donated many of the books and papers he had collected over the previous 50 years to the Mayo Clinic, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and the Alan Mason Chesney Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Maryland.
Early life and education
W. Bruce Fye was born in 1946 in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia.[1] He was the only child of a banker and his childhood hobbies revolved around collecting, that included stamps, coins, and baseball cards.[2] By the age of 14, he had developed an interest for old books, later described "as an advanced case of bibliomania", and by the tenth grade, he decided to become a doctor.[2]
In 1978, Fye was elected a fellow of the American College of Cardiology (ACC)[4] and in the same year joined the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, where he founded the echocardiography laboratory. He served as chair of Marshfield's Cardiology Department from 1981 through 1999, having been elected to nine two-year terms.[1]
In 1987, Fye published his first book based on his MA thesis at Johns Hopkins, The Development of American Physiology: Scientific Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press).[2][5] Of a number of reviews, historian Philip Pauly wrote,
Fye outlines the emergence of the discipline of physiology in American within the framework of a late nineteenth century medical reform movement. The book is important for reasserting the central importance of experimental science in the social transformation of American medicine.[6][7][8]
In addition to a number of committee appointments at the Marshfield Clinic, Fye was vice-chief of staff of St. Joseph's Hospital in Marshfield from 1989 to 1999.[1]
Between 1993 and 1996, he was governor of the ACC's Wisconsin chapter (1993-1996) and chaired the organization's Government Relations Committee.[4]
As head of cardiology at Marshfield Clinic, Fye established a taskforce on workforce and co-chaired the 35th Bethesda Conference: Cardiology's Workforce Crisis: A Pragmatic Approach.[4] He endeavoured, with resistance, to recruit cardiologists and produce studies on the workforce in cardiology. One of his monthly editorials titled “Women Cardiologists: Why so few?” discussed the masculine image of cardiology and the problems with work-life balance.[9]
Mayo Clinic
Mayo Clinic Building in Rochester, Minnesota
In 2000, Fye moved to Rochester, Minnesota to join the Mayo Clinic.[1] At the Mayo Clinic his clinical responsibilities centered on echocardiography and the care of patients with heart valve disease. In 2005 he was selected as the founding director of the Mayo Clinic Center for the History of Medicine.[2]
Profiles in cardiology
In 2003, with J. W. Hurst and C. R. Conti, he published Profiles in Cardiology: A Collection of Profiles Featuring Individuals Who Have Made Significant Contributions to the Study of Cardiovascular Disease.[10] Fye contributed more than fifty biographical sketches to the "Profiles in Cardiology" series in the journal Clinical Cardiology. These were reprinted in a book titled Profiles in Cardiology which was co-edited with J. Willis Hurst and C. Richard Conti and published by Mahwah, NJ: Foundation for Advances in Medicine and Science (2003).[11][12]
Cardiology taskforce
During his tenure as president of the ACC, between 2002 and 2003,[4] Fye tackled some of the effects of Clinton health care plan of 1993, which had highlighted the high number of specialists and a need for generalists, with the result that between 1994 and 2000, fellowship appointments fell by nearly a third.[9] He stated in an interview that;
managed care had a “gatekeeper” model, which prevented patients from seeing a cardiologist unless a primary care physician had signed off. Accordingly, competition in cardiology increased.[9]
In 2006, his essay "Troponin trumps common sense", which discussed the appropriate use of the troponin test, drew the attention of a number of cardiology colleagues. In a reply, he stated "rather than allowing troponin to trump common sense, we should inject more common sense into the process of ordering a troponin level in the first place".[2][13]
He also worked on the origins of the Mayo Clinic and authored a book titled The Mayo Clinic and Cardiology: Specialization in the Twentieth Century.[14]
History of medicine
Fye's interest in medical history developed out of his efforts in collecting books, which began in 1961. By the end of the decade he had begun to focus on acquiring old medical books. In 1973, during his medical training in New York City, he launched a mail order book business, W. Bruce Fye Antiquarian Medical Books. He coordinated a luncheon symposium on collecting medical books at the 1977 meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine and published his first article on the subject two years later.[15][16]
His particular interests in the history of medicine have included 19th century professionalization of physiology, the American medical education in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the history of cardiology, specialization, and the Mayo Clinic.[17]
He was the founding director of the Mayo Clinic's W. Bruce Fye Center for the History of Medicine,[18] named by the Mayo Clinic in his honour as a result of his philanthropy.[19]
