W. Bruce Fye

Wallace Bruce Fye (born 1946) is an American retired cardiologist, medical historian, writer, bibliophile and philanthropist. He is emeritus professor of medicine and the history of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota and was the founding director of the institution's W. Bruce Fye Center for the History of Medicine.

W. Bruce Fye
W. Bruce Fye 2018
Born
Wallace Bruce Fye

1946
Meadville, Pennsylvania
CitizenshipUSA
EducationJohns Hopkins University
Occupations
Known for
Medical career
ProfessionPhysician
Institutions
Notable works
  • The Development of American Physiology: Scientific Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (1987)
  • American Cardiology: The History of a Specialty and its College (1996)
  • "Profiles in Cardiology" series
Awards

Fye was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. A collector from a young age, he developed an interest for 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.

In 1978, he was both elected a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and appointed to the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin, where he was chair of its Cardiology Department until 1999 and where he established the echocardiography laboratory. Fye's appointments have also included vice-chief of staff of St. Joseph's Hospital in Marshfield, governor of the ACC's Wisconsin chapter and head of cardiology at Marshfield Clinic. He has been a president of the American College of Cardiology, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the American Osler Society.

He 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]

He received his undergraduate and medical degrees, BA (1968) and MD (1972) from Johns Hopkins University, where he was elected to four national honour societies: Delta Phi Alpha, Alpha Epsilon Delta, Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha.[2][3]

Fye completed his internal medicine residency at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center [now the New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center] in Manhattan, before returning to Johns Hopkins in 1975 for his cardiology fellowship.[1] During his tenure as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Hopkins, he completed his cardiology training and received an MA degree in 1978 from the Institute of the History of Medicine.[1]

Career

Marshfield Clinic
Marshfield Clinic

In 1978, he 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, he 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

Selected publications

PubMed lists Fye as the sole author of more than 100 articles.[34]

Articles

Books

References
  1. Roberts, William Clifford (January 2005). "Wallace Bruce Fye III, MD, MA, MACC: A conversation with the editor". The American Journal of Cardiology. 95 (1): 55–83. doi:10.1016/j.amjcard.2004.09.002. PMID 15619395.
  2. Silverman, Mark E. (2007). "Profiles in Cardiology: W. Bruce Fye". Clinical Cardiology. 31 (3): 130–131. doi:10.1002/clc.20277. PMC 6653364. PMID 18383046.
  3. W. Bruce Fye, Curriculum vitae and Bibliography - Wallace Bruce Fye (2016) (W. Bruce Fye Center for the History of Medicine)
  4. Fye, W.Bruce; Hirshfeld Jr, John W. (July 2004). "35th Bethesda Conference: cardiology's workforce crisis: a pragmatic approach". Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 44 (2): 216–219. doi:10.1016/j.jacc.2004.05.017.
  5. Tansey, E. M. (16 August 2012). "W. Bruce Fye, The development of American physiology, Baltimore, Md., and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 8vo, pp. xi, 308, £26.55". Medical History. 32 (1): 104–105. doi:10.1017/S0025727300047797.
  6. Pauly, P. J. (7 August 1987). "Physiology Institutionalized: The Development of American Physiology". Science. 237 (4815): 665–666. doi:10.1126/science.237.4815.665-a. PMID 17758573.
  7. 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. JSTOR 1889736.
  8. Schickore, Jutta (2017). About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom, and the History of Writing Scientifically. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226449982.
  9. Mhlaba, Julie. "An Interview with W. Bruce Fye, MD, MA". Retrieved 26 July 2019.
  10. Kenny, Tom (2018). The Nuts and Bolts of Cardiac Pacing (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. p. 29. ISBN 9781405184038.
  11. Conti, C. Richard (December 2008). "With Personal and Professional Gratitude: An Editor's Thank You to J. Willis Hurst". Clinical Cardiology. 31 (12): 565–566. doi:10.1002/clc.20469. PMC 6653013. PMID 19072876.
  12. 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.
  13. "Reply: Troponin Trumps Common Sense" (PDF). Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 48: 2357–2358. 5 December 2006. S2CID 51796670. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 March 2019.
  14. Shurlock, Barry (2009). "The Mayo Clinic, Rochester: 'Only the Best need apply'". European Heart Journal. 30 (9): 1017–1020. doi:10.1093/eurheartj/ehp119. PMID 19411246.
  15. 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. PMID 400268.
  16. "Fyebooks.com". www.fyebooks.com. Retrieved 26 July 2019.
  17. "W. Bruce Fye, M.D". mayo.edu. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. Retrieved 26 July 2019.
  18. Christopherson, Emily. "LibGuides: W. Bruce Fye Center For the History of Medicine: Home". libraryguides.mayo.edu. Retrieved 26 July 2019.
  19. "Bonhams : First Edition of the Book that Transformed Medicineleads Sale of Medical and Scientific Library of W. Bruce Fye". www.bonhams.com. Retrieved 11 August 2019.
  20. Hansen, Bert (31 December 2010). "Five Centuries of Medicine in Art from the Collection of Bruce and Lois Fye (review)". Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 84 (4): 674–677.
  21. "Bonhams".
  22. 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.
  23. "The Mayo Clinic: Faith – Hope – Science".
  24. "'Recovering Bibliophile' Donates Library's Worth of Books to Mayo Clinic". mayoclinic.org. Archived from the original on 5 November 2021. Retrieved 26 July 2019.
  25. "Documenting a Tripartite Career Launched at Hopkins". www.hopkinsmedicine.org. Archived from the original on 5 November 2021. Retrieved 5 November 2021.
  26. "The Huntington Acquires a Comprehensive Collection on the History of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery". The Huntington. Archived from the original on 22 August 2023. Retrieved 5 November 2021.
  27. "Welch Medal Winners | American Association for the History of Medicine". Retrieved 30 July 2019.
  28. "The Master of the American College of Cardiology (MACC) Designation". American College of Cardiology. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  29. "Johns Hopkins Gazette | May 23, 2005". pages.jh.edu. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  30. "American Osler - Home". www.americanosler.org. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  31. Boese, Brett. ""Recovering bibliophile" honored by Mayo Clinic". PostBulletin.com. Retrieved 8 August 2019.
  32. "Awards of ALHHS (Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences)". iis-exhibits.library.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2019-08-06.
  33. "Search Results for "fye" – Who's Who Lifetime Achievement". wwlifetimeachievement.com. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  34. Search Results for author Fye WB on PubMed.
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