George Zuidema, M.D., who transformed and modernized the Department of Surgery at Johns Hopkins during a 20-year tenure as its head, then returned to his native Michigan to revitalize the state university’s then troubled medical center, died of aplastic anemia July 6, 2020, in his hometown of Holland, Michigan. He was 92.

Beginning in 1964, Dr. Zuidema devised an innovative re-structuring of the Johns Hopkins surgery department in response to the intensifying pace of surgical specialization. His initiative led to the establishment of separate departments for neurosurgery, orthopaedics, otolaryngology, urology and general surgery, which has divisions for such specialties as cardiac surgery, pediatric surgery, gastrointestinal surgery and transplant surgery.

He also revised the residency program and enlarged the full-time staff by developing a professional fee program, ensuring the department’s growth and financial stability while maintaining good relations with its vitally important part-time staff.

John Cameron, M.D., who succeeded Dr. Zuidema as director of the Department of Surgery in 1984, says what still astounds him is that “George made radical changes without anybody hardly noticing.”

Dr. Cameron adds that Dr. Zuidema was “not only a very good surgeon, an excellent teacher and researcher, but even more importantly, an outstanding human being who set an example for the rest of us to live our lives by.”

Recruited in 1984 to return to Michigan as vice provost for medical affairs and professor of surgery at the University of Michigan — Ann Arbor, he settled a long-standing feud between the medical center and its teaching hospital, helped launch a successful, university run health maintenance organization, founded new centers for cancer, geriatrics and substance abuse, and oversaw a billion-dollar rebuilding of the medical center.

'Appointment caused a firestorm'

A determinedly low-profile but tireless leader — with a style a writer once termed “stealth hyperactivity” — Dr. Zuidema was a 1953 graduate of the Johns Hopkins medical school and was appointed in 1964 to succeed the legendary Alfred Blalock, M.D., co-creator of the famous 1944 “blue baby” operation that launched cardiac surgery. His appointment was a choice that initially caused a firestorm in the academic surgery community, not just at Johns Hopkins but across the country.

Dr. Blalock made it known publicly that he vehemently opposed Dr. Zuidema’s appointment, as did many top surgeons throughout the nation who had studied under Dr. Blalock.

As Dr. Zuidema wryly observed in a 1995 interview, he had antagonized some Johns Hopkins surgeons after obtaining his medical degree because he “jumped ship” and did not seek to do his postgraduate training under Dr. Blalock. Instead, he went to Massachusetts General Hospital for his internship and residency. This did not endear him to Dr. Blalock or those who had been his protégés, become full professors and headed surgery departments elsewhere.

Dr. Zuidema was far from unaccomplished, despite being just 36 years old and having a lower academic rank. By 1964, he was renowned for his originality and productivity as a researcher, having written more than 200 medical journal articles. He also received important scholarships and awards.

Richard Ross, M.D. (1924–2015), who headed cardiology during the uproar and was dean of the Johns Hopkins medical school from 1975 to 1990, said stepping into Dr. Blalock’s shoes “was sort of like succeeding God.”

“Blalock alumni were in positions of power all over the country. They all felt that one of them should have gotten the job, and they made it pretty tough for George. But … he not only survived, but indeed, thrived on it,” Dr. Ross said in a 2009 interview.

'A keen judge of surgical talent'

Although he admitted 30 years later that his first year as head of the Johns Hopkins surgery department was “kind of crazy,” the then boyish looking Dr. Zuidema quietly overcame the objections by demonstrating his brilliant, insightful skills as an imaginative administrator and a keen judge of surgical talent. Among those he recruited to head the new departments and divisions included such future Johns Hopkins leaders as Donlin Long, first head of the neurosurgery department; Patrick Walsh, head of urology; cardiac surgeon Bruce Reitz, a key figure in Johns Hopkins’ first multiple-donor transplant operation; Lee Riley, a leader in orthopaedics; and otolaryngologist and school of medicine dean Michael Johns.

