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Correspondence, documents, certificates, printed materials, and photographs documenting the career of thoracic surgeon John L. Pool.
History and Biography
Thoracic surgeon. John Lawrence Pool, Jr. was born in 1907 in New York City. He was educated at Princeton (A.B., 1930) and Columbia (M.D., 1934). Pool taught surgery at Cornell and Yale and had a long affiliation with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
During World War II, Pool served as chief surgeon of a field hospital in the South Pacific; immediately following Japan’s defeat, he served as commanding officer of a field hospital there. In the early 1940s he helped found the Tata Memorial Hospital in Bombay, India (now Mumbai). Pool also served a term as president of the New York Academy of Medicine and was active in his medical school alumni association.
Pool was the cousin of J. Lawrence Pool, the first chairman of Columbia’s Dept. of Neurosurgery. He died April 19, 2005.
Organization
Correspondence, documents, certificates, printed materials, and photographs documenting the career of John L. Pool. Included is a draft of his 1940 contact with Tata Hospital; wound infection reports for Memorial Sloan-Kettering; programs of the New York Society for Thoracic Surgery; and records relating to a historical exhibit planned by the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.
Administrative Information
Gift of the Pool family, 2006 (acc. #2006.02.06).