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

Mamiya,Richard

(b.1925) Sansei, cardiovascular surgeon.

Taking pride in children’s surgery

I’m known as a coronary heart surgeon, but I take more pride and interest in children’s surgery. The children’s surgery is so much different than the coronary bypass surgery. They’re all different. The anomalies are all different. And I take pride in the fact that I have easily the world’s longest survivor in correcting a condition called Transposition of the Great Vessel, where a child is born with the vessels turned around. This is a strapping Hawaiian boy, who is about 280 pounds, I think, who is about 30 years old now and he tells me he can bench-press 300 pounds. I know he’s the longest because the doctors here sent him to Boston when he was about 18 years old because they didn’t know how to manage it. And the first thing Boston came back was, “Where did you find this patient?” because they haven’t seen one that was corrected.

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)