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.

Starting a medical program in Hawai‘i

When the rumblings in Hawai‘i got started, and they got going on a two-year program, then they chose a dean. The dean was Windsor Cutting from Stanford and, you know, he was big time. So he asked me to be the professor chairman of surgery and I turned it down the first time because I could see what UW [University of Washington] faced and I could see what the problems we were going to have here. But he came after me. He said, “No, we’re going to be a four-year medical school and we’re going to have a hospital.” I said, “Where are you going to get a hospital?” He said, “I’m going to make Liai Hospital, which was a tuberculosis center into an acute care hospital.” So I joined him on the faculty and we started a medical school. We started a two-year medical school, went on to a four-year. But I could see we were not going to have a hospital. So then I found more fun doing cardiac surgery. So that’s how I started.

Hawai'i medical schools medicine United States

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)