Major Gary P. Wratten graduated from the University of Buffalo School of Medicine before completing his internship at Brooke Army Medical Center. He then completed a surgery residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 1963, before embarking on further training in head-and-neck surgery in Baltimore.
As US involvement in Vietnam grew, Major Wratten was selected by Lieutenant General Leonard Heaton, the Army Surgeon General, for command of the 45th Surgical MUST (Medical Unit, Self-contained, Transportable) Hospital. While deployed in Tây Ninh province, Major Wratten was killed by mortar fire on November 4, 1966. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery and is remembered on panel 12E, line 25 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.
The conference that later bore his name began as Current Problems in Surgery, held at Walter Reed Army Medical Center from 1967 to 1974. After a 5-year hiatus, it was revived in 1979 as the Gary P. Wratten Army Surgical Symposium with the support of the Washington, DC, Chapter of the ACS. The organizers also established the Leonard D. Heaton Distinguished Professor Lecture in honor of the longest-serving Army Surgeon General, who maintained an active surgical practice throughout his 10 years in Army medicine’s top post.
Centered around resident research presentations from the Army’s surgical training programs, the 2.5-day symposium was hosted by and rotated between different Army medical centers. To this end, the symposium doubled as the annual meeting for the Army (state) Region 13 Committee on Trauma (COT) and hosted the Resident Trauma Papers Competition.
The symposium emphasized the readiness focus of military surgery, dedicating a session to the subject every year. The meeting also allowed the surgical consultants to directly interface with residents, staff surgeons, and program directors. In 1995, the Wratten Symposium was timed to be associated with the Spring Meeting of the American College of Surgeons
Mrs. Wratten, along with 30 family members, attended the 2002 symposium as a continued show of support for Army surgery and the symposium’s mission. The papers presented at the symposium’s 20 meeting were published in Current Surgery, the journal of the Association of Program Directors in Surgery.
In 2005, the symposium established the Lieutenant Colonel Mark Taylor Memorial Lecture. LTC Taylor, a general surgeon assigned to Womack Army Medical Center, was killed by indirect fire while serving with a Forward Surgical Team in Fallujah on March 20, 2004; this lecture continues on today at the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons annual meeting.
The last Wratten Symposium was held in 2014, and like its Air Force counterpart, the Society of Air Force Clinical Surgeons (SAFCS) was officially retired in 2014.
Since implementing the Military Health System Strategic Partnership (MHSSP) with the American College of Surgeons in December 2014, the Excelsior Surgical Society has managed the Wratten Symposium legacy funds. The spirit of both the Gary P. Wratten Army Surgical Symposium and the SAFCS Symposium now live on in the Excelsior Surgical Society.
Similar to the structure of the Wratten Symposium, the ESS Symposium is the annual forum for the Tri-Service Region 13 COT Resident Papers Competition where Region 13 winners from the Army, Navy, and Air Force present their clinical and basic science research. The ESS Symposium is also the only place where military surgeons, residents, and medical students have the annual opportunity to meet and interact with both active duty and reserve component surgery consultants from each service.
