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William Straus Fields was born in Baltimore, Maryland on August 18, 1913. He graduated from Harvard with his A.B. cum laude in 1934 and then with his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1938. He was a recipient of the Mary and Matthew E. Bartlett Scholarship there from 1935-1938. following graduation he was an intern in pathology at Nashville General Hospital and the Department of Pathology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine until 1939. From 1939-1940 he was an intern in medicine at the Children's Memorial Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He then served as the assistant resident in medicine at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal from 1940-1941. He served for five and a half months in neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute before joining the Royal Canadian Navy.

While serving the Royal Canadian Navy, William Fields held ranks from Surgeon-Lieutenant to Surgeon-Commander. He was part of the Naval Research Division doing wartime research at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Banting Institute at the University of Toronto from 1943-1945. From 1945-1946 he served as the Principal Medical Officer for the Naval Officer in Charge at the Port of Montreal. Following his service in the Royal Canadian Navy, he was the Rockefeller Fellow in Neuropsychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine and resident in Neurology at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri from 1946 to 1949.

He was appointed to Associate Professor of Neurology at Baylor College of Medicine in 1949 and he served until 1951. In 1951 he was promoted to Professor of Neurology and in 1959, he became Chairman of the Department of Neurology where he served until 1965. we served as a Professor of Neurology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas and then at The University of Texas Medical School in Houston where he ultimately became the Chairman of the Department of Neurology. He also held staff and consulting positions at many Texas and Houston-area hospitals.

During his career he served the Methodist Hospital, Jefferson Davis and Ben Taub Hospitals, Parkland Memorial Hospital and Presbyterian Hospital, St. Luke's Episcopal, and Texas Children's Hospitals and St. Joseph Hospital, St. Anthony Center and Hermann Hospital as a staff member. He also worked as a consultant for Hermann, St. Luke's Texas Children's, M.D. Anderson and Diagnostic Center Hospitals, the Veterans Administration, Wilford Hall AF Hospital, St. Paul Hospital and Baylor University Medical Center, and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute.

John Stirling Meyer was born February 24, 1924, in London, England. He earned a scholarship to the Kent School in Connecticut when he was 16, during World War II, which got him out of London. H earned his BS at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, a Master’s from the Montreal Neurological Institute, and an MD and CM from McGill University. He completed his training at Yale University and later earned additional degrees in neurology and psychiatry, neurophysiology, and neuropathology from Harvard.
Dr. Meyer became a US citizen (in 1952?) when he was needed for the Korean War. He was drafted by the Navy and sent to the Pacific, where he was put in charge of head injuries, first on hospital ships and then at the US-commandeered Yokosuka Hospital in Japan.
He returned to Harvard for a few years and then in 1957, when he was only 33, he became a founding professor and chairman of neurology at Wayne State University School of Medicine. At the time, he was the youngest person ever to hold the position as chair and professor of a medical department in the United States.
Dr. Meyer worked on the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke under both Kennedy and Johnson, and came to Houston to Baylor College of Medicine after catching the attention of Michael DeBakey. Dr. Meyer wrote or edited 30 textbooks and 930 articles. He retired from Baylor as a professor emeritus but was still working at United Neurology when he died on February 17, 2011. He is buried at St. John the Divine Episcopal Church Cemetery in Houston.

George John Ehni, MD was a neurosurgeon who practiced in Houston from 1949-1986. During 1959-1979 he was chairman of the division of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine. Born in 1914 in Pekin, Ill, Dr. Ehni was a 1939 graduate of Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. He served an internship at Cincinnati (Ohio) General Hospital (July 1939-1940) and a residency at the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, Minn (July 1940-1944). During World War II, Dr. Ehni served in the US Navy. In 1946 he moved to Temple and established the department of neurosurgery at Scott and White Clinic. He moved to Houston in 1949. Dr. Ehni was a past president of the Neurosurgical Society of America, the Southern Neurosurgical Society, and the International Society for Study of the Lumbar Spine. He died September 2, 1986 at the age of 72.

[Source: Obituary, Texas Medicine, January 1987, p.82]