Lifetime Achievement Awards

Lifetime Achievement Award: Dr. Lewis Wexler

By Julie Ruiz, PhD

For most of his life, Dr. Wexler has been ahead of his time. He was the first to receive the Gold Medal Award from the North American Society of Cardiac Imaging in 2002; he was one of the first to perform coronary angiography in California and to train radiologists and cardiologists in this procedure. He was one of a few to graduate from high school by the age of fifteen; to begin medical school at the State University of New York, Syracuse, by the age of eighteen; and to meet his life-long love by third grade.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Wexler attended Queens College of New York for two years before transferring to the University of Chicago. As a third-year undergraduate, he went to see his pre-medical admissions counselor, who encouraged him to apply for medical school that day because it was the last day to register for the MCATs. At the age of seventeen and a half he was accepted at Syracuse.

Although Dr. Wexler had planned to stay in California for only one year to complete his internship in 1960 at Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center in San Francisco, he and his wife fell in love with California and have been here ever since. Dr. Wexler was drawn to Radiology because it involved solving puzzles: "I enjoyed my patients, but I had trouble letting go. I'd come home and worry about my patients--particularly, who was taking care of them in my absence. Radiology attracted me because you can solve a diagnostic dilemma but someone else has responsibility to care for the patient."

However, Dr. Wexler has enjoyed the direct contact he has had with his patients as an interventional radiologist for thirty-two years at Stanford and as a physician at Menlo Medical Clinic, where he currently works part-time. "I see as many of my patients as I can at Menlo Medical," he told me. "In the future, direct patient contact in Radiology will increase because I think that preventative medicine will be an emerging subspecialty with whole body scans at low dosage, which will require radiologists to consult with their patients about their results. Direct contact with patients should begin in residency; every radiology resident should have as much patient contact as possible."

Dr. Wexler was in the first purely diagnostic radiology residency program in the U.S. In 1961, when Dr. Wexler was a resident at Stanford, there was no ultrasound, mammography, CT, or MR, and angiography was just beginning. Stanford Radiology had just moved to Palo Alto from San Francisco in 1959. There were only three residents per class, and five faculty members in the Division of Diagnostic Radiology: Drs. Henry Jones, Herb Abrams, Robert Evans, Leslie Zatz, and Steven Ross.

As a resident, he was mentored by Herb Abrams, MD, who inspired him to pursue cardiovascular imaging as a resident. Studying under Dr. Eric Boijsen, Dr. Abrams taught catheter angiography during a time when the field was just beginning. He was one of the first radiologists to develop a percutaneous transfemoral pre-shaped catheter approach to coronary arteriography. "In those days, we had to mold, shape, and sterilize each catheter before we used them," Dr. Wexler remarked. As the beneficiary of this cutting-edge knowledge, he spent one and one-half years training in angiography during his three-year residency program, including a U.S. Public Health Services sponsored fellowship in cardiovascular radiology completed in 1964.

After his fellowship, Dr. Wexler served as a radiologist in the U.S. Air Force in Ankara, Turkey, for two years. Upon completing his service, Dr. Wexler was awarded a James Picker Foundation Advanced Fellowship in cardiovascular physiology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School in London, England, during the academic year 1966-67.

In 1967, he returned to Stanford Radiology as an assistant professor, where he served as chief of the nascent cardiovascular radiology section for 24 years and for 15 years as the co-director of the catheterization and angiographic laboratories at Stanford University Hospital. As a professor of radiology, his research centered on cardiac and vascular imaging, the imaging of aortic dissections, and the effects of contrast media on cardiovascular and renal function. He trained numerous radiologists and cardiologists in coronary angiography before most others were doing it. However, due to turf wars, cardiologists are the only ones trained in this procedure today.

Dr. Wexler has published over 200 manuscripts, book chapters, and abstracts on vascular imaging and interventions. He won numerous awards and was elected as chair or president of multiple professional radiology and cardiology organizations focused on cardiovascular imaging and interventional radiology. However, Dr. Wexler's greatest achievement lies in teaching cardiac catheterization to cardiologists and radiologists: "I taught radiology fellows under an NIH-sponsored training grant for 20 years." By the time he retired in 1999 as professor emeritus of radiology, Dr. Wexler had taught close to 200 radiology and cardiology residents and fellows from all over the world. Many of his students have become leaders in the fields of cardiology and interventional radiology.

