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Arch Surg. 1998;133:1257-1258.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

IT WAS the worst of times. The Bay Area was a haven of social unrest and counterculture revolution. Resistance to the Vietnam War was pervasive. Haight-Ashbury was in its heyday and Fillmore West rocked with music that articulated the social changes. The University of California San Francisco accepted medical students who had been influenced by Mario Savio during the student uprisings at Berkeley and later at San Francisco State. This counterculture revolution was associated with drugs that were in turn associated with increased violence within the city.

William Blaisdell, MD, became chief of surgery at San Francisco General Hospital in 1966. The hospital was faced with a diminishing number of Medicare patients and increasing victims of violence. As a strategy to deal with the violence, a trauma center was started by Dr Blaisdell just prior to the September riots. There were 3 distinct services: elective surgery, "dirty surgery," and the . . . [Full Text of this Article]