Dr. Donald S. Gann, professor of surgery at Hopkins and
Maryland, dies
BALTIMORE SUN |
APR 26, 2020 | 5:07 PM
Dr. Donald
Gann was a longtime member of the Stony Run Friends Meeting.(Nanine
Hartzenbusch / XX)
Dr. Donald S. Gann,
a trauma surgeon and a professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine and at the University of Maryland, died Feb. 3 of
undetermined causes at his Brooklandville home. He was 87.
Donald Stuart
Gann, son of Dr. Mark Gann, chief of surgery at Sinai Hospital, and his wife,
Beatrice Gann, an educator, was born in Baltimore and raised on Eutaw Place and
later in Catonsville.
He attended
Polytechnic Institute through the 11th grade, when he left high school early to
attend Dartmouth College at the age of 16.
“He never
received a high school diploma,” said his daughter, Susan Hibbs of
Brooklandville.
Dr. Gann was a
1952 magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth with a double major in physics and
philosophy. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
He earned his
medical degree in 1956 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
From 1956 to 1957, he completed a residency in surgery at Hopkins and an
assistant residency in surgery at Union Memorial Hospital.
“His
contribution to medicine was multi-faceted; he was a surgeon, an innovator, an
educator, a mentor, a research scientist and the author of hundreds of
published articles, chapters and books,” according to a biographical profile
submitted by his family.
“The surgery
decision happened to me in medical school,” Dr. Gann explained in an interview
with the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma. “I initially intended
to be some variety of scientist. I was sort of groping around. I had a bit of a
head start working with some pretty distinguished physiologists but didn’t have
any sense of what I was going to do. I also found that I was dexterous enough
to do some unusually complicated things.”
In 1967, when
Dr. Gann was 36, he became the first chair of the newly established department
of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University. He was an
assistant resident in surgery at University Hospitals from 1960 to 1962 and
chief resident in surgery from 1962 to 1963.
In 1970, he
returned to Hopkins as a professor of biomedical engineering and associate
professor of surgery, and four years later was appointed professor of emergency
medicine and director of the division of emergency medicine, a newly created
department.
When he came
to Hopkins, he told The Evening Sun that his long-range interest was “the
application of science to the care of people.”
Dr. Gann left
Hopkins in 1979 and went to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, to
establish and chair the department of surgery at the university. He also had a
second role as surgeon in chief at the Rhode Island Hospital, also in
Providence.
After
returning to Baltimore in 1988, he practiced surgery and held four high-level
assignments at the University of Maryland Medical Center, where he headed the
division surgical critical care from 1992 to 2000. He was also chief of the
trauma surgery and critical care sections, and chief of the section of
endocrine surgery.
He retired
from UMMS in 2010.
Dr. Gann’s
professional associations included serving as president from 1987 to 1988 of
the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma. He was also a member of the
American Association of Endocrine Surgeons, American College of Surgeons,
Halsted Society, Southern Surgical Association, Endocrine Society and the
Biomedical Engineering Society, of which he was president from 1971 to 1972.
Dr. Gann and
Dan Darlington, a physiologist, established Shock Therapeutics Biotechnologies
Inc., whose mission is to create and develop patented treatment for hemorrhagic
shock and currently is raising funds to develop a patented antibody that will
allow patients to live from one to four hours until appropriate lifesaving
procedures can be performed.
“I’ve known
Dr. Gann all of my academic life. I shared a post-doc fellowship with him and
he gave me a faculty position in surgery at Hopkins which I had for 18 years,”
said Dr. Darlington, who holds a Ph.D. “He was very smart and very kind but
very demanding. His thoughts were don’t shoot for the moon but shoot for the
stars and then you can see how you can soar.”
He said that
Dr. Gann eschewed all titles.
“He’d tell
academics everyone was equal. He treated you like a peer, and he expected you
to act like one. And because everyone was equal, there was no fear or
retribution," he said. “And he realized he didn’t know everything and he’d
say,
‘Tell me what
you know so we can move this along faster.’ He wanted to learn as much as he
possibly could.”
Dr.
Darlington, who lives in San Antonio, described Dr. Gann as a “genius and was
simply something else.”
Dr. Gann
became a Quaker at a young age and was a longtime member of the Stony Run
Friends Meeting. “His life was deeply informed by his spiritual practice and
the values of Quakerism,” according to the family profile.
He served
twice as clerk of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization
founded in 1917 to promote peace and social justice locally, nationally and
internationally. In his capacity as AFSC clerk, he worked with multiple Nobel
laureates to restrict the global trade in small arms.
In a 1997
Baltimore Sun interview he mocked the slogan, "Guns don’t kill people,
people do."
“I do think
guns kill people. And sometimes, the people pulling the trigger are people who
don’t even know what they’re doing — like little kids. And sometimes the
victims are people who are not intended to be shot — like little kids,” he
said.
In 1960, Dr.
Gann married the former Gail Burgan, a nurse practitioner at the University of
Maryland.
“I couldn’t
have done it without the kind of support I’ve had, not to mention somebody who
is willing to live anywhere, almost,” he explained in the American Association
for the Surgery Trauma interview. “I learned early on that I’ve married
somebody that’s smarter than I am, and I like it that way; but she feels the
other way about it, and that makes it nice, too.”
Because of the
coronavirus pandemic, plans for a memorial service to be held this summer are
incomplete.
In addition to
his wife of 60 years and daughter, Dr. Gann is survived by three sons, Donald
S. Gann Jr. of Reisterstown, Robert Gann and Richard Gann, both of Providence;
and three grandchildren.
CONTACT
I am one of The Sun's
obituary reporters and have been writing them since the early 1990s. I attended
Emerson College in Boston and wrote for Boston Magazine. I also was the author
for nearly 20 years of The Sun's Back Story column.
####
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to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
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The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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