My fathers obituary, running this Sunday in the Chronicle: Mark Gorney, an internationally-known plastic surgeon and longtime resident of San Francisco and Napa, died Nov. 17 after suffering a stroke. He was 89. A past American Society of Plastic Surgery president who was passionate about patient protection and charity reconstructive work, Dr. Gorney was relentless in his defense of good medicine. The oldest child of Polish Jews who fled Warsaw shortly after World War 1, Dr. Gorney grew up with his parents and younger sister in Mexico City, where the family joined a multilingual community of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He first came to the United States as an undergraduate at Harvard; his American citizenship was granted when he enlisted in the U.S. Army, which helped put Dr. Gorney through medical school at the University of Chicago. By the time he was ready to work as an active duty physician, Dr. Gorney had enlisted in the Navy, and served as a medical officer during the Korean War. During most of his years as a surgeon, Dr. Gorney lived in San Francisco, where during a Navy stopover he had met his first wife, the late Elizabeth Majo Gorney. He was highly active in the plastic surgery departments of both St. Luke’s and St. Francis hospitals—at St. Francis, Dr. Gorney was chief of the plastic surgery residents’ training program for many years—and, while maintaining a private practice, also taught in the surgical programs at Stanford and the University of California at San Francisco. Dr. Gorney’s greatest professional satisfaction, though, came from his surgical trips abroad, during which he performed and taught facial, burn scar, and other kinds of reconstructions in countries that have little access to this kind of medical work. His specialties included cleft lips and cleft palates; repairing these birth defects brought him particular joy, he used to say, because they allowed children who had been outcasts to join society. As a bilingual surgeon, Dr. Gorney often conducted his charity surgical work in Latin America with surgeons he trained. But his destinations also included the Philippines, Burma, and—during the Vietnam War—Saigon, where he operated in a hospital unit that admitted injured children, as well as those with birth defects, without inquiring as which side of the conflict their families had come from. Kim Phuc, the screaming napalm-burned girl in one of the most famous photographs from the Vietnam War, was a patient of Dr. Gorney’s; he helped care for her and arrange her further reconstructive surgery in the United States. Over his career Dr. Gorney belonged to, and in some cases led, nearly every professional plastic surgery society in the United States, including the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, and the California Society of Plastic Surgeons. He also served in the leadership of the International Confederation of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgery. He was especially honored to serve for ten years as a senior examiner on the American Board of Plastic Surgery. His campaigns for high medical standards of care, and against unscrupulous advertising by physicians, were well-known throughout plastic surgery circles; he contributed to numerous professional journals, and cards and gifts to Dr. Gorney often included images of Don Quixote. He was also a vehement opponent of what he regarded as doctor-hostile litigation and unreasonably high medical malpractice awards. It was Dr. Gorney’s frustration with unwarranted law suits that led him to successfully campaign for tort reform in California, and to join a handful of other physicians in establishing The Doctors Company (TDC), a medical liability insurance company run by doctors for doctors that presently insures over 70,000 U.S. physicians; he served for 30 years on the governing board of TDC and as medical director after his retirement from surgical practice until 2006. Dr. Gorney’s first marriage ended in divorce. He and his second wife, Geraldine (Thomas) Gorney, had homes in San Francisco and the Napa Valley. A week before Dr. Gorney’s death, they had just moved to Portland, Oregon, to be closer to Mrs. Gorney’s daughter Karyn Rainone (Rick) and grandson Matthew Siciliani (Reba). Other survivors include Dr. Gorney’s children Cynthia (Bill Sokol), Douglas, and Mark Andrew Gorney; stepchildren Kevin Cox and Kenneth Cox Jr.; other grandchildren Aaron and Joanna Sokol; and two great-grandchildren Hannah Siciliani and Heather Cox. A memorial service is planned for this uniquely remarkable man on January 17 at 3:00 p.m. at the Marines Memorial Club in San Francisco. The family asks that any donations in Dr. Gorneys memory be made to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ Educational Foundation or the Marines Memorial Club of San Francisco.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 20:24:51 +0000
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