Washington University (Saint Louis, Mo.). School of Medicine. Neurology and Neurological Surgery Department.

The executive faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine approved the formation of a joint department of neurology and neurological surgery effective July 1, 1974. The increasing number of mutual interests of these disciplines prompted the action. Sidney Goldring M.D., professor of neurological surgery was appointed head of neurological Surgery and co-head of the new department with William M. Landau, M.D., Professor of neurology and head at that time of the Department of Neurology. Goldring had a lifelong interest in neurophysiology and the experimental and clinical aspects of epilepsy. Ralph Dacey replaced Goldring as head of neurological surgery and co-chair in 1989. Although there was one academic program, there were two separate faculty, and the neurosurgery staff was much smaller until expansions in the 1990s. Neurology and neurological surgery were one department for nearly 30 years until the end of the 2002-2003 academic year. Before 1974 they were separate as well.

Until 1974, neurosurgery was a division of the department of surgery. Ernest Sachs, a neurosurgeon who trained under Victor Horsley, started a training program in neurosurgery at Washington University in 1921. Sachs was brought to the University in 1910, the year of the publication of the Flexner report, to develop neurosurgery in the Midwest, south of Chicago. He became professor of neurosurgery in 1919, the first such specialty post in the world. Many of Sach's trainees became outstanding teachers and clinicians. When Sachs retired as chief of neurosurgery in 1946, he was succeeded by Henry G. Schwartz, a superb clinical surgeon interested in the training of residents, the neurology service and basic neuroscience programs. Many of his trainees continued in academic neurosurgery and the neurosurgical division became strongly committed to basic and clinical research before retirement as neurosurgery chairman in 1974. Neurosurgeons William S. Cox was a distinguished member of the neurosurgical faculty from 1957-1997 and Leonard T. Furlow served on the neurosurgical faculty from 1932-1967. George Bishop, James O'Leary, and Thomas Woolsey have had long research associations with neurological surgery at WUSM.

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