During his sabbatical year in 1982-83, Dr. Wexler was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow, working in the U.S. Congressional offices of Representative James R. Jones of Oklahoma and then Senator Dan Quayle. In Washington, he met a wide array of the politicians, staff, and lobbyists involved in healthcare issues. This experience inspired him to successfully apply for several grants in health services research.

Among his most enduring contributions has been his service to the University and the community. At Stanford, he served on both the Medical School and University Faculty Senates and chaired the Committee on Land and Buildings. He was chief of staff of Stanford University Hospital and directed the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) survey of the medical school in 1996. Dr. Wexler currently serves as a member of the Stanford Medical School Admissions Committee and the University's Judicial Panel.

In addition to his committee work, Dr. Wexler, along with his wife, enjoys the cultural aspects the Bay Area offers, including ballet and opera. They are both dedicated to life-long learning: "Recently, my wife and I received an award from the Stanford Continuing Studies Program for the couple who has taken the most continuing studies courses." This March, they traveled to Italy to see the sites from one of their continuing studies courses on Christianity and Judaism in ancient Rome.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Dr. Henry H. Jones

(Image courtesy of Mark Riesenberger)

By Julie Ruiz, PhD

"My greatest achievement is that I survived," Dr. Jones said to me after I spoke with him about our "Lifetime Achievement Award." In his 68 years of serving Stanford Radiology, Dr. Henry H. Jones, professor emeritus, has done much more than survive. He has left a long legacy of achievements and a lasting impression on those who have had the opportunity to interact with him.

Born on June 9, 1917, in Altoona, Pennsylvania, he was the second son of Henry O. and Euphemia Heilman Jones. His older brother, Howard, died in infancy. His father was a urologist, and his mother was the superintendent of music for the Altoona school system and, later, was a writer of style reviews and producer of fashion shows for the William F. Gable Department Store. "She was so successful," Dr. Jones told me, "that department stores as far away as Pittsburgh wanted to hire her to produce their style reviews."

After graduating from Haverford College in 1939 with a BA in chemistry, Dr. Jones attended the graduate chemistry program at Harvard. "I spent a year pretending to be a chemist at Harvard and learned that I wasn't really going to be the kind of chemist I wanted to be because I didn't fully comprehend the application of partial differential equations." In 1940, he applied and was accepted to medical school at Yale. In medical school, he was reminded that medicine requires a life time of learning, which is something he had observed throughout his childhood because both his father and grandfather were physicians. "In your first- and second-years of medical school, you realize that what you are learning today you will use for the rest of your life," Dr. Jones remarked. Because of his interest in chemistry and mathematics, Dr. Jones felt a natural affinity for radiology.

At the end of 1941, he was inducted into the army to serve in World War II, but he was assigned back to finish his medical studies. After completing a rotating internship in 1943 at Metropolitan Hospital in New York City and a residency in radiology at Yale in 1946, he served in the army as an instructor at the Army School of Roentgenology at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, where he trained physicians to be radiologists or "90-day wonders," as they were commonly called. "That was a great experience," he told me. "I had just finished my residency in radiology and now I was teaching what I had learned. If you want to learn something, teach it!" After three cycles of training, he was assigned as head of radiology in Bad Constadt, Germany, which was the orthopedic center for the army of occupation.

After his discharge from the army in 1948, he went to speak with the chair of the Radiology Department at Yale, Henry Kaplan, MD, who had taught him during residency and who had recently been hired to head the Stanford Radiology Department. Dr. Jones' reputation preceded him, and it was the impression he had left on Dr. Henry Kaplan that led to his hire at Stanford. "After I was discharged from the army, I was looking for a position as an academic radiologist so I went to talk to Henry Kaplan. I asked him, 'Do you know of any available academic jobs in radiology?' He answered, 'Why? You already have one at Stanford.' It's the only job application I've ever done in my life! It was very inexpensive; I didn't fill out any forms or anything." So, Dr. Jones came to Stanford at the end of June 1948. Because Dr. Kaplan did not leave Yale for Stanford until September, Dr. Jones ran the Department until his arrival. As the only senior, full-time faculty member, he worked 7 days a week for 14 to 16 hours a day, and he taught all the radiology courses until Kaplan arrived in September of 1948.

