Former WSLH Director and Medical Director Dr. Stan Inhorn passed on February 19, 2025.
Dr. Inhorn was WSLH Assistant Director starting in 1960, becoming Director from 1966-1979. He then left to create and lead the UW Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, eventually returning to the WSLH and retiring as WSLH Medical Director in the late 1990s.
Dr. Inhorn had a major impact on the WSLH and our role in the state and nation, as well as on healthcare in the United States.
An excerpt from his obituary recounting just some of his accomplishments –
“Stan moved to Madison in 1953 to pursue a five-year internship and residency in Pathology at the University of Wisconsin Hospital. Stan chose UW for his residency because the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene (WSLH) was the first state public health laboratory to be located on an academic campus. In the first year of his residency in the WSLH, Stan rotated through bacteriology, virology, serology, among other fields, and was also given space and supplies to start his own research. …
“At UW, Stan was appointed Assistant Professor of Pathology and Assistant Director of the WSLH in 1960. He became Director of the WSLH in 1966, a position he held until 1979, when he was asked by the UW Medical School to create a Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. During his long career at WSLH, Stan pursued many different lines of medical research and public health intervention. He was involved in a large community program to promote the new Pap smear test for detecting cervical cancer. He created a Cytogenetics Lab at WSLH which identified the genetic trisomy 13, an important discovery in understanding congenital birth defects in children. With the American Cancer Society, he headed a demonstration project with a number of Wisconsin hospitals to determine the acceptance of offering low-cost mammography as a screening test for breast cancer.
“Starting in 1966, Stan played a major role in the implementation of Medicare, helping to develop the quality assurance (QA) practices to be required of all public health and clinical laboratories in this country. He chaired the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) task force that developed the Proficiency Testing standards for the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act of 1967 (CLIA-67). Stan was also a member of the Medical Laboratory Services Advisory Committee to CLIA. Stan, a past-chair of the Laboratory Section of the American Public Health Association, was selected to be editor of a book called Quality Assurance Practices for Health Laboratories. With 5 general chapters and 15 laboratory disciplines, this 1200-page volume was published in 1978. As laboratory practices and technology changed in the 1970s and 1980s, a revision of CLIA was made in 1988 (CLIA-88). Stan was appointed to the new CLIA-88 advisory committee. The Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) realized that a change was needed to connect laboratories to their users, including first responders, hospitals, health departments, etc. For his efforts at leading a new program called L-SIP to establish state-wide laboratory systems, Stan was awarded the Gold Standard Award by the APHL and later the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award.”