Transplant pioneer from Beverly helped launch the Betty Ford Center
BY MAUREEN O’DONNELL Staff Reporter modonnell@suntimes.com July 30, 2012 5:26PM
Dr. James W. West (center) and fellow doctors Raymond P. Murphy (left) and Richard H. Lawler performed the world’s first human organ transplant in 1950 at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park.
Article Extras
Updated: September 1, 2012 6:15AM
Dr. James W. West made medical history when he helped perform the world’s first human organ transplant in 1950 at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park on a woman in desperate need of a kidney. His subsequent research — and personal experience with alcohol dependence — led him to help launch the famed Betty Ford Center for treating addiction. “He was beloved by Mrs. Ford,” said John Boop, president of the Betty Ford Center Foundation, who credits Dr. West with a large part of the California center’s success. In 1975, the longtime Beverly resident helped Monsignor Ignatius McDermott found Chicago’s Haymarket Center, a pioneering facility for the treatment of substance abuse. “He was the original ‘Most Interesting Man in the World,’ ” said his son, William J. West. At one time, “He played banjo in an all-doctor band to raise money for Little Company. It was the ‘Emergency Room All-Stars.’ ” The last surviving physician from the historic kidney-transplant team, Dr. West died July 24 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif., at 98. In 1950, Dr. West, working with Dr. Richard Lawler and Dr. Raymond Murphy, removed a kidney from a woman who had just died and transplanted it into Ruth Tucker, a 44-year-old woman with polycystic kidney disease. “She was a very strong and stalwart woman, with a lot of hope,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in a 2004 interview. Though the transplanted kidney failed in about three months, it eased the demands on the woman’s other kidney, giving it the break it needed to start working again. Tucker lived five more years. Though kidney transplants are now common, the procedure wasn’t without controversy at the time. “It sounded bizarre to take an organ from a dead person and expect it to work,” Dr. West told the Sun-Times. Some members of the clergy “were opposed to the idea that you could take tissue from someone who was dead and put it in someone who was alive, and it would come back to life,” he said in an interview with the Catholic New World. “It was like, once it was dead, it should stay dead.” Dr. West grew up in Oak Park and attended Campion Jesuit High School in Prairie du Chien, Wis., and Loyola University School of Medicine. He practiced surgery from 1942 to 1981. In the 1940s, he sought help for alcohol dependence. That changed the course of his life, and he helped form the Illinois State Medical Society Panel for the Impaired Physician. “He’s one of the giants in the field,” said Dennis Gilhousen, president of the National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers, which created the James W. West Quality Improvement Award in his honor. From 1982 to 1989, Dr. West was medical director of the Betty Ford Center. He wrote many publications on addiction, including He had a gift for being positive, kind and nonjudgmental. Whenever he was asked how he was doing, his reply was, “Never better.” “One of the things he would tell family members of patients [is] you never give up on a patient,” Boop said. “All through my life,” his son said, “I had recovering alcoholics walk up to me and say, ‘Your dad saved my life,’ or ‘Your dad saved my marriage,’ or ‘Your dad saved my family.’ ” To the end of his days, Dr. West was a fan of the Original Rainbow Cone sold at 92nd and Western, and the veggie-bedecked Chicago hot dog known as a “Garden on a Bun.” His wife of 58 years, Shirley, died in 1997. He is survived by his second wife, Maureen; daughters Judith West, Pamela Byrne, Penelope West and Victoria Dingler; sons Raymond and William; stepdaughters Cheryl Marquis and Sandy Clark; five grandchildren, four step-grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Services are planned Aug. 25 at Sacred Heart Church in Palm Desert, Calif.