In addition to building up a large collection of books, offprints, and autographs relating to the history of cardiology, Fye has been a collector of prints and engravings relating to medicine and engraved portraits of physicians. He curated two exhibitions of prints drawn from his collection: Medicine and Art (Marshfield, WI, New Visions Gallery, 1996) and Five Hundred Years of Medicine in Art from the Collection of Bruce and Lois Fye (Rochester, MN, Rochester Art Center, 2010). That exhibition was held in conjunction with the annual meetings of the American Osler Society and the American Association for the History of Medicine.[20]
Fye was editor-in-chief of the Classics of Cardiology Library, which produced facsimile reprints of books of significance in the history of cardiology and cardiac surgery. The series was launched with an original volume William Osler's Collected Papers on the Cardiovascular System, which Fye edited.[21]
In 2014, when Fye retired from Mayo Clinic, he became emeritus professor of medicine and the history of medicine. The following year he published Caring for the Heart: Mayo Clinic and the Rise of Specialization (Oxford University Press), where his “goal was to write a book that explained how and why the care of patients with heart disease changes so dramatically during the twentieth century”.[22] Surgeon and historian Justin Barr wrote in his review;
Caring for the Heart weaves together the history of the Mayo Clinic, the history of cardiology, and the history of specialization, into a single account, pulling the strengths from each element to help dissect, explain, and historicize the others. In so doing, Fye has created a highly readable story of modern medicine in twentieth-century America, meeting the challenge of appealing to professional historians, clinicians, and interested public alike.[22]
Based on his research and publications about the history of the Mayo Clinic, Fye functioned as Senior Historical Consultant for the two-hour Ken Burns film The Mayo Clinic: Faith, Hope, Science, which premiered on PBS on 25 September 25, 2018.[23]
In 2016, he donated many of the books he had collected over the previous 50 years to the Mayo Clinic.[24] In 2021, Fye arranged to donate his private papers to the Alan Mason Chesney Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Maryland,[25] and donated what was believed to be the largest private collection of books and other materials related to the history of cardiology to the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.[26]
Personal and family
Fye met Lois Baker in high school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and they married whilst he was a medical student and she was a nurse at Johns Hopkins. They have two daughters, Katherine and Elizabeth.[2]
Awards
2000: William H. Welch medal, for his book American Cardiology: The History of a Specialty and its College (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).[27]
PubMed lists Fye as the sole author of more than 100 articles.[34]
Articles
Fye, W. B. (December 1979). "Collecting medical books: practical and theoretical considerations with an annotated bibliography". Transactions & Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. 1 (4): 305–23. PMID400268.
Profiles in Cardiology: A collection of profiles featuring individuals who have made significant contributions to the study of cardiovascular disease. Co-authored with J. W. Hurst and C. R. Conti, Foundation for Advances in Medicine and Science (2003). ISBN978-0615120843
Robert Earl Beamish, was a Canadian physician and cardiologist.
Harold James Charles “Jeremy” Swan was an Irish cardiologist who co-invented the Swan-Ganz catheter with William Ganz at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 1970.
Maude Elizabeth Seymour Abbott was a Canadian physician, among Canada's earliest female medical graduates, and an internationally known expert on congenital heart disease. She was one of the first women to obtain a BA from McGill University.
The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHUSOM) is the medical school of Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1893, the School of Medicine shares a campus with Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins Children's Center, established in 1889.
Fredrick Arthur Willius was an American research cardiologist and medical historian who was the founding director of the Cardiology section at the Mayo Clinic.
John Webster Kirklin was an American cardiothoracic surgeon, general surgeon, prolific author and medical educator who is best remembered for refining John Gibbon's heart–lung bypass machine via a pump-oxygenator to make feasible under direct vision, routine open-heart surgery and repairs of some congenital heart defects. The success of these operations was combined with his other advances, including teamwork and developments in establishing the correct diagnosis before surgery and progress in computerized intensive care unit monitoring after open heart surgery.
William Clifford Roberts was an American physician specializing in cardiac pathology.
John Willis Hurst was an American physician who served as the cardiologist of former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was the editor of Hurst's the Heart, one of the most widely used medical textbooks in the world. He also served as a former president of the American Heart Association.
