Edward Van Liere and the Creation of the Modern WVU Medical Program

One of the founding fathers of medical education in West Virginia, Edward Van Liere’s impact on West Virginia University’s Medical School cannot be understated. As a member of the faculty for 45 years and the Dean of the Medical School for 25 years, Van Liere oversaw dramatic changes in the medical program, most notably the transformation into a four-year program and the establishment of a medical hospital. Indeed, without his capable leadership, it is possible that the Medical School would not have survived through the 1930s, let alone grown into the successful institution it has become today.

Edward Van Liere was born on October 30, 1894, the youngest of 12 children. Growing up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning his BA in 1916 and his MS in 1917. Completing his medical training at Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Harvard, Van Liere spent a year teaching at the University of South Dakota before accepting the position of Professor of Physiology at WVU in 1921.[1] Throughout his career, Van Liere taught a course on obstetrics (until 1960) and other basic physiology courses.[2] It was at WVU where Van Liere met Helen Kimmins (WVU Class of 1920). The couple married in 1923 and remained together until her death on April 1, 1929.[3] Shortly after, Van Liere remarried to Alice Hartley, a reporter for the Dominion-News, a local Morgantown newspaper. Alice, who met Van Liere while writing a story on the Medical School, was “rescued” by the professor before the students could take her to see the cadavers upon which they performed dissections.[4] The two married on November 10, 1930, and remained together until Van Liere’s death in 1979; Alice lived another seven years before passing on February 8, 1986. They had one daughter, Wilhelmena “Mimi” Van Liere, born April 5, 1933. Following in her father’s footsteps, Mimi became a teacher. Initially, she taught sixth grade and later taught at a junior college. Van Liere and Alice also tragically lost a child. This baby was born four months premature on September 9, 1941, and died shortly after birth. [5] 

Historians of the WVU Medical program have noted that Van Liere never regretted his decision to work in academia his entire career rather than in clinical practice.[6] Shortly after he began his career, Van Liere became a leading expert on research in hypoxia, becoming the first to broadly describe its effects on the body. Using low pressure chambers to test first on animals and later on student volunteers, he examined ways to preserve physiological functions in low oxygen environments.[7] This would become especially significant following the American entry into World War II, when Van Liere served as a consultant to the US military about aviation physiology to ensure the welfare of high-altitude pilots.[8] Van Liere was a frequent correspondent with General Harvey Armstrong, who became the Air Force’s surgeon general in 1949. Beginning in 1936 and continuing throughout Armstrong’s career, he corresponded with Van Liere on matters of aviation physiology. In 1948 Van Liere turned down a position at the Air University but did accept a part-time consultancy with the institution.[9] In addition to his research on hypoxia, Van Liere also examined gastric emptying. As Robert Hamilton (class of 1941) recalled, on Saturday mornings, student volunteers ate cold farina mixed with barium to “determine the effect of certain drugs on gastric emptying time.”[10]

While his true passion was research, Van Liere’s biggest legacy was in his role as the Dean of the Medical School. After a 1934 inspection by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the AAMC revoked WVU’s accreditation, citing its “influence by partisan politics,” large student body, small faculty cohort, low budget, and “inadequate” facilities.[11] Van Liere, who became acting dean of the Medical School during this crisis, reorganized the program by shrinking classes to a maximum of thirty accepted students, emphasizing clinical training, hiring qualified faculty, and improving the Medical Building and Library.[12] Van Liere also established strict qualifications for admission to the Medical School: the approval of both the Dean and an Entrance Committee of at least three other faculty members, three years of pre-medical study with an average grade of C, and a satisfactory score on a pre-medical aptitude test (presumably the MCAT, a standardized exam for medical students that was created in 1928 as a response to the high dropout rate of medical students throughout the 1920s, but this document does not specifically state the name of the exam).[13] By 1937, WVU’s Medical Program had regained its full membership within the AAMC, who was pleased with the improvements.[14] In addition to the reforms that strengthened the academic quality of the Medical School, Van Liere also implemented changes to emphasize a commitment of service to the state of West Virginia. Except for the WWII period, when the Medical School participated in a national program to quickly train military doctors, only in-state students were accepted into the Medical School from 1939 to September 1962. This focus on educating West Virginians was intended to improve and increase healthcare across the state, particularly in rural areas where quality medical care was sparse.[15]

