Dr. John Salyer, a pioneer in heart surgery at the former Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, died July 25 in Coronado, Calif. He was 96.
Salyer, who had wanted to be a doctor from the time he was a child, was once head of the heart-lung surgery department at Fitzsimons.
Salyer led the team that did the first open-heart surgery at Fitzsimons, said Dr. Alan Hopeman, a former colleague. Salyer and other doctors went to the University of Minnesota in 1956 to watch other surgeons perform the procedure, using a heart-lung machine to keep the patient alive while surgery was in progress.
The machine was a huge step forward in heart surgery.
“He was a good surgeon, an excellent teacher and a gentle person,” said Dr. W. Gerald Rainer of Denver, who trained under Salyer for a year. “And he was always kind to the staff.”
Salyer “could make a complicated surgery look easy,” Hopeman said. “He was very skilled.
“We had both been career military men, and he told us that whether you’re a military or civilian doctor, you take care of the patients — before, during and after surgery.”
Salyer also was a doctor to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower in 1947-48, before Ike became president. “He got Eisenhower to stop smoking, but it didn’t last,” said Salyer’s wife, Jill.
After leaving Denver, Salyer moved to Santa Ana, Calif., and worked at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange, Calif. He performed that hospital’s first open-heart surgery, said his daughter, Barbara Yagi, of Torrance, Calif.
He was a founding member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons.
John M. Salyer was born in Volga, Ky., on Oct 25, 1911, and graduated from Paintsville High School in Paintsville, Ky. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Kentucky and his medical degree at Vanderbilt University. While in college, he was an “extern” at Tennessee State Penitentiary, Yagi said.
He said that he learned a lot “but there were minimum monetary benefits,” Yagi said.
Salyer spent 20 years, from 1939 until 1959, in the Army, many of those years at Fitzsimons. During World War II, he was in India and Burma setting up jungle hospitals. He came back to Fitzsimons, then served in the Korean War as a consultant to MASH units.
Yagi said her father was asked in 1978 to be a consultant for the television program “M*A*S*H” but declined the offer. Instead, he taught medicine at the University of California at Irvine.
Salyer met his first wife, Nancy Kenney, at Fitzsimons, and they married in 1939. She died in 1983.
His second wife, Sadye Travers, died 10 years ago.
He married his third wife, Jill Smith, in 2000, the day before he turned 89.
In addition to her and his daughter, he is survived by a son, John M. Salyer of Antioch, Tenn.; two grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; two stepchildren; and four stepgrandchildren.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
