Willis J. Potts

Having completed the chemistry course, Potts was able to enroll in medical school. He held a job at a restaurant so that he could afford school. After graduating from medical school, he undertook general surgery training at Presbyterian Hospital in Chicago and at Rush Medical College. In 1925, Potts opened a general practice as a physician and surgeon in Oak Park, Illinois. He did not make much money at first, but by 1930 he had sufficient funds to go to Frankfurt for further surgical training.[1]

After spending 1930 and 1931 in Frankfurt, Potts returned to Chicago and practiced general surgery there for several years. In 1942, he went to the Pacific to serve in World War II, setting up the 25th Evacuation Hospital. When he was discharged three years later as a colonel.[2]

Returning to Chicago after World War II, Potts decided to focus on problems in pediatric surgery.[3] He worked briefly as Chief of Surgery at West Suburban Hospital.[4] In late 1946, he was appointed Surgeon-in-Chief at Children's Memorial Hospital (CMH).[3] His position came with a faculty appointment at the Northwestern University Medical School.[5]

At the time of Potts' appointment at CMH, only a few childhood illnesses could be addressed surgically; appendicitis and pyloric stenosis were two of the most common pediatric surgical problems. Potts recruited experts in several surgical specialties and asked them to commit themselves to developing surgical solutions for pediatric problems. As he was setting up the pediatric surgery program, Potts went to Boston Children's Hospital for three months to observe the workings of that pediatric surgery program.[3]

Potts spent considerable time thinking about the surgical correction of heart defects. Working with CMH pediatric cardiologist Stanley Gibson and with pathologist Joseph Boggs, Potts helped create a collection of more than 200 anatomic specimens of various heart defects. The collection was later used extensively by cardiovascular pathologist Maurice Lev.[3]

Potts, Gibson, and research fellow Sidney Smith became interested in treating blue baby syndrome, the group of heart defects that result in insufficient blood flow to the lungs. They became intrigued by the idea of somehow connecting the aorta (the body's largest artery, which sends blood to all of the body's tissues) to the nearby pulmonary artery (which sends blood to the lungs).[3] In 1946, Potts and Smith devised an operation for blue baby syndrome. The surgery involved making a tiny incision in the aorta and a tiny incision in the pulmonary artery and then sewing the two openings together. They performed the procedure successfully on 30 dogs before Gibson sent them a 19-month-old patient named Diane Schnell. Schnell was turning blue and fainting frequently. The team felt that she would not live much longer without surgery, so they decided to make her the first patient to receive a Potts shunt.[1] She did well after the surgery and was known to be alive and well in the late 1960s.[5]

Potts, Smith and Gibson published an article in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association in November 1946 in which they described saving three children's lives. They wrote that the new Potts shunt was safer than the standard treatment at the time, the Blalock-Taussig shunt, which sometimes resulted in paralysis or death.[6]

In 1953, Potts was the first surgeon to successfully repair a pulmonary artery sling, an abnormality in which the lung blood vessels wrap around and compress the patient's windpipe. The patient who underwent this first repair was a five-month-old girl. She was still alive at nearly 25 years of age; like many of the patients who underwent Potts' version of this repair, she had decreased blood flow to the left lung, but she was doing well.[7] Potts and his team also advanced the treatment of a heart defect known as transposition of the great arteries.[3]

Potts' work with heart surgery included the invention of at least three surgical devices. His neighbor, Bruno Richter, worked for a medical instrument manufacturer and assisted him with these innovations. The Potts-Smith aortic exclusion clamp closed off only a portion of the aorta so that the Potts shunt could be completed while maintaining blood flow to the spinal cord. He also developed the Potts vascular clamp, which allowed vessels to be clamped without being crushed; this moved vascular surgery forward significantly. A third device, the pulmonary valvulotome, helped surgeons to minimize bleeding when they entered the right ventricle to repair a child's pulmonary valve.[3]

Non-cardiac surgical problems in children also interested Potts. Imperforate anus was one of his special clinical interests. Potts made technical improvements to the surgery that was used for infant girls who had imperforate anus with a low rectovaginal fistula.[8] In 1959, he attempted the separation of a set of conjoined twins who shared a heart. Both twins were weakening, but Potts hoped to save the stronger of the two; the child died within four hours of the procedure. He consulted on another case of conjoined twins the next year, but he declined to operate because he felt that the surgery had no chance of success.[1]

In 1955, Potts wrote an editorial in JAMA in which he criticized the overall quality of pediatric surgical care in the United States. Potts pointed out that despite the proliferation of U.S. children's hospitals, only eight hospitals had pediatric surgery programs run by full-time pediatric surgeons. He noted that there were only 33 members of the surgical section of the American Academy of Pediatrics and that 12 of those members had practices that were not fully focused on children. While he acknowledged that increasing levels of specialization created new challenges in medical education, he said that parents would soon demand the same quality of care for their children as they did for themselves.[9]

Potts served as the president of several medical organizations, including the Institute of Medicine of Chicago, the Chicago Surgical Society and the Chicago Heart Association. He won several awards, including an American Medical Association Gold Medal and the William E. Ladd Medal from the American Academy of Pediatrics.[5] In 1964, Hope College awarded an honorary Doctor of Science to Potts.[10]