Murray Stanley Hoffman was an American cardiologist, educator and diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the American Board of Cardiovascular Disease, a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and a member of the Council on Clinical Cardiology (CLCD) of the American Heart Association.
Shahbudin Rahimtoola was a cardiologist based in Los Angeles, United States. He served as a Distinguished Professor at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. Rahimtoola was credited for his contribution to two clinical syndromes namely the hibernating myocardium and 'prosthetic valve-mismatch'.
Thomas Forrest Cotton FRCP was a Canadian cardiologist. He introduced electrocardiography to Canada and England and was the first to recognise the relationship between finger clubbing in adults with acquired structural heart disease and infective endocarditis. His paper on clubbing in endocarditis is considered by cardiologists as a classic.
Charles Stone Bryan is an American retired infectious disease physician, researcher, author and Heyward Gibbes distinguished professor emeritus of internal medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine (UofSC). His contributions to medicine have included working on a formula for administering the maximum possible dose of penicillin to people with kidney failure which would treat the infection and avoid penicillin toxicity, and treating and writing on HIV/AIDS. He is also a noted medical historian and an authority on the life of William Osler.
Shelby Kutty is an Indian-born American cardiologist, a professor of pediatrics and internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He holds the Helen B. Taussig endowed professorship at Johns Hopkins and is Director of the Helen B. Taussig Heart Center and the chair of Cardiovascular Analytic Intelligence Initiative at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He currently serves as the editor of American Journal of Physiology: Heart and Circulatory Physiology and Cardiology in the Young and as consulting editor for the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Prior to this, he held the title of assistant dean for research and development and vice chair of pediatrics at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Medicine. Kutty has published over 400 articles in peer-reviewed medical journals.
Mark Edwin Silverman was an American cardiologist, medical historian, medical educator and author of more than 200 medical articles and a number of books, who founded the cardiology program at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia.
Harvey Feigenbaum is an American cardiologist known for his life-long work in the field of echocardiography. He wrote the first textbook on the subject in 1972, which is currently in its 8th edition, and has published over 300 articles. He has trained generations of cardiologists including many of the world's pioneers in the field through his numerous visitors, frequent workshops, annual courses in Indianapolis, Indiana beginning in 1968, the year when he started formal fellowship training He founded the field of cardiac sonography in 1965 and the American Society of Echocardiography in 1975. His seminal article on the diagnosis of pericardial effusions published in 1965 with his technique "brought echocardiography to the attention of thousands of practitioners".
John Thompson Shepherd was a British-American cardiologist, medical researcher in cardiovascular physiology, and medical school dean. His research on the regulation of the cardiovascular system included "classic studies on reflex control of the circulation, haemodynamic responses to heat stress and exercise, and mechanisms of vasodilation."
Harold Ensign Bennet Pardee was an American cardiologist and pioneer in electrocardiogram research.
Christopher J. Boes is an American neurologist and historian of medicine. He holds the titles of professor of neurology, professor of history of medicine, director of the W. Bruce Fye Center for the History of Medicine, at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, and since 2022 is the Mayo Clinic Designated Institutional Official (DIO). His research focuses on the management of headache, including migraine and trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias. His work in the field of history of medicine includes research on Sir William Gowers, Sir William Osler, Bayard Taylor Horton, Mary Broadfoot Walker, Betty Clements and Harry Lee Parker.
↑ Richman, Irwin (1988). "Review of The Development of American Physiology: Scientific Medicine in the Nineteenth Century". The Journal of American History. 75 (1): 273–274. doi:10.2307/1889736. JSTOR1889736.
↑ Kligfield, Paul (April 2004). "Book Review Profiles in Cardiology Edited by J. Willis Hurst, C. Richard Conti, and W. Bruce Fye. 514 pp., illustrated. Mahwah, N.J., Clinical Cardiology Publishing, 2003. $69.50. 0-615-12084-9". New England Journal of Medicine. 350 (14): 1476. doi:10.1056/NEJM200404013501428.
↑ Fye, W. B (1979). "Collecting medical books: Practical and theoretical considerations with an annotated bibliography". Transactions & Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. 1 (4): 305–23. PMID400268.
1 2 Barr, Justin (April 2018). "W. Bruce Fye. Caring for the Heart: Mayo Clinic and the Rise of Specialization". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 73 (2): 245–247. doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrx038.
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