Duke Hospital was opened on Monday, July 21, 1930. The 73rd patient to register presented a neurosurgical problem - headaches and papilledema. Dr. Deryl Hart, the first Professor of Surgery at Duke, performed a ventriculogram on July 24 and then resected a cystic glioma of the right frontal lobe two days later. From 1930 to 1937, Dr. Hart and Dr. Clarence Gardner performed the neurosurgical procedures at Duke Hospital in addition to their other surgical responsibilities.

 

Dr. Barnes Woodhall came to Durham in September, 1937, from the Johns Hopkins Hospital to head up the first surgical specialty service at Duke. In 1942, Dr. Woodhall left for military service to become Chief of Neurosurgery at the Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, Dr. Guy Odom was recruited by Dr. Hart and joined the staff in 1943. When Dr. Woodhall returned to Durham in 1946, he and Dr. Odom began their long and productive association.

 

During World War II, two men, Dr. Robert Neill and Dr. Frederic Kristoff, served as neurosurgical residents at Duke Hospital. Beginning in 1946, Drs. Woodhall and Odom accepted one new individual each year for neurosurgical training, and by 1949, they had established a five-year residency program. The residency was enlarged further with the acceptance of either one or two residents per year starting in 1965. Of the forty-four men who had completed residency training in the Division of Neurosurgery as of 1980, twenty-two have spent a significant period in academic practice, and eight have become chiefs of neurosurgical residency training programs.

 

Dr. Odom established a neuropathology laboratory in 1946 and for thirty-five years personally instructed each resident in neurosurgical pathology. In the process he accumulated the paraffin blocks, slides, and typed descriptions of more than 5,300 surgical specimens, most of them brain tumors. Over the years Drs. Woodhall and Odom not only ran a busy clinical service and a first-rate residency training program, but also conducted a variety of research projects, many of which concerned intracranial aneurysms or brain tumors. During the twenty-five years between 1946 and 1970, the two men produced 196 medical publications.

 

Dr. Blaine Nashold joined the neurosurgical faculty in 1957, and since then a total of eight individuals have maintained the senior staff. Currently, there are two pediatric neurosurgeons and six neurosurgeons who specialize in adult subspecialties. Throughout Duke’s more than 70 year history of neurosurgery, there have only been four Chiefs of Neurosurgery. Dr. Odom followed Dr. Woodhall as Chief of the Division in 1960, and Dr. Wilkins succeeded Dr. Odom in 1976. Dr. Friedman has been Chief of the Division since 1996.

 

The Division of Neurosurgery maintains active clinical services at Duke Hospital and the Durham V.A. Hospital as well as a resident rotation at the Durham Regional Hospital. On a broad base of general neurosurgical activity, the interests of the individual staff neurosurgeons have added extra dimensions to the practice and training of Neurosurgery throughout the years.

 

*This text was updated from the 1980 yearbook of the Duke University School of Medicine, The Aesculapian