Dr. Arthur K. Steffee, one of the pioneers of modern spine and neurosurgery, now in his 88th year, lives on a mountaintop roughly 35 miles south of his birthplace in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and 126 miles east of where he made his mark at, first the Cleveland Clinic, then St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital and, finally, at the company he founded and later sold to DePuy Corporation, AcroMed.
Looking across the verdant valley, the Allegheny River far below, winding its way around the hills, Dr. Steffee’s compound is as close to heaven as one can imagine in this historic corner of Pennsylvania.
OTW made the pilgrimage to Dr. Steffee’s mountain in order to interview him for our History of Modern Spine Surgery project. We spoke with Dr. Steffee for more than half a day, recording nearly 3-1/2 hours of remembrances.
Over the years, Dr. Steffee circumnavigated the globe, by his counting, five times—teaching, lecturing and training a generation of spine and neurosurgeons. And the company he founded, which was the first spinal implant manufacturer in the United States, is now a division of the largest medical company in the world, Johnson & Johnson.
For the son of a teacher and bank teller, it’s been a remarkable climb to top of the mountain.
The Kid From Oil City
When Art Steffee was born in 1934, his hometown, Oil City, had a population 22,000. Today it is half that. In 1859, in nearby Titusville, Edwin L. Drake drilled the first commercially successful oil well in the United States. Oil City soon became the center of the first great oil boom.
About two weeks before he was born on August 16, 1934, Eddie Hodgkinson, the new daughter of Cecil B. Hodgkinson, M.D. was also born in the same hospital. But, as Steffee recalls, “In those days, especially doctors’ wives, tended to stay in the hospital a little longer than usual. I met my wife in the room next door to me when I was born.”
Art and Eddie became boyfriend and girlfriend in the 9th grade (“The only girlfriend I ever had”) and married in their senior year of college.
Eddie’s father, it turns out, was one of George Crile’s staff members. Crile, along with Frank Buntz, M.D. and William Lower, M.D., founded the Cleveland Clinic. Their Lakeside Division of the University Hospital in Cleveland was an integral part of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I and operated the hospital in Rouen, France, during the war. Crile’s lab technician in that hospital was Cecil B. Hodgkinson—Art Steffee’s future father-in-law.
When World War I ended, Dr. Crile told Hodgkinson that he should become a doctor. Cecil said, “I was born in Canada, and I don’t have any money.” So, George Crile paid for Hodgkinson’s medical education at the University of Indiana. Upon graduating, Hodgkinson took an internship at St. Vincent’s Charity hospital, which was the oldest and best hospital at the time in Cleveland.
Later, Hodgkinson joined Crile, Buntz, and Lower at the Cleveland Clinic and was among the first group of residents or fellows to graduate from that now legendary institution.
Hodgkinson eventually set up a practice in Oil City and in the early 1950’s became Art Steffee’s father-in law. Steffee was already thinking about medical school when he married Eddie.
“People ask me, why did you go to medical school? In fact, my mother told me and my brother Bill, ‘you have to go to medical school’. And I knew how to follow directions.”
“But you know my parents couldn’t afford to send us to school. I owe my medical education to a dentist in Oil City,” recalls Steffee, “He coughed up the cash for both my brother and me to go to medical school. When it was all said and done and over with, I paid it back actually. But times were different. You know, how much tuition was at McGill? $740 for Americans. $500 if you were Canadian. For the full year.”
Steffee’s father-in-law, who was born in Canada, insisted he attend McGill University. “I was accepted at Jefferson in Philadelphia. But he said, ‘No, you’re going to McGill.’ I applied there and got in.”
Steffee was the oldest of three children. “My mother was a schoolteacher. My father was a teller in the bank. My dad started in the bank the day he graduated from high school. And he stayed in that till he retired in Oil City.” His brother, Bill went to University of Pennsylvania medical school, later earned a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, taught at Boston University, joined Steffee at Charity Hospital as Chief of Surgery, and helped, eventually, to found AcroMed. Both Bill and Art Steffee were at Cleveland’s Charity hospital for about 10 years.
Steffee’s sister attended Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, earned a degree in interior decorating and spent most of her life in Chicago, where she met her husband and worked for Sears Roebuck.
“I do things because I can.”
“I guess, maybe, I’m a little bit impatient about things. I don’t wait for somebody else to do something. I sort of like the challenge.”
And, upon reflection, Steffee acknowledges that his ability to create and build probably ran in his family.
“My grandfather, on my father’s side was quite an inventor. I remember watching my grandfather take an old Hoover sweeper—take the whole thing apart, leaving the motor on the end of the long stick, fashioning a blade, putting it on four wheels—and creating a rotary lawnmower. That was before rotary lawnmowers were even invented. My grandfather then detached the wheels and use that converted Hoover vacuum to trim hedges. When my grandfather built his house in 1903, he installed central vacuuming, cleaning in every room, with a gas engine in the basement.”
