[lively music]
- Before I came to the Cleveland Clinic,
I was in awe of the Cleveland Clinic.
- She has some very aggressive femoral disease.
- The first coronary bypass surgery was done here in the Cleveland Clinic.
- The first stopped heart surgery was done here.
We did the first larynx transplant.
Then it led to the face transplant.
- Good morning. How are you?
- The clinic was really a pioneer in nursing leadership.
- She's COVID negative.
- It's not just about being first in something.
It's having determination to endure blowback
of being iconoclastic.
- We are fearless,
willing to try new things, innovative.
- But we believe we just have one mission,
and that is patient care.
- All right, we'll take good care of you, okay?
- Okay.
- Our mission has not really changed
from the very inception of Cleveland Clinic.
We're about to turn a hundred years old,
and our mission is about to turn a hundred years old.
[light piano music]
[energetic music]
- The story of the Cleveland Clinic actually begins
way before the clinic was started.
The late 1800s, moving into the early 1900s,
medicine in the United States was way behind
how medicine was practiced in Europe.
At the time, there were some very prominent individuals
in the scientific and medical world in Cleveland.
George Washington Crile, he was a farm boy.
He was born in Ohio, a small town down south,
hard-working.
He graduated from Wooster College of Medicine,
joined the practice of Bunts and Weed
to practice with buggies and horses and trauma.
And Weed up and died.
And so Bunts and Crile
brought on one of Crile's cousins, Lower.
These three surgeons were great surgeons.
They were great academicians.
They were great educators,
so they were what we would call a triple threat.
[light dramatic music]
- Fast forward to World War I.
The first boots on the ground of United States soldiers
were known as the Lakeside Unit,
led by Dr. Crile,
and Crile had an incredible role
in organizing medical care.
They faced incredible adversity.
At one of the great battles of Ypres,
they had 10,000 incoming casualties within 48 hours.
- At that time, medicine was practiced, what I call, mano-a-mano.
You know, you had one doctor, one patient,
and you didn't have a whole heck of a lot you could do for anybody.
The partners, they were just three surgeons working together,
but what they put together in this base hospital
was what you see with the Cleveland Clinic.
It wasn't just surgeons, it wasn't just physicians.
It was a whole team.
- As the war ended they said, this is the way to go.
I want to do medicine the way we did here.
Collaborative.
To think and act as a unit.
[light music]
- The three surgeons, when they came back to Cleveland after the war,
they brought in the fourth partner.
Phillips was his name.
They would take their small partnership
and explode it into this group practice.
Cleveland, at that time, was a booming enterprise.
It was one of the largest cities in the United States.
It was one of the wealthiest cities.
And so what they decided to do was to build an outpatient clinic,
which is still here, which is still on our campus.
It was in February of 1921 that the building was finished
right here down on Euclid Avenue.
- Things were really going very well.
The clinic was bustling.
There was growth, and in 1929, you know,
the clinic almost came to an end.
It was May 15th.
It was a busy day at the clinic.
There were hundreds of patients and caregivers
in the outpatient facility.
One of the maintenance workers was in the basement,
and there was an odd smell and some smoke.
At that time, X-rays were stored on films
made of nitrocellulose,
just a very volatile material.
The X-rays started to ignite and emit this poison gas,
and there was an explosion.
And this gas started to emanate through all four floors of the building.
People were overcome, and literally died in their seats.
That is still the greatest loss of life
in American hospital history.
[gentle music]
The community of Cleveland
came to this heroic rescue,
and without the Cleveland philanthropic and volunteer support,
there would be no Cleveland Clinic,
and, you know, we've been relying on them ever since.
[upbeat music]
- We have a three-part mission from the very founding:
research, education and patient care.
The founders knew that, to take care of our patients,
we needed to do research, because we needed to know
much, much more about the diseases and then understand how to treat them.
- In 1945, one of the best-known researchers, Irvine Page,
was hired into the clinic system to run the basic science labs.
- At the time, hypertension was a major healthcare problem.
- For reasons not yet fully understood,
the arterials may become chronically contracted,
and this is the cause of chronic high blood pressure.
- Dr. Page discovered that the origins of blood pressure control
were through a hormone produced by the kidney.
Harriet Dustan, I wish I had known her.
She was the first to show
that there was a renal artery cause for hypertension,
and that was that the blood vessels going to the kidneys
were narrowed and abnormal,
and those patients suffered from the worst hypertension.