Following the reaccreditation of the Medical School, Van Liere’s most significant accomplishment as dean was creating a four-year medical program at WVU. Almost immediately after the program’s reaccreditation, Van Liere urged WVU President Chauncey Boucher to create the four-year school to alleviate the difficulties of placing students in the third year of courses at other medical institutions. [16] This desire, however, was interrupted by wartime necessities, and it would not be until after the end of WWII that the Medical School took strides to becoming a complete program. In 1943, Van Liere arranged an agreement with the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) where 17-20 WVU medical students per year were accepted to MCV for their final two years, greatly relieving the issue of placement after students’ second year. This arrangement continued for twenty years and 330 physicians who began their education at WVU earned an MD degree at MCV. [17]

With the post-WWII increase of applicants, however, it became evident that the program needed a major transformation. In 1948, WVU President Irvin Stewart argued for a new medical school facility to accommodate the larger number of qualified applicants. The Board of Governors followed shortly after and established a committee to study the issue of the establishment of a four-year medical and dentistry school.[18] An editorial in the April 1, 1950, issue of the Morgantown Post noted the necessity of the new building. This editorial claimed that it was “fairly certain” the American Medical Association (AMA) Council on Medical Education and Hospitals would not renew the class A rating of the two-year Medical School unless it received a new building and claimed that it was “utterly imprudent” to spend money on a new facility unless it could also eventually accommodate a four-year program.[19]

Most significantly, however, this editorial argued that the decision of the location of the four-year school had to be made soon, referencing the sectionalist controversy over location that had derailed legislation for a four-year medical program in 1949. During the 49th Legislature in 1949, several bills to create a school in Charleston were introduced but defeated by delegates from Monongalia County, who supported placing the hospital on the WVU Campus in Morgantown.[20] Needless to say, in their 1950 editorial, the Post strongly advocated for Morgantown as the site of the future hospital.

The controversy of location complicated itself in 1951 with the consideration of Huntington as a third possible site. In 1931, a local Huntington paper published an editorial supporting a four-year medical school in that city. While, of course, the development of a four-year program remained stagnant between 1931 and the early 1950s, Cabell County still encouraged Huntington for consideration. MCV President W.T. Sanger endorsed Huntington as a way to overcome the Morgantown-Charleston debate, lending serious credence to this third option as a location for the new program. Sanger’s opinion was supported by Dr. Basil C. MacLean, the director of the Strong Memorial Hospital at the University of Rochester and Dr. O.W. Hyman, the administrator of the University of Tennessee’s Medical Center in Memphis. These three consultants argued that Huntington had several existing hospitals, and thus, resources for supplementary clinical teaching. Furthermore, bonds had already been authorized to construct a new hospital (Cabell-Huntington Hospital), which they noted could be a clinical center of the medical school. Huntington also had specialists already available to teach students. Finally, Huntington was located in a population center and the site of Marshall College, allowing for a large patient base and an existing academic base. These arguments were, indeed, incredibly persuasive, and in 1975, partially based on these reasons, the WV Legislature approved the creation of the Marshall School of Medicine (now the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine).[21]

As a way to overcome the deadlock over location, the 51st Legislature decided to give Governor Okey Patteson the power to decide the location, ending the controversy in the legislative body. Shortly after signing the bill in late 1951, he announced the new hospital would be located in Morgantown, ending the debate about its location once and for all. According to Dr. William A. Neal, the author of Quiet Advocate, a biography of Van Liere, Patteson’s decision to place the Medical Center in Morgantown remained “contentious” for many years, showing that, despite the debate’s conclusion, the sectionalist tensions about the four-year program’s location remained a sore subject.[22]

In addition to the location of the Medical School, another difficulty faced by Van Liere and advocates for the four-year program was funding. In March of 1950, Van Liere, utilizing his connections within the medical community, invited Dean Wilburt C. Davison of Duke University’s Medical School and Dean Herman G. Weiskotten of Syracuse University’s Medical School to survey the costs and feasibility of a four-year medical program. The Dominion News reported on June 8 that the two doctors estimated that a new medical facility would cost about $10 million to build and about $1 million to operate. Despite this cost, however, the Dominion News noted that both doctors “insisted” that comprehensive medical and dental schools were needed.[23]

Patteson’s solution to this funding problem was the levying of a tax on soda pop, placing an additional penny on each half liter, an eighty-cent tax on each gallon of soft drink syrup, and an eighty-four-cent tax on each liter of syrup.[24] This tax was positively received by most WV bottlers, since they could raise the price of soda, but was opposed by out-of-state lobbyists for the beverage industry.[25] Despite this opposition, however, Patteson insisted on this tax, which was implemented on June 30,1951. In 2022, after 71 years, Senate Bill 533 to repeal the soda tax and shift funding for health education to an insurance tax instead was introduced. On March 30, 2022, Governor Jim Justice approved the bill. The soda tax will be repealed, effective July 1, 2024.[26]

