Vallee L. Willman 1925 - 2009

To Melba, the Willman family, friends, colleagues and admirers of Val Willman:

I wish to share, with deep appreciation and regret, some recollections about Val Willman, a physician and surgeon who walked prayerfully with his God in a joyful journey of great achievement.  Joy, said C.S. Lewis, is the serious business of Heaven, and Val was a joyful inspiration for me and for thousands of others who were similarly privileged to meet this great Christian gentleman as he went about the business of Heaven here on earth.

Forty five years ago Val and I operated together on a slender boy of 15 who had been struck in the chest by a rapidly propelled broken flywheel as he attempted to repair his motor scooter. The impact ruptured the wall between the two sides of his heart, putting him into severe heart failure.

After multiple complications following initial repair of his heart, the patient reached a stage where the nurses and dietitians found him totally resistant to accepting a balanced diet. They came to Dr. Willman in great frustration, saying: “He won’t eat anything but peanut butter and jelly bread.”  Val took the order book and with great solemnity wrote the formal order: “Peanut butter and jelly bread, t.i.d. and 8 p.m.”  This seemingly flippant order carried a serious educational and therapeutic message to all concerned. It recognized the primacy of this sick, young patient, and the need to deal with him on terms he would accept.  And it conveyed a gentle lesson to the staff that the first priority was not a balanced diet------ that could come later, after the patient and staff had surmounted the immediate crisis. Meanwhile a serious, constructive decision had been made in a characteristically light-hearted fashion.

The patient got well and dropped from sight until a few weeks ago when my morning e-mail contained a note, signed: “Forever indebted patient from St. Louis.”

It gave the details of his 1964 injury and our joint operation and quoted his parents who considered the operation a miracle. He had enjoyed a very full and happy married life for 40 years with two children and three grandchildren.

The e-mail brought me a mixture of joy and sadness: joy that this grievously wounded young man had survived to a long, productive life through the unflagging efforts of a superb clinical team who were directed and encouraged by the gentle, jocular advice of  a wise surgeon still in his thirties, and sadness, that I could not share with Val in his impairment the good news of a patient whose life had been preserved, in no small part by Val’s insistence on what was best for this extremely sick and demanding teen ager.

Growing up in the black dirt country of southern Illinois, Val knew well the successes and disasters of the independent farmer, and he often shared with me the lessons of that bygone era of rugged individualism. I was once privileged to attend his father after a serious corn picker accident, and I recall vividly his mother calmly knitting in the corner of the examining room as I evaluated the shattered hand that she and her husband accepted with such impressive stoicism. This is a characteristic that Val inherited, along with other worthy attributes from splendid parents.  

His joyful sense of humor included a respect for hierarchical authority, but did not keep him away from practical jokes. One day I walked into his office and he asked me to put out my index finger, on the tip of which he deposited a small drop of what I would soon learn was a newly discovered special adhesive. As I followed his request to put my thumb and forefinger together I instantly recognized too late that it was essentially impossible to separate them, as he dissolved into appreciative laughter.

During his residency period, he was second to none in his attention to detail and his dedication to his patients. Yet he would sometimes use a weekend off from his busy surgical duties to help out with farm chores in Greenville. From him I learned what it was to “buck bales” in the summer sun. Powerfully built and capable of sustained, hard labor, Val would chuckle as he reported his father’s comment on his short stature: “Son, you’ve got the whole world to grow in!”

And grow he did, as a master surgeon, a skilled and beloved teacher, an indefatigable producer of significant research contributions, and a leader in many professional societies where he rose to high office. He was a vice-president of the American College of Surgeons and received that organization’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award. With his brilliant colleague and friend, Ted Cooper, he established a little known but highly significant liaison program of cardiovascular research with Russia in the days when the cold war made such ventures a challenge in reciprocal diplomacy. The friendship and respect that existed with his Russian colleagues, overriding any political considerations, was a powerful testimonial to the international recognition of his intrinsic merit, organizational skills and charismatic personality

In 27 years as surgical departmental chairman he advanced the basic research underpinnings of cardiac transplantation to facilitate rapid clinical advances when the immune barrier was finally successfully breached. Great surgical clinician that he was, it was appropriate that he should pioneer the first Midwest clinical heart transplant in 1972. He was a leader in the cooperative efforts to develop a left ventricular assist device here and abroad, and his distinguished surgical group made significant advances in coronary artery bypass procedures.  An early report on catheter removal of emboli was a portent of what would become a new branch of our profession--endovascular surgery.

When he ended his surgical chairmanship in 1996, it marked a professional career of just under half a century, essentially every year of which was spent in one fortunate institution. He had met and surmounted with distinction a host of clinical and administrative challenges that would lead on to a final phase of lessened responsibility and, as the shadows lengthened, a diminishing capacity in the exercise of his quick wit and broad Ignatian philosophy that instructed and inspired so many students and colleagues.

The list of his honors and distinctions is well known, and it has been a source of pride and joy to this surgical colleague who worked in harness with him in the early phases of his inspiring career. In addition to our long professional association there were familial interactions of the closest sort.  On one occasion when we returned from an extended family trip to Canada, having left our youngest child with the Willmans, there was an anxious moment, and I stress its brevity, when our daughter seemed to choose Melba as the familiar mother figure rather than her biologic maternal parent. We often recalled this affectionate contretemps as evidence of the warm relationship between our families through happy times as well as deeply sorrowful ones, and for which our gratitude to Melba, Val and the Willmans can never be adequately expressed.

I have a thick file of correspondence through the years, most of it in his characteristic firm hand, detailing his activities and aspirations as he chronicled a maturing philosophical viewpoint, burnished and broadened by his more recent interactions with younger Jesuit colleagues in theology and psychology. Then there were the intermittent phone calls to my home or office, sharing news of events in St. Louis and the Church, and commenting on developments in the broad field of medicine with illuminating cogency. Periodically he would send me articles, from various conservative, or not so conservative journals of opinion, as triggers for spirited telephone conversations or long letters. And on every one of my birthdays the mail would bring a book, by someone such  as Polkinghorne on science and belief in God, or a bound collection of the Chestertonian newspapers known as G.K.’s Weekly, or perhaps one of Walter Hooper’s latest offerings from the literary trove of C.S. Lewis. 

Sadly, for more than two years the telephone voice was silent, the magazine clippings no longer arrived, and the stack of treasured birthday books at the bedside table no longer received their standard February addition. Instead, on my latest birthday some four weeks ago, came the mournful telephone notice that the earthly segment of his splendid career had peacefully ended at home in the presence of his family. A superb surgeon and a great Christian gentleman has left us all better for having known him.  May he rest in peace.

Willman Memorial
St. Louis, MO USA
March 6, 2009

C. Rollins Hanlon, MD
Executive Consultant
American College of Surgeons
Chicago, IL USA