William Wolff

Substantial reservations

Wolff later admitted that the team had substantial reservations about the next step: “We now confess that we were not at all entranced by the prospect of pushing a stiff firm tube through a thin walled convoluted colon. The spectre of a series of malpractice suits loomed large, should a mishap occur.”

Shinya’s first forays into the colon used fibre optic endoscopes from Olympus Corporation designed for the oesophagus and able to reach only the splenic flexure, the first bend in the colon. But in 1969 with input from Wolff and Shinya, Olympus developed dedicated colonoscopes and later added an electrosurgical polypectomy snare.

Because of widespread scepticism, Wolff and Shinya delayed publishing. They performed the procedure on more than 100 patients to amass a body of overwhelming scientific evidence. Finally, in 1973, they published their groundbreaking paper in the New England Journal of Medicine: “Polypectomy via the fiberoptic colonoscope—removal of neoplasms beyond reach of the sigmoidoscope” (1973;288:329-32, doi:10.1056/NEJM197302152880701).

The US surgeon Francis Moore, winner of the 1978 Lister medal of the Royal College of Surgeons, described the technique as “a quantum advance in abdominal surgery.” The journal Seminars in Colon and Rectal Surgery in 1999 named it one of the “landmark articles of the 20th century” in the discipline.

Stephen P Haverson, who in 1969 began a surgical residency at Beth Israel, where he is now attending surgeon, said that Wolff “was instrumental in helping to perfect this technique and most importantly had the foresight to know that this was a very important advancement in medical care.”

William Irwin Wolff was born on 24 October 1916, in New York City. His father was a lawyer and his mother a maths teacher. He won the New York state junior tennis championship and aged 16 enrolled at New York University, where he was a fencing champion. He earned his medical degree in 1940 from the University of Maryland, followed by an internship and thoracic surgery residency at the Cornell and Columbia university divisions of Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.

In 1943 he entered the US army, assigned to the first general hospital unit stationed north of London before the June 1944 Allied D Day landing in France, and after in Paris. During the Battle of the Bulge, where the US Army suffered 90 000 casualties, Wolff completed surgery on a wounded soldier in the face of advancing German troops before evacuating, narrowly missing capture.

Discharged in 1946 with the rank of major, he completed surgical training and was named chief of thoracic surgery at Deshon Veterans Hospital near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1949 he performed one of the first successful resuscitations using open cardiac massage on a patient who had experienced a cardiac arrest. The revival was a front page newspaper story and Wolff wrote a paper for JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, encouraging surgeons to use the technique.

He returned in 1950 to Bellevue and, after studying open heart surgery techniques at the University of Minnesota, helped set up an animal laboratory at St Vincent’s Hospital in New York for open heart surgery research. In 1956 he became associate professor of clinical surgery at New York University School of Medicine and in 1960 professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Academic excellence

In 1962 he was named the first full time director of surgery at Beth Israel, stepping down in 1976. Dr Haverson said of his tenure, “He promoted academic excellence in our institution comparable to that at any university teaching programme and more.” Carl A Soderstrom, a surgery resident at Beth Israel in the early 1970s and now adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, added, “Dr Wolff was the quintessential clinician, surgeon, scholar, teacher, and mentor. As leader he fairly critiqued and guided his residents. He exuded pure joy at the accomplishments of his residents and staff.”

The author of more than 120 papers, Wolff served as president of the New York Surgical Society and was a founding member of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons, which in 1998 honoured him with its distinguished service award. Other honours include the Beth Israel Medical Center alumnus of the year in 1992 and the gold key award from the University of Maryland Alumni Association. Wolff leaves his first wife, Lillian Myrick Wolff, and their five sons and four daughters. His second wife, Rita Smith Wolff, died in 2007.