About Kaiser Permanente | Heritage

Mar 4, 2008

Dr. Cecil Cutting, Kaiser Permanente Pioneer, Dies at Age 97

Cecil C. Cutting, MD, a pioneer physician who helped establish Kaiser Permanente and was the first and longest serving Executive Director of The Permanente Medical Group, died Sunday, March 2, at age 97.

Dr. Cutting was the first physician hired by Dr. Sidney R Garfield when Dr. Garfield joined forces with the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser to provide prevention-oriented, prepaid medical care for Kaiser's workers building the Grand Coulee Dam starting in 1938.

When the U.S. entered World War II, the small team moved to Richmond, Calif.. There, the formal program that was to become Kaiser Permanente was established to provide medical care for Kaiser's 200,000 workers at wartime shipyards in Richmond, Calif.; Vancouver, Wash; and Portland, Ore.; as well as at Kaiser's Steel Mill in Fontana, Calif. Kaiser Permanente officially opened to the public when the war ended in 1945.

In 1948, Dr. Cutting -- along with Dr. Garfield and a handful of other physicians -- founded The Permanente Medical Group. Dr. Cutting became the first executive director and, under his leadership, it grew into the largest medical group in the United States.

Meanwhile, Kaiser Permanente (the partnership of Permanente physicians with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals), became the largest nonprofit private health care program in post-war America.

Dr. Cutting was a talented surgeon and served as chief of surgery and chief of staff in Kaiser Permanente's Hospitals in Oakland and Richmond. His clinical reputation allowed him to recruit a medical staff of talented physicians. For 20 years he served as The Permanente Medical Group's first executive director; and in retirement, he was medical advisor to the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute.

Dr. Cutting was “an extraordinary leader,” said Dr. Morris Collen, 94, another founding physician of The Permanente Medical Group and someone who first worked with Dr. Cutting during World War II. “(Dr.) Garfield had the vision, but Cutting was the one who made the doctors' group so successful,” Dr. Collen said in an interview with the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times . “Everybody really loved the man. He was really extraordinary.”

For more information, read this press release regarding Dr. Cutting.