Miles F. Porter and the age of bold surgery

1878 — 1933

A national surgeon in a canal city: The first Fort Wayne physician whose work reached national medicine was Miles F. Porter (1856–1933), born in Decatur, who took his medical degree from the Medical College of Ohio in 1878 and practiced in Fort Wayne for fifty-four years. The documented record is substantial without embellishment. Porter was surgeon and chief of staff of Hope Hospital — the institution that became Parkview — and as chief he built the first operating room on the hospital grounds, on the site the downtown Y.M.C.A. later occupied. After 1900 he confined his practice to surgery and obstetrics. He was a founder of the American College of Surgeons and sat on its Board of Governors, a trustee of the American Medical Association for nine years, a fellow of the American Surgical Association, president of the Indiana State Medical Society, and at one time president of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; he held the chair of Professor of Surgery in the Indiana University School of Medicine. His published work ran in the national transactions of his specialties — a paper on cornual pregnancy, operated on with recovery, in the obstetricians' and gynecologists' transactions of 1901, and "Elective Cesarean Section," read before the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association in December 1908, arguing the planned operation's place in practice. That published, argued, technique-shaping record is the advancement this entry can certify. Two larger claims attach to his name in local memory, and they are printed here as what they are: Arthur Paulison's 1973 sketches of Lindenwood Cemetery's pioneers, published by the Fort Wayne Public Library, say Porter "is known to have performed the first gallbladder operation in the Middle West" and to have "performed one of the first appendectomies in the history of surgery." No corroboration of either superlative was found in the surgical literature reached, and both stand in this section as the 1973 sketch's claims, attributed and unproven — early appendectomy and gallbladder surgery were genuinely new in Porter's first decades, and that he was among the region's earliest practitioners of the new abdominal surgery is the claim his documented career supports. The era's other documented technique adoption in this record — diphtheria antitoxin, first used in Fort Wayne in 1895 — is the Epidemics record's, cross-referenced here in this line. No source reached names Fort Wayne's first X-ray examination or first use of ether; those firsts, if they were ever set down, are not in the record. Porter's other founding — the Physicians' Guarantee Company of 1899, ancestor of MedPro Group — was medical-liability insurance, a financing innovation rather than a medical advancement, and its record is the Business record's.

Sources:

1. Arthur M. Paulison, Pioneers Resting in Historic Lindenwood (Fort Wayne Public Library, 1973) — the fifty-four years of practice, the national reputation "pioneering in the advancement of modern surgery," the first operating room built on the Hope Hospital grounds as chief of staff, and the gallbladder and appendectomy claims, carried in the entry as that sketch's claims.
2. Indiana University Arbutus yearbook (1917), faculty sketch — born Decatur 1856; M.D., Medical College of Ohio, 1878; AMA fellow and trustee for nine years; founder and governor of the American College of Surgeons; American Surgical Association fellow; president of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; former president of the Indiana State Medical Society; surgeon and chief of staff of Hope Hospital; Professor of Surgery, Indiana University School of Medicine.
3. Transactions of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (1901) — Porter's "Cornual Pregnancy; Rupture in the Fourth Month; Operation; Recovery"; the 1905 transactions — his "Personal Experience in Myofibromata of the Uterus"; Miles F. Porter, "Elective Cesarean Section," read before the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association, St. Louis, 16 December 1908 (JAMA reprint).
4. Epidemics section of this history — diphtheria antitoxin first used in Fort Wayne in 1895, cross-referenced in one line.