Alton Ochsner
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Alton Ochsner (May 4, 1896 - September 6, 1981) was a surgeon and medical researcher. Spending most of his life in New Orleans, Louisiana, he worked at Tulane University and various local hospitals before starting his own clinic.
Raised in a small South Dakota town, Ochsner was an unlikely hero of Southern medicine. A director at the Tulane Medical School had the foresight to recruit him from the University of Wisconsin Medical School, and, in 1927, he succeeded the legendary Rudolph Matas as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Tulane. Although Tulane did not have its own hospital at the time, Ochsner succeeded in organizing one of America's premier surgical teaching programs at Charity Hospital, an institution that provided invaluable clinical opportunities to Ochsner and his students.
As a teacher, he became renowned, perhaps notorious to his medical students and residents, for his intense verbal cross-examinations in the Charity Hospital amphitheater, or "bull pen" as it is known. He believed the psychologically taxing ordeal programmed students to perform well under stress and kept them on their toes.
He co-founded The Ochsner Clinic. One of the first to document the link between cancer and cigarette use in 1939, he pioneered the "war against smoking." The Ochsner Clinic is now one of the USA's largest group practices and academic medical centers. In 1990 alone, the clinic had 650,000 outpatient visits. His leadership in exposing the hazards of tobacco and its link to lung cancer, that remain one of his most important contributions. He maintained this association even though he was criticized and ridiculed by his peers.
At Touro Hospital one of his patents was jazz musician Muggsy Spanier, who credited Ochsner with saving his life and composed the tune "Relaxin' at the Touro" during his recovery.
Numerous honors and awards were bestowed upon Ochsner not only for his success as a surgeon, but rather as a New Orleanian. In 1948, he received the highest civic honor New Orleans can bestow upon someone-he was named Rex, King of Carnival.
