S
urgeons are known for their attention to detail, and Dr. Norton Wa-
terman is no exception: Now retired, Waterman noticed years ago
that significant quantities of unused hospital supplies – from scrubs
and bandages, to wheelchairs and incubators – were getting tossed
into landfills or left to gather dust in storerooms.
“I was always bothered by the waste at the hospital,” says the Louisville native
who graduated from Harvard Medical School and did a surgical residency at
Washington University’s Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. “At Barnes in the 1950’s,
they recycled everything,” he recalls, but when he returned to Louisville to
establish a private surgical practice, “they were throwing things away.”
Then in 1993, Dr. Waterman read a Journal of the American Medical Associ-
ation article about a Yale Medical School anesthesiologist who was gathering
unused operating room supplies and sending them to medically needy coun-
tries. Certain that Louisville’s medical community could do the same thing,
Waterman approached the Greater Louisville Medical Society (formally the
Jefferson County Medical Society), where then-Executive Director Lelan
Woodmansee and the board of governors agreed to provide seed money and
space for an office, and storage in the old University of Louisville School of
Medicine building at First and Chestnut Streets in what had been the unheat-
ed morgue. It was “a bleak space,” by Waterman’s description,