The Missouri Ophthalmological Society, Inc.
A brief history of its early years (1963-1970) by founding member John Aure Buesseler, MD*
On the first of April 1959, I arrived on the campus of the University of Missouri in Columbia as the Founding Chief of Ophthalmology in its newly created four-year Medical School. Hugh Stephenson, MD, the Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Missouri, recruited me from the three-ophthalmologist private practice group I had founded in Madison, Wisconsin. Although it was April Fools Day, I felt very fortunate to have been chosen to establish the Ophthalmology teaching, patient care, and research program at that historic and renowned university located almost in the geographic center of the state.
Historically, the University of Missouri - Ol' Mizzou - had a medical school for almost one hundred years prior to World War II. However, in the last few decades it offered only the first two years of instruction. In the 1950s, it obtained the necessary authorization and funding enabling it to recruit faculty and to construct a new state-of-the-art four-year medical school and teaching hospital. It was into that go-go-go environment that I found myself. For me, Mizzou was a good fit.
I immediately started a residency program and recruited the best young ophthalmologist I could find in the person of Felix Nabor Sabates, MD. Together, we worked to make the Ophthalmology service as outstanding as possible. The effort yielded patient referrals from all over central Missouri.
As I became more knowledgeable of the ophthalmological state of affairs, I grew uncomfortably aware that Missouri was divided into two academic centers. One such center was located in and around Washington University in St. Louis and the other in and around the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas, and its juxtaposition in a larger city of the same name in Missouri. The ophthalmologists in the rest of Missouri, particularly centrally, had no academically organization and home. Felix and I agreed that we and our University of Missouri ophthalmology program should create a state-wide unifying professional organization for all Missouri ophthalmologists.
In determining the reception of such an effort would have, we were pleased with the nearly universal support from throughout both Kansas City and the out-state areas of Missouri. However, we were somewhat surprised, although forewarned, by the near-total opposition to such a state-wide organization from the Department of Ophthalmology at Washington University in St. Louis.
Because the out-state and Kansas City ophthalmologists were so supportive and particularly because Robert Dean Mattis, MD, Chairman of the Ophthalmology Department at St. Louis University assured us that he and his staff would be supportive of the establishment of a state-wide academically oriented professional organization of ophthalmologists, I was sufficiently encouraged to write a set of by-laws and articles of incorporation for what I named the Missouri Ophthalmological Society, Inc. (MOSI).
With those documents prepared for consideration, Felix and I scheduled the organizational meeting of MOSI for October 24, 1963, in the Chase Hotel in St. Louis The meeting was very well attended by ophthalmologists from throughout the state. The resort, Tan-Tar-A and the Lodge of the Four Seasons were favorites, with a nationally or internationally renowned speaker leading the program.
MOSI enabled its members to become more familiar with each other and to recognize the leadership among them in their own profession and in their own state. For example Carlie Souter Smith, M.D., the locally renowned female ophthalmologist in Springfield, was brought into statewide prominence and recognition by being the first to be chosen as a recipient in 1964 of the Gold Medallion Award. Paul Anton Cibis, M. D., of St. Louis, Winny Post, M. D., of Joplin and H. Berry Ivy, M. D., of Springfield. Other leaders in the profession who stepped upon the MOSI stage in those early years were Presidents such as Truman Schertz, M.D., of Kansas City, Missouri; Stephen Bowen, M.D., of St. Louis; Dick Underwood, M.D., of Kansas City, Missouri; and Felix Nabor Sabates, M.D., of Kansas City, Missouri.
Key to MOSI success in my opinion was that it brought a much needed unity to the ophthalmologists of Missouri. Critically important in accomplishing this was the role of a member serving the thankless but necessary tasks of intra-organization communicator as its Secretary-Treasurer. As soon as that obligation was out-sourced to some other entity, the “glue” of personal membership commitment to the Society was lost and the Society was prone to disassociation. I must ask the question: Is this what happened MOSI?
I left Missouri in 1970 to accept the appointment of Founding Dean of the Medical School and Founding Vice President of Health Affairs at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, and to serve a brief tour of duty in South Vietnam during the Vietnam Conflict as a Special Project Officer for the United States Secretary of Defense.
My eleven-year tenure at the University of Missouri was filled with pleasant and precious memories, foremost among them being a colleague of Dr. Felix N. Sabates. He is now nationally and internationally renowned ophthalmologist as the Chairman of the Ophthalmology Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and as the Founder and Executive Director of the Kansas City Eye Foundation. In addition, I have many fond memories of the wonderful colleagues associated with the establishment and success of MOSI in bringing unity and collegiality to and among the ophthalmologists of the beautiful state of Missouri.
*Founding Member of the Missouri Ophthalmological Society, Inc. (MOSI). Emeritus Founding Dean of the Medical School and Emeritus Founding Vice President of the Texas Tech Health Sciences University of the Texas Tech University System, Lubbock Colonel, Medical Corps/Special Forces Officer and Senior Flight Surgeon, U. S. Army (Retired)Doctor of Human Letters, Honoris Causa
