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Staff members applaud as Dr. Patricia Numann exits an operating room at Upstate University Hospital after completing her final surgery before retirement in 2006. In her honor, many staffers wore the pink scrubs that Numann preferred to wear in surgery instead of blue.

(Post-Standard file / John Berry)

Dr. Patricia J. Numann is a trailblazing Syracuse surgeon with many firsts to her credit:

She was the first woman surgeon at Upstate Medical University.

When she became president of the Association for Surgical Education, she was the first woman president of any national surgical organization.

She founded the Association of Women Surgeons.

She was the first woman to chair the American Board of Surgery.

And she was the second woman elected president of the 79,000-member American College of Surgeons.

Numann overcame every roadblock thrown up at a time when women were not welcome in medicine and certainly not in surgery.

Even though Numann is retired from surgery, she still is in demand, speaking at medical schools around the nation and surgical organizations around the world. At age 72, she got her first patent while creating "Fundamentals of the Surgery Curriculum" for the American College of Surgeons.

Earlier this year, her long quest paid off when the World Health Assembly passed a resolution for the World Health Organization to include surgery in its public health mission.

Were you in leadership roles growing up?

I don't really think so. I come from a small town in the Catskills, Denver, N.Y., population 82. I went to Roxbury Central School, graduated with a class of 16. There weren't a lot of leadership positions. I wasn't class president. I wasn't editor of the yearbook.

I was always driven to achieve academically, but I didn't think about leadership roles at that time. We lived in the country. It was difficult to commute. We were poor. There were a lot of things that made it challenging. We were outsiders. My father lost his job and we moved from New York City when I was 4 or 5 -- just beginning school.

Who influenced your leadership development?

In many ways, my family. My family never discouraged us from doing anything even though we were poor.

My brother was the oldest. He went to college. I looked up to him. He was the gold standard in the family for accomplishment.

My sister went to college and then she got sick. She got multiple sclerosis and was very ill, but she recovered, got married, had kids, went back to college, finished and worked.

My father's aunt lived with us. She always expected perfection. She demanded it. We always had to get 100 in spelling tests, we always had to do our math, we had to be interested in current affairs, we had to know how to do everything. She died when I was in eighth grade. She was a tremendous influence.

And my mother was. She moved from Nebraska to New York City, cold turkey, left her family, left everything she knew. My father had a stroke when I was 8 or 9. He was 44. So my mother went to work in a restaurant called the Kass Inn. She had to learn to drive. She just did it. No fuss or hullabaloo.

Did he recover?

He recovered fairly well. He recovered his speech. He walked with a limp and always carried a cane.

An expectation of success seems rooted in your family.

My father hadn't graduated from high school. My mother had. But it was always expected that we would go to college. My brother went to RPI. My sister went to Wells. I went to the University of Rochester in general science, which was the pre-med major.

You get good grades, you work hard, and you go to college. That was always an expectation. My great aunt always had the expectation that we should be perfect.

We were expected to work. I went to work when I was 12.

What do you think people want from their leaders?

They want help when they're in a quandary. It may just be somebody to talk to, who can think through the problem with them so that they can figure it out.

They want leaders to sometimes run interference.

They want honesty.

They want to know that you will always have their back. And that you're not going to be disloyal or dishonest. They want to know they can count on you.

I think they want you to be somewhat inspirational.

They want you to be proud of what they do.

One of the failures I've seen in leaders is that they want to be the god or the hero and they don't want other people to succeed to their level. That's the opposite of what a true leader should do. You should be proud if every single person around you is successful.

What was your most satisfying success?

My advocacy for women surgeons has been successful. Now, there are associations of women surgeons in many countries, and they're modeled after our association. I know many of the leaders. I know the things they've achieved. Many men support these organizations when they realize the obstacles that have been put in front of women. That has got to be one of my proudest achievements.

In this community, the advocacy for women with breast cancer has made a difference and made sure that women in Syracuse get state-of-the-art breast cancer treatment and it's compassionate.

I am proud of what I've done in surgical education. Both through the Association of Surgical Education -- to improve undergraduate surgical education and graduate surgical education -- and through programs I've been involved in to make the care we give people more consistent.

I've always been proud of my own technical ability. I think I was technically a very good surgeon. From my early childhood, striving for perfection, I like that.

Tell me why you wanted to be a doctor.

When I was a small child, my favorite stories were doctor-type stories. From the earliest I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor.

Then, watching my father go through the stroke and seeing the care he got. And my sister with her multiple sclerosis and the care that she got. It fascinated me.

I started working in the hospital as a nurse's aide when I was 16. The doctors actually let me go into the O.R.

Nobody told me that women weren't doctors, even though I didn't see any women who were doctors. It just never dawned on me that there was any sort of prohibition. In college, they told us that virtually none of the pre-med women would go to medical school.

There was a quota system for women, 5 to 10 percent of the class. Some didn't take women at all.

And then came the cruel reality that surgical training programs flat out didn't accept women. They sent your application back and said, "We don't accept women."

I ended up making a deal with the chairman of surgery that if I did really well in surgery, he would allow me to be a surgical resident. Then nobody wanted to give me a job.

Even a couple practices that had promised they would give me a job reneged on that. My father and mother were dead, and I was alone. My father would always say, "I hope you survive figuring it out yourself." So I did.

I finally got a part-time job as a physician at the V.A., which I really liked. I loved the vets, they're just the greatest patients on earth.

Shortly after that, a new chairman in the department of surgery offered me a job at Upstate. So I stayed. I've had many opportunities to leave, but never thought there was anything better -- I had great colleagues.

"CNY Conversations" feature Q&A interviews with local citizens about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. They also run regularly on Sunday in The Post-Standard's Business section. To suggest a person for CNY Conversations, contact Stan Linhorst at slinhorst@syracuse.com.

Last week: Ed McGraw of Ashley McGraw Architects talks about leading during a time of accelerating change.

