Interviews

1. Treating international and VIP patients

2. Innovation in heart surgery

3. Taking pride in children’s surgery

4. Former child patient turned professional volleyball player

5. Starting a medical program in Hawai‘i

Richard Mamiya

(b.1925) Sansei, cardiovascular surgeon.

Innovation in heart surgery

I enjoyed being in that area [heart surgery] where I could exercise that. In fact, I got some national recognition because what I did at one point was to bypass almost any vessel with disease in it. Now, we have this angioplasty – this balloon angioplasty – which is a much, much simpler procedure where they can pop the narrowed portion open. But before this came about, we had no way of controlling the process medically. No diet, no medication. So I would…the narrowing that was significant, was 70 percent or more, which interferes with blood flow. But there were many other vessels when I operated on, that had 30, 40, 50, 60 percent and I decided why not bypass all of them when we bypass for some significant? But certainly I had to do this without incurring any added risk in mobility or mortality. So this was the first thing that had to be proven. And when I analyzed about 4,000 of my cases, this was so. In fact, my mortality rate was better than the national average. The national average was about 2.0 and my mortality rate was .9 when my average bypass was about five per patient and the national average was about two per patient. So at that time, I thought I made a contribution to coronary bypass surgery.

medicine surgeries

Date: May 30, 2006

Location: Hawai‘i, US

Interviewer: Akemi Kikumura Yano

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Dr. Richard Tsuruo Mamiya is a Sansei born in 1925 in the Kalihi-Palama neighborhood of Honolulu, Hawai'i. The oldest of four sons, Dr. Mamiya is a highly regarded cardiovascular surgeon who attended St. Louis High School in Honolulu where he was a star athlete, playing varsity football, baseball, and basketball, eventually earning a football scholarship to the University of Hawaii. As an undergraduate, he was encouraged to go into medicine by a zoology teacher and ultimately received his medical training from St. Louis University Medical School in Missouri. After teaching medicine in Missouri, he and his family returned to Hawaii, where he served as one of the founders of the University of Hawai'i Medical School. He performed the first coronary bypass surgery in Hawaii in 1970 and made progress in the field of pediatric cardiac surgery in the days when it was still a growing specialty.

Though he officially retired from surgery in 1995, Dr. Mamiya continues his philanthropic work through two organizations he has founded. The Richard T. Mamiya Charitable Foundation is devoted to supporting humanitarian and charitable works across the state of Hawai‘i and the Mamiya Heritage Library is a comprehensive collection of local medical data, based in the Hawaiian Medical Library. (May 11, 2007)

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