After 68 years in our Department, he has left an enduring legacy and the results of his life time of learning are reflected in the plaques that line the walls of his office, such as the Robert Reid Newell Memorial Award and the Broad Street Pump Award. Conferred by Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), the Broad Street Pump Award is bestowed upon physicians who apply their medical knowledge in socially responsible ways. Dr. Jones was a founding member of PSR and a leader in the movement to eliminate nuclear war and weapons of mass destruction. "I was very surprised and extremely pleased. I'm delighted to have this award," he commented. Dr. Jones was also the first chief of the radiology service at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, and he earned the moniker "Bones Jones" in recognition of his subspecialty regarding the skeletal system. His research focused on the mechanisms governing the growth and modeling of the skeletal system.

Dr. Jones has accumulated a great number of roentgenograms throughout his career, and he has donated them to our departmental resident and medical student teaching library: "I used to teach the bone and joint part of the radiology clerkship, and I have bequeathed the set of films I accumulated through my teaching to the library for use by the medical students and residents. I think it's useful, and it's organized so that people can teach themselves. People do very well teaching themselves by the time they get to medical school. If you can't teach yourself by then you're in deep trouble." The Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies (SUMMIT) is compiling his extensive collection of radiographs. For more information on this project, please see http://summit.stanford.edu/pdfs/mediaserver_ts.pdf and http://summit.stanford.edu/pdfs/meadiaserver_tearsheet.pdf. His collection is also featured in Dr. Amy Ladd's Paget's Disease E-Book, which can be viewed at http://paget.stanford.edu/, and he has given several detailed and informative online lectures on bone disease, including one on osteomyelitis (http://osteomyelitis.stanford.edu/pages/hjones.html) and one on osteosarcoma (http://osteosarcoma.stanford.edu/pages/EbookInfo.html).

After retiring on December 31, 2006, he worked part-time until January of 2007. I asked him how he spends his time, and he told me, "I'm reorganizing my film collection, and I'm cleaning my desk, which could take a while. I make a little progress on it, and I come back to find it's grown back again; I don't understand how it piles up, but it does." He also enjoys spending time with his grandchildren, Emmerson (age 11) and Elliott (age 6).

To read more about what our Department was like when Dr. Jones began at Stanford, please see his first-author publication, "A History of the Department of Radiology at Stanford University" published in the American Journal of Roentgenology 1995 Mar;164(3):753-60 (http://www.ajronline.org/cgi/reprint/164/3/753).

"HAPPY DAY!"

Lifetime Achievement Award: Dr. William Northway, Jr

(Image courtesy of Mark Riesenberger)

By Julie Ruiz, PhD

During his first year as an assistant professor of Stanford Radiology in 1964, Dr. William Northway, Jr, was captivated by what appeared to be multiple cysts in the chest X-rays of premature infants in severe respiratory failure who had been treated with mechanical ventilation and high oxygen concentrations. With his curiosity piqued, he began his research. By 1967, Dr. Northway had made a startling discovery: the high levels of oxygen used to treat respiratory failure in newborn premature infants were causing a new chronic lung disease, which he called bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). His pioneering work dramatically changed the treatment of respiratory failure in newborn premature infants.

Dr. Northway is a Stanford legacy, who was born and raised in Palo Alto. His father served as the chair of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Stanford, and his mother was a nurse at Stanford-Lane Hospital before her marriage. He attended Palo Alto High School and Stanford University for his undergraduate and medical degrees. At Stanford, he met Drs. Henry Jones and Henry Kaplan and decided to become a radiologist. After medical school, Dr. Northway headed to the East Coast to complete an internship in internal medicine at the New York Hospital (Cornell University). He returned to Stanford in 1958 to begin his residency in radiology and encountered Dr. Robert Evans, the first pediatric radiologist at Stanford, and Dr. Herb Abrams. Both were critical to his interest in becoming an academic pediatric radiologist.

After finishing his residency in 1961, he enlisted in the air force and was stationed at Keesler Air Force Base Hospital in Biloxi, Mississippi, as the assistant director of the Department of Radiology from 1961 to 1963: "I spent two years in the United States Air Force as a captain and as one of two radiologists at a 500-bed hospital." At Keesler, he met and married his wife, Linda. In 1963, Dr. Northway obtained a fellowship at the Hopital des Enfants-Maladies in Paris, France, with the assistance of Dr. Robert Evans and Professor Jacques Lefevre, the leading French pediatric radiologist at the Hopital des Enfants-Maladies. Through Dr. Kaplan, he also secured a James Picker Foundation Fellowship for support.