With the support and encouragement of Governor Patteson and the funding of the hospital via the soda-pop tax, the legislature passed legislation in 1951 to authorize the expansion of the medical program and construction of a teaching hospital. It was this same bill that allowed Patteson to decide the location of the site.[27] In 1957, WVU constructed a new building for the basic sciences, and in 1960, the University Hospital opened. A year later, Volunteer Services was established to increase community outreach and support the hospital through the staffing of the gift ship, outpatient playroom, and providing reading materials for the patients, among many other things. This organization was led by Alice Van Liere until her retirement from 1973 after more than five thousand hours of service.[28]

With the larger facility, classes doubled in size, allowing for more students to be trained as physicians. Beginning in 1960, WVU’s Medical School offered a four-year medical program, establishing a comprehensive medical program that enabled students to remain in Morgantown to earn their M.D.[29] A February 18, 1960 memo marked the official discontinuation of the two-year program, stating that “With the beginning of the full four-year curriculum at the School of Medicine it appears that whatever purpose was served by this [two-year] degree has ceased to exist.”[30] In addition to the new four-year medical program, a Dental School and a Nursing School were created from scratch, and many qualified clinical faculty members in all of the new programs were hired by Van Liere.[31]

In addition to the reforms that strengthened the academic quality of the Medical School, Van Liere also implemented changes to emphasize a commitment of service to the state of West Virginia.

Van Liere retired from his administrative position at the end of 1960. After stepping down as dean, Van Liere also “gave very few lectures” to first-year medical students, opting to focus on research and writing instead of teaching introductory classes as he had earlier in his career.[32] After his 1966 retirement from teaching, the Medical School established the Van Liere Research Award for excellence in undergraduate research in his name.[33] Working with fellow professor emeritus Gideon Dodds, Van Liere worked on several histories of medical education in WVU, most notably History of Medical Education in West Virginia (1965), which largely traced the evolution of the WVU Medical School to that point. A popular story claims that Van Liere finished his final work, a history of the Department of Physiology, on the day of his passing. However, while this monograph was indeed finished shortly before his death, Neal noted in his biography of Van Liere that the exact timing was unknown. According to Neal, the account of Van Liere handing then-chair George A. Hedge a finished and autographed draft before leaving his office for the final time is simply “Medical School lore.[34]

In addition to his academic writing, Van Liere was well known around Morgantown for several of his hobbies. He loved old cars and was locally famous for his 1922 Packard Roadster (nicknamed “Thunderbolt” by his friends), which he drove into the 1940s. At the time of his 1979 death, Van Liere drove a “supersize” luxury car dating from the 1950s.[35] In addition to his affinity for vintage automobiles, Van Liere was also an avid fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. In addition to being a founding member of “The Scion of Four,” a Morgantown Sherlock Holmes organization created in 1952, Van Liere wrote a number of essays analyzing the medical nature of these detective stories, many of which were published in science journals.[36] For example, in 1966, Van Liere’s article, “Dr. John H. Watson and the Subclavian Steal,” which argued that Dr. Watson suffered from a blood clot in an artery, was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Van Liere utilized textual evidence to suggest that Subclavian Steal Syndrome, the effects of this blood clot, was caused by Watson’s wounds in Afghanistan, demonstrating both his medical acumen as well as his detailed knowledge of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Many of Van Liere’s essays were published in his 1959 book, A Doctor Enjoys Sherlock Holmes, which is available online.

Van Liere died on September 5, 1979, leaving behind a legacy of excellence in medical education. The Edward J. Van Liere Professorship in Physiology, created in his memory, continues his legacy of teaching, research, and publishing, and the WVU School of Medicine remains the premier medical education program in the state.[37] The schools of medicine, dentistry, and nursing that he established remain exceptional teaching, research, and service institutions, adhering to the same high standards of quality initially set by him. As Clark Sleeth, Van Liere’s former student, research assistant, faculty colleague, and successor as dean, said during his eulogy, Van Liere’s “influence in years ahead will continue to be felt by myriads who have never ever heard his name,” a fitting tribute to this leader of the medical education field in West Virginia.[38]

A statue of Dr. Van Liere is featured in a place of honor in the atrium of the Health Sciences Center, right next to the Pylons and the entrance of the William A. Neal Museum of the Health Sciences. This likeness, crafted by master sculptor and alumnus Burl Jones, DDS, was generously gifted by Dr. James and Karen Butler Caveney in honor of Karen’s Uncle Edward. In addition, a portrait of Van Liere painted in 1960 by Grace Dredge Reasoner hangs in the entry to the museum, by the doors to Okey Patteson auditorium. 

• Footnotes
• Works Referenced
• Secondary Sources