These amazing discoveries led to a change in life and death
for patients with hypertension.
She was a brilliant woman working with Page
at a time when most medical schools only admitted men,
and the Cleveland Clinic is an amazing place
because it saw the value of Harriet.
She was a leader here.
[light music]
- The most powerful chapter, I believe,
in the history of cardiovascular care of Cleveland Clinic
is the one that relates to Dr. Mason Sones and Dr. René Favaloro.
- Coronary artery disease was big,
it killed a lot of patients with heart attack,
but we really didn't know how to take pictures
of the coronary arteries back then,
and Mason Sones did a lot of cardiac catheterization.
- Cardiac catheterizations were done in what looked like a submarine.
There was a man down in this pit, and he had this periscope,
and a patient was above, and they had this dye
that they would inject into the aorta,
and they would just look at the heart and the valves.
Dr. Sones, he injects, and to his horror,
he sees this dye, they've put it in the wrong place.
And they look up on the monitor.
The EKG has gone silent.
The guy was still conscious, fading away,
and Dr. Sones came up and shook up and said, "Cough."
He goes [coughs].
[machine beeping]
The cardiac monitor goes into sinus.
The first cardiologist to do a selective coronary arteriogram said,
"I think we're onto something."
- And it was also at that time that another
very famous surgeon joined the clinic, René Favaloro.
They were trying to figure out how to solve the problem
of coronary artery obstruction.
And so Favaloro took a vein
and interposed it to bypass
the obstruction in the coronary artery,
and so, bang, this was the second great discovery,
and it's the basis, really, for contemporary cardiology.
- Things evolved at the Cleveland Clinic in heart care,
and we started looking at new devices,
new operations, new valves,
and one of the early people to run our research institute
was Bernadine Healy.
- The effect that Bernadine Healy had on research,
you can't match it.
She was the first female Director of Research at the Cleveland Clinic.
She really wanted it to be known that women had heart disease too,
and women's cardiovascular risk and disease is quite different,
and research on people was only done on men.
If you wanted to study women, you recruited men
and you administered female hormones.
This was happening in the 1980s.
She said, "That's nonsense,"
and she mandated that if you're going to do clinical studies,
you need to include women.
Audacious, right?
- The research very early on was pushed by curiosity,
by necessity, by innovation,
and that spirit has been legendary
right up until today.
We just did our 2,000th heart transplant,
and we've done 2,000 lung transplants.
There's not too many programs in the world that has reached those marks.
The lineage of transplantation here at the Cleveland Clinic
goes all the way back to the concepts that were batted around
with George Crile with respect to blood transfusion.
If our founders showed up today,
they would be extremely pleased, because what they would see
is that we were still true to our founders' beliefs.
[machine beeping steadily]
- The foundation of Cleveland Clinic as a group practice
that was put in place a hundred years ago is alive and well.
- In the early 2000s,
our CEO Toby Cosgrove created institute models
combining various departments into teams that work together,
and so there's no competition
between, say, the vascular surgeons and cardiologists,
but instead they work together and share their knowledge and insights
to deliver the best possible care for patients.
- We'll get you out of here, okay?
- I think the most important thing
and the thing that will guide us through all this
is the fact that we can't lose sight of our main objective is our patients.
- No matter what you do in our organization,
again, each of you can contribute in your own unique and special way.
- This is a great day. - I appreciate you.
- In 2008, we established a nursing caregiver institute
and then the Office of Patient Experience
to really examine what our patients need
and the experience that they have in our organization.
[gentle music]
- We believe that we have a responsibility to touch as many lives
in the United States and worldwide as we can
with the type of care that we know how to provide.
- But Cleveland, of course, is our hometown.
We're a very unique city, hardworking, accomplished.
That word "grit" captures it all.
- We have a responsibility to set the bar for excellence in healthcare
and everything that we do, in particular when it comes
to our underserved communities.
- You will come back? - Absolutely.
- We work closely with our civic leaders
to meet the needs of the people who matter most,
and that is our community and our patients.
- So surgery went very well. Take a deep breath.
- I think all of these things that we're doing,
it's like a domino effect.
One thing makes another thing better.
We're not the same old Cleveland Clinic,
but we're the same old Cleveland Clinic.
- I cannot stop to marvel
on the collective wisdom of our founding fathers.
You can feel it in everything that is being done here at the Cleveland Clinic,
and I'm absolutely certain that we are going to continue
with the success in the next hundred years.