During his years at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Zuidema also was chair of one of the most ambitious projects in medical literature: the three-volume “Study on Surgical Services for the United States.” He enlisted hundreds of surgeons to contribute to what became a five-year undertaking. He also founded the Baltimore Academy of Surgery “to get the academic people and the leading clinical surgeons in the community together,” he explained in 1995. Its main goal was to minimize “town/gown misunderstandings.”

Dr. Zuidema’s success at Johns Hopkins led medical schools elsewhere — The University of Arizona, Chicago and Ohio State University, among others — to recruit him. He said no to all of them.

“Hopkins is a place that gets in your blood, is unique in terms of collegiality, mutual respect, the ability to work with a lot of gifted people. It is not easy to leave that,” Dr. Zuidema said in 1995.

Yet, when he received an inquiry from his home state — the offer by the University of Michigan to return there after 20 years— he decided to take it on.

“The job was one I had to invent and define, 100%,” he recalled a decade later. A future president of the university, James Duderstadt, Ph.D., M.S., told a reporter for Johns Hopkins Medical News in 1995 that Dr. Zuidema proved to be “primarily a team builder who could get things done in great part because of his enormous integrity — he is a fundamentally honest and decent man.”

Dr. Zuidema’s accomplishments at Michigan inspired its often fractious regents to agree unanimously to establish the $1.2 million George D. Zuidema Professorship of Surgery.

An early interest in science and helping people

Dr. Zuidema was born March 28, 1928, in a small western Michigan town where most of the residents were of Dutch descent, as was his family. His interest in medicine was solidified when he was 12 and saw a family physician promptly cure his sister’s fiancé of a dangerous strep throat with a new wonder drug called sulfanilamide.

“I liked science and I liked helping people,” he told an interviewer in 1994. “The only career I could think of that combined the two was medicine.”

Extremely bright, he sailed through his hometown’s small Hope College in three years and graduated in 1949, then won four scholarships that enabled him to attend Johns Hopkins’ medical school — for which his father, a city engineer, was willing to re-mortgage the family home to finance. During the summer, Dr. Zuidema returned to Holland to earn money for medical school by digging ditches.

His postgraduate training was interrupted by two years of service in the U.S. Air Force. Stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, he conducted research in physiology that would become important to development of the American space program.

“I ran the human centrifuge and actually had my picture in National Geographic wearing one of those darn pressure suits,” he recalled decades later. He subsequently became one of only a dozen members of NASA’s Science and Technology Committee for Manned Space Flight.

In 1960, he was recruited to become an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Michigan. He soon began producing major research papers and was swiftly promoted. Within only four years, he was chosen to succeed Dr. Blalock at Johns Hopkins.

A surgeon and scientist, Dr. Zuidema also was a savvy negotiator, adept at the skillful use of academic levers. In a 1995 interview, he described how he finessed the creation of Johns Hopkins’ kidney transplant program.

“We had a terrible time convincing the nephrologist,” Dr. Zuidema recalled. “Finally, he said, Well, ‘I just can’t get the money for an artificial kidney.’ I said, ‘How much is an artificial kidney? Do I understand that if I can get $30,000, we’re in business?’ He said, ‘That’s exactly right.’

“Well, I had a patient who had given me $10,000 to do some good thing. So I went to the dean and said, ‘Look. If I can raise $10,000 and got $10,000 from the [Johns Hopkins] Hospital, will you give me 10?’

“He said, ‘Oh yeah — good idea.’ So then I went to the hospital, told them I had raised $20,000 … and we had a transplant program!”

An avid boatman, Dr. Zuidema enjoyed plying Michigan’s Elk Lake, 200 miles north of Ann Arbor, in his 38-foot trawler named Gilead. He was adventurous enough to plan a cruise for his entire family from Florida up through the Chesapeake Bay and back again.

Dr. Zuidema’s wife of 65 years, Joan Houtman Zuidema, died in 2018. Their prematurely born son, Michael, died three days after his birth in 1959. Dr. Zuidema is survived by four children: Karen Voter, David Zuidema, Nancy Radcliffe and Sarah Kohl, 10 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

A private family graveside service will be held at Pilgrim Home Cemetery in Michigan. No visitation is scheduled. A memorial service will be held at a later date.