SALT LAKE CITY-Per Wednesday news, Russell M. Nelson, the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has donated his medical journals and research to the University of Utah School of Medicine.
This consists of 35 volumes and contains more than 7,000 surgeries that may be particularly needed “by living patients in need of additional operations.”
Pres. Nelson spoke at a brief afternoon gathering with University of Utah officials in the First Presidency’s Council room at the Church Administration Building at Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City.
Pres. Nelson reported the meeting, which was led by Elder Dale G. Renlund of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles of the Church (also a heart transplant surgeon and a fellow University of Utah graduate to Pres. Nelson), “was a historic point in my life.”
Pres. Nelson was joined by his wife, Wendy Nelson, University of Utah president Taylor Randall, Doctors Sam Finlayson and Craig Selzman of the University of Utah and Katie Eccles of the University of Utah’s Board of Trustees.
Eccles expressed her gratitude, on behalf of the Eccles family, that the records would now be housed in the university’s Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library.
The volumes are comprised of 30 books of operative reports, three books of reprints of more than 100 of Pres. Nelson’s scientific publications, a master patient index and his Ph. D. thesis.
Pres. Nelson, who turns 99 September 9, was admitted into the University of Utah’s School of Medicine in 1944. He received his M.D. from the institution in 1947 at the age of 22 and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Minnesota in 1954. He returned to Salt Lake City in 1955.
Pres. Nelson, in medical spheres, is perhaps best known for the development of an artificial heart and lung machine that is small enough to function in an operating room.
By virtue of this invention, Pres. Nelson performed Utah’s first open-heart surgery in November 1955.
