The first orthopedic operation performed at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View when it first opened in 1961 was a hip-fracture repair by Mayfield Harris.
Forty-eight years and some 9,000 surgeries later, Harris again was first into the operating room after the opening of a spanking new ECH last November. This time, he was assisting Dr. Jeffrey Kliman on a total hip replacement, a procedure that did not exist when Harris began his career after training at Stanford Medical School. Now 85, Harris still runs his practice in Los Altos two days a week.
Standing for three hours through the recent operation, Harris looked limber in his scrubs as he held the incision open with retractors. "You get to know the tension of the muscle, the fascia, what's springy, what's not." Fatigue is no problem for him, even though he underwent open-heart surgery 15 years ago. "The longest surgery I've ever done was about 10 hours, and I never recall getting tired."
Stamina is assumed in someone who was team physician for the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team for 10 years and has attended, as Kliman noted, "every Stanford football game for 50 years."
As a field surgeon during the Korean War and in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Harris experienced situations that were far more challenging than anything he sees in operating rooms now. "Osteomyelitis [bone infection] was a major complication of wounds, even in surgery." He says greater understanding of infection and better options for its prevention have been even more important than the advances he has witnessed in surgical equipment and techniques.
Raised in Beverly Hills, Harris enjoys recalling that he used to clean Cary Grant's swimming pool and had occasion to ask Liz Taylor out for "some pop" on his first payday as an intern at Los Angeles County Hospital. "I'd been a doc for two weeks and I was bubbling over. My first check was $14—that was for two weeks." Taylor was incredulous. "'I thought that was for a day,' she told me."
DIANA REYNOLDS ROOME is a writer in Mountain View.
