Abstract
I was honored to provide an opportunity for Dr. Wolfe to present a lecture (his last public presentation) at the Southeastern Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in the summer of 2023. I requested a bio for the program and was sent this brief summary in first person. For those of us who knew Tony, it is easy to hear his voice through these words and recognize the weight he placed on the many experiences that helped to shape him.
Joseph K. Williams
Atlanta, Georgia
I was born in Cleveland Ohio where my father was a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. My father enlisted in the Army at the beginning of WWII as a Private and came out a Major. He stayed in the military and was groomed to be a Soviet expert. During this time, I stayed with my maternal grandparents in Huntington, W. Va., where my grandfather was a Urologist. Upon my Father’s return we moved every 2 years. . .language school in Monterey, Calif etc. My father became an Air Force Attache at the US Embassy in Moscow from 1958 to 1962; I studied French and Russian in Munich for a year, then enrolled as a foreign student at the University of Moscow. I returned to the US to finish my education: Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School.
I then spent 2 years in the US Public Health Service in Senegal, West Africa (since I knew some French). I returned to the US to complete my General Surgery Residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. I heard Dr. Tessier speak at the ASPRS meeting in Montreal in 1971 and decided that is what I wanted to do.
I completed my Plastic Surgery residency with Ralph Millard in his new program in Miami 1972 to 1974; Jackson Memorial was a circus compared to the Brigham. Millard wrote Tessier asking if I could visit; the answer was yes. I stayed in Paris for a year, rising from on-looker to assistant. My relationship with Tessier was at first formal but with time became friendly.
Europeans, particularly the French, are slower to form close relationships than Americans. I returned to Paris, to the epicenter of Craniofacial Surgery at Hopital Foch and Clinique Belvedere at least 1 or 2 times a year for the next 25 years and went to see Tessier operate in a number of American cities: Dallas, Boston. Los Angeles, Louisville, Kansas City, Houston, Charlotte, Campinas Brazil, and others. I became his go-to guy; any request would be referred to me.
Toward the last decade of our relationship, I would stay in his guest bedroom when in Paris. Weeks were spent going through his records to find finished cases which I made into a large PowerPoint presentation. This was shown at the 2006 meeting in London, “Honoris Causa.” He stayed with me when in Miami. I stayed several times at his family home in Hèric, a suburb of Nantes.
What did I learn from Paul Tessier?
First of all, it was an experience of my lifetime to get to know the man well. He was a character from another century, a cigar-smoking elephant hunter whose hero was Ambroise Paré. I was the Boswell for his Samuel Johnson, following the great man around and recording his wisdom for posterity. To see him examine a patient, record his thoughts in his notes, and develop a long-term plan was the best teaching. He always started at the top of the head, working down, including the hands. He had a profound knowledge of anatomy, and the drawings he had done by Francine Gourdin depicted the bony pathology with precision.
In surgery, he was not fast, but there was no wasted motion, and his scrub nurse Elizabeth Hecht always knew what instrument would be needed next. It was astounding to see him do 10 to 15 cases a day, including Saturday. That would be impossible in any American teaching hospital. Many of the instruments he used he had had made, and the osteotomes and rugines were always sharp. Here was a completely new kind of Plastic Surgery; in the US it was a soft tissue specialty; here it was bone: how to cut it and stabilize it, how to skillfully take bone grafts from hip, rib, and later the calvarium.
I had few original ideas, but I published many of Dr. Tessier’s contributions, of course with attribution. These publications I think were responsible for my academic success: President of ASMS, Founding Member and President of ISCFS, President of the Rhinoplasty Society. I owe my career to Paul Tessier.