Franz Hoskins: doctor and dad

Darrell Dean Rector, barely 19 years old, seemed destined to die young that September in 1942. His appendix was rotting and there he was, stuck on a submarine eight days from the nearest port and thousands of miles behind Japanese lines. There was no doctor on board.

His rescue came at the hands of an ad hoc surgical team equipped with bent spoons for retractors and scalpel blades held by a hemostat. His anesthesiologist was Lt. Franz Hoskins, whose only qualifications at the time were alertness and curiosity.

"I thought he could follow my instructions," recalled Wheeler Lipes, pharmacist's mate first class and impromptu surgeon of what came to be known as the first appendectomy performed on an underwater submarine.

Dr. Hoskins, who went on to be a submarine commander and then a family doctor for some 40 years in the Tacoma area, died of cancer at 86 last Thursday (Nov. 8) in Kingsport, Tenn. He was buried in his Navy dress blues yesterday in Greeneville, Tenn.

"He was a great veteran, doctor, individual and father," said his daughter, Nancy Hoskins.

"My dad was a very positive-thinking person," said his son, Franz Hoskins Jr., who is an anesthesiologist and medical director at an outpatient-surgery center in Arcadia, Calif.

When Rector turned up with appendicitis aboard the USS Seadragon, Lipes was, at first, resigned to not being able to operate. But then the commanding officer ordered him to go ahead.

"He said, 'I fire torpedoes every day and I miss, but I've done the best I could,' " recalled Lipes, a retired medical-center president in Corpus Christi, Texas.

The surgical team operated on a ward-room mess table. Their gowns were pajamas sterilized with alcohol drawn from a torpedo-room bulkhead. Ether, the anesthetic, was delivered through a mask made of gauze and a large tea strainer.

"Like all the others involved, I'd had no medical training," Dr. Hoskins wrote in a recollection now on the Web , "but after reading about how to give an ether anesthesia from the appendix of the medical manual, I finally consented to do my bit."

Lipes started the anesthesia and then, as the operation got under way, gestured to Dr. Hoskins when to administer it.

The operation took two hours and 36 minutes, with ether fumes so thick the team was groggy.

"One thing I learned," Hoskins told The Seattle Times in 1987: "You can do an appendectomy with 3 ounces of ether. I used three pints" on the Seadragon."

Rector recovered without complications. The Navy took a dim view of surgery by amateurs but found a way to praise the men.

"In this particular instance, it appears that deliberation and cautious restraint preceded the operation; the operation was performed under difficult circumstances and with pioneering fortitude and resourcefulness; and that the result was entirely satisfactory," wrote Thomas G. Walsh, the submarine squadron medical officer.

The story of the Seadragon appendectomy later brought a Pulitzer Prize for George Weller of the Chicago Daily News and was adapted for television in the late 1950s.

Rector died two years later on a different submarine when one of its torpedoes circled back and blew up the ship.

Dr. Hoskins went on to become the first reserve officer to command a submarine, the USS Trutta, on war patrol. He attended the University of Washington medical school on the G.I. Bill, but insisted his interest in medicine had nothing to do with the Seadragon appendectomy, however memorable it might have been.

"That day is still vivid in my memories," he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1997, when Dr. Hoskins, Lipes and "assistant surgeon" Norvell Ward were reunited for the first time since the war. "I could never forget that."

Dr. Hoskins himself narrowly survived open-heart surgery in 1979, bleeding so badly afterward that his heart stopped and doctors had to reopen his chest and massage his heart in the intensive-care unit. He continued working until age 80. Only a year and a half ago, he won a ballroom-dancing contest at the age of 85.

He was preceded in death by Noreen Hoskins, his wife of 45 years. His two children are his only survivors. No memorial fund has been established.