Donald Trunkey
Donald Dean Trunkey was an American trauma surgeon.
Early life
Trunkey was born in 1937 in Washington State. He received a BS in Zoology from Washington State College, where he also played basketball and because of alphabetical sorting was the last person to graduate before the school changed its name to Washington State University in 1959.Medical education
He then went to the University of Washington for Medical School and graduated in 1963. He interned under J. Englebert Dunphy at the University of Oregon Medical School, who became his mentor and turned his focus to surgery. He was then drafted into the army and served two years in Germany. He completed his surgical training at UCSF and became a faculty member in 1972. As a UCSF faculty member, he was the leader of the trauma service at San Francisco General Hospital. His experience as an academic trauma surgeon led to his authorship of a popular textbook on trauma care in 1983. In 1986 he became the Chief of Surgery at Oregon Health & Science University. In 2018 he retired to Idaho.Writings
Trunkey has authored 174 journal articles, 25 books, and about 200 book chapters. In 1978 he starred in an episode of Lifeline on NBC."The critical moment in Don Trunkey's career was when he published a paper in 1979 on death rates of trauma patients in Orange County, compared to those in San Francisco County," said Richard Mullins, MD, Professor, Department of Surgery. "That paper was a bombshell. It was one of the earliest, most persuasive pieces of evidence on the effectiveness of trauma centers." Trunkey was, more than any other single person, responsible for the development of sophisticated, state-of-the-art trauma programs in the U.S.