Working at the Hopital des Enfants-Maladies was an enlightening experience, according to Dr. Northway: "The hospital had about 500 beds at the time, and it was repudiated to be the largest and oldest children's hospital in the world. Many of my patients had been flown in from the French colonies in Africa, so I saw things that you wouldn't see in the United States, like scurvy, which is caused by vitamin C deficiency; rickets, which is caused by vitamin D deficiency; and tuberculosis (TB) of the spine and other areas. They also had a large ward of patients with congenital bone dysplasias that no one had categorized yet."

He returned to Stanford in 1964 as an instructor in radiology and held a faculty position at Stanford throughout the rest of his 34-year career. Over the years, Dr. Northway has seen a multitude of changes. When he began in the Stanford Department of Radiology, children were not separated from adult patients for radiologic purposes. Also, radiotherapy, nuclear medicine, and diagnostic radiology were still one department when he was the director of the Division of Diagnostic Radiology from 1976 to 1981.

Most memorable were the technological advances. In the 1970s, CT and ultrasound technologies were primitive, but developing, Dr. Northway recalled: "We were just starting to have ultrasound and CT at that time. Initially, Dr. Zatz, who was developing the ultrasound technique, immersed the body part to be examined in water, and he reached in the water bath with the ultrasound equipment to make the images."

Teaching has changed as well. When Dr. Northway presented at grand rounds early in his career, he and his colleagues always presented with X-rays, lab results, and the patient, who is rarely involved with grand rounds today because of privacy issues. These changes in teaching have made it exciting but challenging. "Someone said once that by the time you have been out of medical school for 10 years only 10% of what you learned will still be in effect. When I was in medical school, they hadn't discovered DNA! The fun of teaching is passing on new knowledge," Dr. Northway asserted. Even amidst all the revolutionary changes, Dr. Northway had time to complete his research, in part, because the chair, Henry Kaplan, had established a policy that allowed each new tenure track faculty member to spend two days a week on research and three days on clinical care.

This protected research time allowed Dr. Northway to make a discovery that would permanently alter the treatment of premature infants with respiratory failure or hyaline membrane disease/respiratory distress syndrome (RDS). When he arrived at Stanford in 1964, pediatricians were just beginning to use very high levels of oxygen to treat premature infants with RDS. When a colleague asked him to look at a series of chest X-rays from treated premature infants, Dr. Northway was puzzled by the appearance of cystic changes in the lungs. After ruling out staphylococcus pneumonia, he examined all the infant charts, nursing notes, and pathology and concluded that the lung changes were related to pulmonary oxygen toxicity.

Dr. Northway's findings were published in a seminal article entitled, "Pulmonary Disease Following Respirator Therapy of Hyaline Membrane Disease (Bronchopulmonary Dsyplasia)," in The New England Journal of Medicine (1967 Feb 16;276(7):357-68). His many research studies on BPD helped advance the therapy of premature infants with respiratory failure by promoting the lowering of therapeutic oxygen concentrations. This, along with lower ventilator pressures and other advances in neonatology, significantly decreased the mortality rate for premature infants with respiratory failure.

In 1998, Dr. Northway retired from a 34-year academic career. During the same year, he was selected as the "Pioneer Session Honoree" by the Society for Pediatric Radiology (SPR) for his important contributions to the development of pediatric radiology. In 2003, he was awarded the SPR Gold Medal. In honor of his distinguished career, Dr. Northway also received the 2005 J.E. Wallace Sterling Lifetime Alumni Achievement Award, which is bestowed annually by the Stanford Medical Alumni Association in recognition of "exceptional lifetime achievement" in medicine. He continues to serve our Department as an active emeritus professor of radiology and pediatrics.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Dr. Matilde Nino-Murcia

(Image courtesy of Mark Riesenberger)

By Julie Ruiz, PhD

In November of 2006, Dr. Matilde Nino-Murcia received the Inspirational Immigrant Professional of the Year (IIPY) Award from Upwardly Global at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco. Founded in 1999, Upwardly Global is a nonprofit organization that helps highly qualified immigrant professionals, who are also permanent residents, write resumes, refine interviewing skills, and develop professional networks. Many of the immigrants who use the services of Upwardly Global were doctors, lawyers, and engineers in their former country. However, most have to work as waiters, taxi drivers, etc. until they can get a U.S. license or degree because their licenses and degrees are often not valid in the U.S. As a volunteer and mentor, Dr. Nino-Murcia works with immigrant professionals interested in medicine: "I review their resumes and talk to them about the opportunities that exist here and guide them on how to validate their medical licenses."

