How the Wound Healing Society began

The history of an innovation and its implementation often involves several individuals with similar ideas at similar times. So was the birth of the Wound Healing Society. Many factors drove the formation of our Society, including the founders, major changes in our scientific knowledge, and changing concepts of industry in the market for wound healing products. The time had come, and so it was only natural that the thought of forming a Wound Healing Society was more than a fleeting idea in the minds of many wound healing investigators. Therefore, credit for the birth of the Society belongs to many. In the early 1950s and into the late 1970s, only a handful of clinicians and basic scientists were interested in the field. They included Stanley Levenson, J. Engelbert Dunphy, Erle E. Peacock Jr., John Schilling, Jerry Gross, David Jackson, Bengt Zederfeldt, and Thomas Gibson. Names such as Artz, Moncrief, Charlie Baxter, and Basil Pruitt revolutionized the care of burn wounds. The next generation saw the likes of Tom Hunt, George Martin, Russell Ross, and Karl Piez, while the wound healing careers of Kel Cohen, Bob Diegelmann, Paul Ehrlich, Bill Eaglstein, Mike Caldwell, Adrian Barbul, and Marty Robson matured in the 1970s. Great support in these early days came from industry with thoughtful pioneers such as David Marshall, Walton Van Winkle, and Carlos Blanco. In addition, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences played a role, with vigorous support from Emily Black and Lee Van Lentin. There are many great leaders who followed and made the Society the success it is today, who of course did not participate in its creation. Those who carried the torch all have our deepest respect and admiration. Similar to every article that lists names, we apologize in advance for those omitted inadvertently. Each decade had shown new interest and excitement among clinicians—especially surgeons and dermatologists, and an increasing number of basic scientists. In the early days, there was a clear gap between basic scientists and clinicians. To learn the basics essential for understanding the processes of tissue repair, many clinicians attended the Gordon Research Conference on collagen. In the early 1970s, collagen was king when it came to wound healing. We thought scarring and nonhealing wound problems would be solved simply by controlling collagen metabolism. Our scientific tools were primitive by today’s standards and perhaps our thought processes were the same! The first wound healing text to become a classic was published in 1970 by Peacock and van Winkle. It remains a classic to this day. There were no conferences on wound healing per se until the Dunphy/ Hunt meeting in February 1968, which was later published and served as a major source of wound healing information for young investigators. This collection of papers, along with the Peacock and van Winkle text, gave many of us our first real understanding of contraction, collagen metabolism, inflammation, and a host of wound healing phenomena. In 1971, the late John Longacre assembled a stellar group of clinicians and basic scientists in Cincinnati, Ohio, and produced a monograph entitled The Ultrastructure of Collagen, which remains of value to this very day. In April 1974 there was an International Symposium on Wound Healing in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, with key addresses by Russell Ross, David Jackson, Albert Dorfman, and Mel Glimscher. During the 1980s, Tom Hunt, Eli Pines of Johnson and Johnson, Adrian Barbul, and Mike Caldwell were able to put together three International Symposium on Wound Healing meetings in Tarpon Springs, Florida. From the Division of Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, Department of Surgery and Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. Reprint requests: I. Kelman Cohen, MD, Division of Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery, Department of Surgery, Medical College of Virginia – V.C.U., P.O. Box 980154, Richmond, VA 23298-0154. Email: kecohen@hsc.vcu.edu. Copyright 2002 by the Wound Healing Society. ISSN: 1067-1927 $15.00 + 0