Leffall, LaSalle Doheny Jr.

Impact on the world

Became the first African American elected president of the American Cancer Society in 1978 and of the American College of Surgeons in 1995, using both platforms to launch national initiatives specifically addressing cancer disparities between Black and white Americans, including the organization's first conference dedicated to cancer among Black Americans in 1979; he chaired Howard University's Department of Surgery for 25 years, training nearly 300 general surgery residents and roughly 6,000 medical students over a 50-year teaching career, and was later appointed by President George W. Bush and reappointed by President Barack Obama to chair the President's Cancer Panel, advising the White House directly on national cancer policy and health disparities from 2002 to 2011.

Life & background

Born in Tallahassee, Florida in 1930 and raised in nearby Quincy during strict legal segregation, Leffall later recalled the specific, early experiences that taught him the boundaries of Jim Crow, including being confined to the balcony of the local movie theater and being told as young as three or four years old that certain downtown establishments were simply off-limits, with no explanation beyond his mother's acknowledgment that the rule was wrong but unavoidable. The son of two educators who emphasized academic achievement as a path past those barriers, he graduated from high school at 15, completed his undergraduate degree at the historically Black Florida A&M College in just three years, and applied to both Meharry Medical College and Howard University's medical school; when neither responded promptly, Florida A&M's president personally intervened with Howard's leadership to secure his and a classmate's admission, and Leffall went on to graduate first in his 1952 class. At Howard, he studied directly under Charles R. Drew, already profiled in this collection for his pioneering blood plasma and transfusion research, alongside other formative mentors including anatomist Montague Cobb; after completing a surgical oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and a year as chief of general surgery at a U.S. Army hospital in Munich, he returned to Howard's faculty in 1962, rising to chair its Department of Surgery by 1970, a position he held for the next quarter-century while becoming, in 1992, the first holder of Howard's endowed Charles R. Drew Professorship in Surgery, named for his own mentor. Specializing in colon, rectal, breast, and head and neck cancers, he authored more than 150 articles and book chapters on surgical oncology, served as board chair of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation across two separate terms, and continued performing surgery until shortly before turning 76, completing his final operation alongside a former student who later became Howard University's own president; he published a memoir, 'No Boundaries: A Cancer Surgeon's Odyssey,' in 2005. He stopped actively practicing medicine in 2013 but continued teaching and consulting with Howard colleagues, arriving each morning at six o'clock, until his death from cancer in 2019 at age 89; multiple institutions, including a Houston hospital and his own hometown's hospital surgical wing, have since named honors and awards after him.

Sources

1. National Library of Medicine (Opening Doors exhibit); Washington Post obituary; BlackPast.org; American College of Surgeons official history; American Cancer Society press room