KU School of Medicine-Wichita

12 George Dyck First Department of Psychiatry Chair When George Dyck, M.D., became first chair of the Department of Psychiatry in June 1973, he was just one of two full-time faculty in the oce. The other, Gayle Stephens, soon moved to Alabama — "I barely got to know him," said Dyck. Dyck and the school's new base were in Wichita State University's Fairmount Towers, a dormitory they awkwardly shared with WSU students. The sign outside read: "WSU Branch University of Kansas School of Medicine." The first team of faculty had been assembled in 1973, ahead of the arrival of the first class in January 1974, coming then because KU was experimenting with a compressed three-year program. "There was tremendous pressure to get physicians out into the rural communities, to train more physicians, so we were very conscious of that," Dyck said. Richard Guthrie, M.D., head of pediatrics, possessed the academic background other department chairs lacked. Dyck remembers feeling like an "impostor" at first on that front. Other department heads, part-timers, came from busy Wichita practices: Ernie Crow, internal medicine; George Farha, surgery; Daniel Roberts, obstetrics/gynecology. Dyck, who did his residency at Menninger's in Topeka, had practiced at Prairie View in Newton but sought a new challenge that ended up being KU School of Medicine-Wichita. Getting his program up and running proved challenging. Dyck visited other cities using the community training model and recruited local psychiatrists to teach students in their clinics. "Psychiatry had the reputation of being somewhat removed from medicine," Dyck said. "Cramer Reed was very concerned about being relevant to the rest of medicine. Gayle Stephens really had that idea as well, of integrating psychiatry or the concepts. It's maybe a little dicult now to realize how skeptical general medicine was about psychiatry." Dyck would take students to the ER at night to observe what they might see in their practices. That cut on a hand could, he said, be a suicide attempt, and students should be aware of it and patients' underlying psychological issues. Dyck returned to Prairie View in 1980. He recalls his KUSM-W years as somewhat turbulent, with faculty dicult to hire and the school fighting for its place. But the hands-on training was a hit: "It turned out to be quite popular. The students rated the clinic experience very highly. They were being taught by actual clinicians, not residents, the later of which was usually the case in a big medical center." Rural Health Education & Services is established to help address health care needs in rural Kansas. 1990 FIRST DEPARTMENT CHAIRS Robert H. Robinson, M.D. ...................................................................................Anesthesiology G. Gayle Stephens, M.D. ..................................................................................... Family Practice Ernie Crow, M.D. ................................................................................................ Internal Medicine Daniel Roberts, M.D. . ........................................................................Obstetrics & Gynecology Richard Guthrie, M.D. .....................................................................................................Pediatrics S. Edwards Dismuke, M.D. ........................................................................Preventive Medicine George Dyck, M.D. ..........................................................................................................Psychiatry Si Hershorn, M.D. ............................................................................................................. Radiology George Farha, M.D. ............................................................................ Surgery & Orthopaedics Established the Kansas Bridging Plan, a loan-forgiveness program for primary care and psychiatry residents to encourage physicians to practice in Kansas upon completion of their residency training. 1991 Joseph Meek, M.D., becomes fourth dean. 1991

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