Because of her dedication and commitment as a volunteer and a mentor, Dr. Nino-Murcia was one of many nominees selected nationwide for the IIPY Award: "Being the recipient of this award meant the world to me because it is a recognition of what I've tried to do throughout all these years: help others to succeed. It is also a recognition of my mentors, Drs. Gerald Friedland and Brooke Jeffrey, who have guided and supported me throughout my academic career here at Stanford. As the saying goes, when you walk through the jungle, you need to do what you can to clear a path through the trees so that others can follow. It is this process that I have found to be the most rewarding in my career."

The challenges she has faced as an immigrant are not the only obstacles she has had to overcome in her lifetime. She was born in a very small town about 200 miles from Bogota, the capital of Colombia. While her mother was not able to give her children wealth, she was able to give them an education. As a young girl, Dr. Nino-Murcia originally wanted to be a nurse, but her mother encouraged her to become a physician because she knew her daughter could succeed. And she did. Graduating from high school at sixteen, Dr. Nino-Murcia went on to medical school at the National University of Colombia in Bogota where she was one of only seven women in a class of 90 students. By the time she graduated from the National University of Colombia School of Medicine, she ranked second in her graduating class.

After their internships and one year of service, she and her husband, a medical school classmate, decided to immigrate to the United States. Dr. Nino-Murcia was a twenty-six year old Colombian medical school graduate, wife, and mom when she first arrived in the United States in 1975. "We had professors who had trained in the United States. They were our role models in medical school," she explained to me. "We came here to get better training and preparation to bring back to our medical school in Colombia. However, we stayed, in part, because the political situation in Colombia had become very unstable due to guerrillas and drug trafficking."

Today, the United States feels like her home, but it was not always that way. Learning a new language and culture were challenging, but having someone to learn it with helped: "When I came here, my older daughter was about two and half years old, so I used watch Sesame Street with her--Big Bird, Bert, Ernie, and the Cookie Monster were some of the most effective language instructors of my daughter and me. You can learn amazing things when you must do so to survive, and when your teachers can make you laugh while learning."

Even after she proved her proficiency in English by passing the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), Dr. Nino-Murcia was devastated to receive only rejections to the fifty letters she sent out to teaching hospitals along the eastern seaboard who told her, "This program does not accept FMGs [foreign medical graduates]." Finally, Dr. Nino-Murcia picked up the phone and called four local hospitals. The fourth hospital was Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. They had an opening and wanted her to start that week.

Becoming a medical resident in the United States was a major success, but it is not among Dr. Nino-Murcia's proudest achievements. These are personal. Her most significant accomplishment is her daughters. Beaming, she told me, "I am so proud of them. They both went to Stanford. The older one majored in English literature and then went to Berkeley and got her master's in education. She's a high school teacher. My younger one got her undergraduate and master's in earth systems. She works in San Francisco as a consultant for mining companies in South America and Africa, developing strategies to preserve the environment and well-being of the people impacted by the mining industry. They are both very passionate about their work and giving back to the community."

Her second greatest achievement is being a professor in the Stanford Department of Radiology: "It is truly a privilege to be a member of such a great Radiology Department. The people in our Department are very talented, accomplished, and very friendly. It is great to work at a place where you are constantly learning and surrounded by people you look up to." Dr. Nino-Murcia has been at the VA since 1984, where she specializes in applying multidetector computerized tomography technology for the diagnosis, classification, and staging of pancreatic cancer; using positron-emission tomography to evaluate genitourinary tumors; and evaluating gastrointestinal motility disorders in patients with spinal cord injuries.

As she acknowledged in her acceptance speech for the IPPY award, being a foreigner has its advantages: "My background growing up in a rural community outside of the United States and my struggles to learn English and understand a new culture all gave me awesome problem-solving skills, as well as a heightened appreciation for those who mentored me and a strong belief that I should give back to those who follow."

