Sometime in these next few months, before or after you read this, Jim Youker will step out of the chairmanship of radiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCOW) in Milwaukee. It was a mere 42 years ago when he started as chairman and now as long as it takes for the medical school to recruit his successor.
At least for now, most of us have a common assumption that Jim has the longest tenure of any academic radiology chairman in this country. Somebody may know better. There is a question about the longevity of Ben Orndorf, the Chicago pioneer radiologist, who was the founding chairman at Loyola University, or Lawrence Reynolds, who was chairman at Wayne State University in Detroit. Both of them were gentlemen professors who spent part of their time managing private practices. But Jim Youker was a full-time academic in his Milwaukee years and in most of his career before he arrived in MCOW in 1968.
Dr. Youker was born in Cooperstown and raised in Buffalo, NY. He attended college at Colgate University. While he was an undergraduate, he suffered a ruptured appendix. The jolt and the successful treatment led him to think about a career in medicine, rather than in chemistry. So he switched to pre-med and was accepted at the University of Buffalo School of Medicine. With his experience in the snow belt, he went on to an internship at the University of Minnesota. That was where he got his interest in radiology, in the department led by Leo Rigler, another of the American radiology pioneers and the founding chairman at Minnesota.
After Jim Youker’s first year of residency, he was drafted into the Navy Medical Corps under the Berry plan and assigned to a medical facility in Corpus Christi, TX. A year and a half later, he was discharged. He spent 6 months studying pathology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and then returned to the University of Minnesota. That was the year after Dr. Rigler resigned and moved to California. Harold Peterson, a Harvard-trained neuroradiologist, became the Minnesota chairman and mentor to the residents. Dr. Youker finished his residency in 1960 and passed the American Board of Radiology certification examination the same year.
His first career move was back to Corpus Christi in a practice group with several other docs he had consulted with in his navy career. Shortly afterward, he volunteered for Project Hope, a medical effort to carry health care to various countries with a team on a converted Navy hospital ship. He spent 4 months there and parted after a stay in Indonesia.
He joined Dick Lester, then the chief of radiology at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) in Richmond as an assistant professor. MCV had a small radiology staff covering its two affiliate hospitals. The decade of the 1960s was the time when Swedish radiologists were developing many of the angiographic procedures and American radiologists, including Jim Youker, made pilgrimages to Stockholm or Lund to learn catheter techniques. Jim Youker spent his time at the Malmo Hospital, a teaching center of Lund University, where the international leader of radiology, Ollie Olsen, was the chief of the medical school department of radiology. His mentor on angiography at Malmo was Solve Welin, one of the radiologists who experimented with double contrast studies.
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