The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, Vol 58, 1223-1227, Copyright © 1994 by The Society of Thoracic Surgeons
Will Camp Sealy: surgical innovator, scholar, exceptional teacher, and true Georgian
IW Brown Jr
Division of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Watson Clinic, Lakeland, Florida.
Will Camp Sealy, MD, Professor Emeritus of Surgery, Duke University 1984
and Mercer University 1992, was born in Roberta, Georgia, in 1912. A 1936
medical graduate of Emory University, he was in surgical residency training
at Duke University from 1936 to 1942. During the next 4 years as an army
surgeon in World War II, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and, in the
European theater, made chief of surgery of the 121st General Hospital and
later the 128th Evacuation Hospital. After the war, he rejoined the
surgical faculty at Duke. In 1950, he became chairman of the division of
thoracic and cardiovascular surgery, where in the ensuing years he made a
number of important initial observations and significant contributions.
Among these were studies on the serious paradoxical hypertension that may
follow repair of coarctation of the aorta, and on the combined use of
hypothermia and perfusion for open heart surgical procedures. In more
recent years, his initiation and landmark studies of the surgical treatment
of certain cardiac arrhythmias have gained him worldwide recognition and
opened one of the last frontiers of cardiac surgery.