And throughout her professional career, she has given back. Dr. Nino-Murcia has mentored college students interested in health careers, and she continues to serve disadvantaged students by actively participating in the Stanford Health Careers Opportunity Program; the Clinical Shadow Experience for Minority and Disadvantaged College Students; and the School of Medicine Minority Orientation Weekend.

Lifetime Achievement Award: Dr. Stanford Rossiter

(Image courtesy of Mark Riesenberger)

By Julie Ruiz, PhD

When I met Dr. Stanford Rossiter at his home at the Hyatt Classic Residency on February 12, 2007, he was lying down in a chair, his tall frame enveloped by a blanket of Stanford red. I asked him how he was doing and he replied, "Not so well. I'm falling apart." At 91 years of age, he had been one of the oldest physicians on duty in 2005, serving 36 hours a week at Stanford Medical Center and the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California. Despite having to close his eyes frequently to search the recesses of his memory, his bright blue eyes still light up when he talks and his sense of humor and smile are never failing.

He was born 92 years ago in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unlike his father, who was a Union Pacific Railroad engineer, Dr. Rossiter chose to attend medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1940. He began his residency in surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, but was called to serve in World War II as a physician and a base radiologist in the army a few months later after Pearl Harbor in 1941. Why did he decide to become a radiologist? "I didn't choose," he told me. Apparently the commanding officer needed someone to take X-rays. "It took about 10 seconds to sign a change in my character," Dr. Rossiter recalled.

He found serving in World War II "difficult." He first participated as a triage officer at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 and then served in southern France where one of his duties was to do an inspection of the prostitutes in the area. "We took smears and chest X-rays," he remembered. After the war, he spent two months at the French Neurosurgical Institute in Paris where he learned myelography, which is a radiographic examination that uses a contrast medium to detect spinal cord injuries, cysts, and tumors. In 1946, he returned to the University of California, San Francisco, as a resident in radiology, finishing in 1948. After residency, he organized the Menlo Medical Clinic in Menlo Park and, in 1950, he became the first radiologist at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City. Along with one other physician, he also ran the Radiology Division of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital.

I asked him what Palo Alto, California, was like 70 years ago. He remembered first visiting Palo Alto as a member of the University of Utah polo team in 1935: "Utah was cold and wet. Palo Alto was just balmy. I liked what I saw, and I decided to come back." And so he did. He recalled that one of his most vivid memories of the Palo Alto area was in 1941 while he was sitting on a hill that is now part of the Sharon Heights Country Club: "I sat on the hill and watched battle dust from Woodside followed by the sound of horns, bugles, dogs--never saw a fox!"

Yet the biggest changes he has seen over the past years have been technological advances, which have also been the most challenging part of his career at Stanford: "Before, I did mostly gastroenterology and mammography. And now magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, positron emission tomography, and multiple row CT scan, have evolved." Yet it was the lack of technological development that got him in trouble with the law. Practicing at a time before the invention of image intensification for fluoroscopy, Dr. Rossiter wore red goggles while driving to the Veterans Administration Hospital, so that he would not lose his dark adaptation. He claims he was stopped for driving with red goggles, which canceled the red in traffic lights: "I was arrested for driving with red goggles on, just once!"

Overall, the most fulfilling part of his career has been his employment by Stanford and the Veterans Administration Hospital as a radiologist: "I enjoyed working more than playing golf or anything else; there are so many more rewards." While he cherishes his work as a radiologist, he does not consider it his greatest accomplishment. Neither has his highest achievement been the founding of the Menlo Medical Clinic, nor the establishment of the radiology clinic at Sequoia Hospital, nor his longevity. His greatest accomplishment was marrying his wife, Rickie, whom he met when he was a medical student and she was a patient at Ridley Park Hospital: "I examined her then and I liked what I saw. We went to parties together and I married her."

(To read more about Dr. Stanford Rossiter, please see The World of Stanford Radiology: 1901-2005 by Otha W. Linton, MSJ, and the May 21, 2006 PA Times Leader article "Joy of Work Keeps Oldest Doctor on Duty, Full of Stories" http://www.topix.net/content/kri/3215921163069702350127154860862235801710.)