Art Steffee still lives a life of incessant forward motion. He came into his career at the very moment when modern orthopedic and spine care was emerging. Every new idea—Charnley, Harrington—triggered, in Steffee, flashes of inspiration—followed by a beeline to a lab. Any lab.
“I was fortunate enough to come along right when total joints started,” recalls Steffee. “Do you remember the ring total hip? It preceded all the rest. It was a screw, a metal socket with a long thread and you screwed it up inside the iliac post. You put the femoral part in just like you would for Moore prosthesis—Austin Moore. I made several attempts at a finger joint. Initially I used a chimpanzee hand to test designs. I remember going to the Delta primate center in Covington, Louisiana, on my own time and my own money and did a series of cases putting the finger joints in chimpanzees. The only problem with them was the chimpanzees also walk on their knuckles.”
Steffee, who was excited about the explosion of articulating prosthetics for hip, knee, fingers, shoulder and more, was, in his words, “teased” to go a country hospital and set up an arthroplasty practice and became one of Richard Corporation’s best known and most productive surgeon champions. It was there that he met Patricia Bishop—“Best scrub nurse who ever walked”—who would follow Steffee back to Charity and be with him for the remainder of her life.
Charity wanted Steffee back.
Cleveland, in those years, was a hotbed of cardiovascular innovation. Charity was one of the places where the original pump oxygenator machine was invented. The surgeon inventor of that oxygenator retired, and his lab was now without a leader.
“Charity hospital had closed it down because Bud had retired. They offered Bud’s lab to me. They said ‘You can have it. You can have the whole thing. We’ll put in whatever you want. We put an Instron machine in for testing.’ Charity did everything. I had a whole crew of people working.”
The way to Steffee’s heart was to give him tools. Machines. A lab. A workshop.
The “jealous mistress” of medicine combined with Steffee’s ability to fabricate solutions to clinical problems led to his leaving the Charity lab (which became better known as the Cleveland Research Institute, the home for a talented corps of engineers led by Jim Moran, Terry Stahurski, the remarkable Frank Janson and its immensely consequential and talented director, Seth Greenwald) to found AcroMed.
Steffee Today
Arthur Steffee’s contribution to modern spine surgery is incalculable. Surgeons around the world. Asia, Latin America, Australia, Europe and North America—learned the modern practice of spine surgery from him. They, in turn, trained other surgeons and collectively, restored millions of patients to productive lives.
Every time we write an article about Dr. Steffee, we get letters from former patients praising his care, skill and, most of all, heart.
Today, Dr. Steffee doesn’t think very much about his success. Certain patients, one’s he was unable to help, haunt him. And he has had more than his fair share of personal loss.
In 1961, fresh from McGill medical school in Canada, where his sons David and Michael were born, he and Eddie bought a house in South Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland. Dr. Steffee was an intern at Cleveland Clinic. He was working the overnight shift on January 2, 1961, when a fire started in or near the studio couch of their home around 3am. Smoke from the blaze filled the home’s ventilation system. The cause of the fire was never discovered. Eddie, 26, David, 5, Michael 2 and John, 3 weeks old, perished.
How Dr. Steffee recovered, I can not imagine. He would later marry Patricia, his scrub nurse and together they would build a life and marriage which flourished for more than 25 years. Patricia passed about four years ago. Today, Dr. Steffee is married to the delightful Marybeth Steffee.
At 88 years old, Dr. Steffee’s mobility has diminished but his drive and creativity remain in full force.
Art Steffee has remolded the top of his mountain—restoring a magnificent stone home, landscaping, literally, the top of a mountain, and his jaw dropping piece de resistance, a guest mansion unlike any I ever seen.
And he has, of course, a mighty impressive set of earth moving equipment and a workshop par excellence.
Here are a few photos of Art Steffee’s mountain compound.
Left: Dr. Arthur Steffee and Marybeth Steffee / Right: The rock wall that Art Steffee designed and built.
Left: Dr. Steffee tools around his property in a 4-wheel drive, open window, stick shift vehicle. / Right: The rock pool and waterfall that Steffee built.
Left: Dr. Steffee’s incredible guest house, which is still under construction. / Right: Steffee salvaged a tree, installed it in the guest house, and then build a circular staircase around it. Note tree bark on the edges of each step.
Left: Steffee salvaged a stained glass window and doors from a local church. They form the dramatic entrance between foyer and great hall. / Right: The roof beams are roughhewn and still have tree bark on them.
Left: Grappling hook on pulleys that Steffee invented for grasping and lifting heavy, bulky objects to the 2nd floor. / Right: Roughhewn tree branch, wire suspended, on a swivel joint, balanced to swing easily over the room.
