Donald L. Morton, MD, Visiting Professor Lectureship

Dr. Morton, raised in the coalfields of West Virginia became one of the country’s foremost experts in the clinical treatment of melanoma.  The Department of Surgery honors his achievements in surgical oncology and proud Mountaineer heritage with the establishment of a lectureship in his honor at the West Virginia University School of Medicine.

He knew that more than 80 percent of melanoma cases had no nodal metastases on presentation, yet underwent aggressive nodal dissections. It was his insight that lymphatic drainage could be mapped using vital dyes, and the first, or “sentinel,” lymph node draining the area of the primary tumor bed could identify whether others behind it would also be involved. This insight would change the approach to melanoma surgery, and spare thousands the morbidity of aggressive nodal surgery.

He was born in Richwood, Nicholas County, in a house his father built with no running water. He attended Berea College in Kentucky, a Christian abolitionist school that offered full tuition to students from Appalachia. He completed undergraduate studies at the University of California in Berkeley. He received his MD and trained in surgery at UCSF and at the National Institutes of Health, where he stayed as senior surgeon and head of tumor immunology. He joined UCLA as chief of surgical oncology, then established the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica.

He won the Jacobson award for innovation from the American College of Surgeons. He was a member of all the major professional societies in surgery, and was president of the Society of Surgical Oncology. He received continuous grant funding from the National Institutes of Health for more than 35 years. In 2000 he was the top investigator in grant funding from the agency. He was the author of nearly 700 peer review publications.

Past Visiting Professors

• 2024 Kiran K. Turaga, MD, MPH
  Professor of Surgery, Division Chief, Surgical Oncology
  Assistant Medical Director, Clinical Trials Office
  Department of Surgery, Yale School of Medicine
  Smilow Cancer Hospital
  Yale New Haven Hospital
  Connecticut
  2023 Herbert J. Zeh, III, MD
  Professor and Chair, Department of Surgery
  Hall and Mary Lucile Shannon Distinguished
  Chair in Surgery
• 2022 E. Phillips Polack, MD, MA, DSc(hon), FACS
  Director, Center for Skin Cancer and Melanoma
  Director, Center for Wound Care
  Chairman, Committee on Ethics
  Wheeling Hospital, WVU Health System
  
  Clinical Professor of Surgery
  Department of Surgery
  WVU School of Medicine
  
• 2021 MAUREEN KILLACKEY,MD, FACS, FACOG
  Emeritus Professor
  Medicine and Obstetrics and Gynecology
  Columbia University Medical Center New York, NY
  Chair, New York State Cancer Advisory Council
• 2019 Charlotte E. Ariyan, MD, PhD
  Associate Professor
  Associate Program Director
  Surgical Oncology Fellowship
  Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center New York, NY
  "Lymph Nodes and Cancer: from Halsted to Morton"
• 2018 Frederick L. Green, MD, FACS
  Adjunct Professor of Surgery
  University of North Carolina
  Chapel Hill, NC
  Medical Director, Cancer Data Services
  Levine Cancer Center Institute
  Charlotte, NC
  "Prognostic and Predictive Factors in the Staging of Cancer:  2018 and Beyond"
  
• 2017 Jeffrey M. Farma, MD, FACS
  Associate Professor of Surgery
  Department of Surgical Oncology
  Fox Chase Cancer Center
  Philadelphia, PA
  "Evolution in the Treatment of Melanoma"
  
• 2016 Douglas Evans, MD
  Medical College of Wisconsin
  The Challenge of Pancreatic Cancer:  Progress from the Medical College of Wisconsin
  
• 2015 Armando E. Giuliano, MD
  Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
  The Rise and Fall of Lymphadenectomy for Breast Cancer