By: AMY GEISZLER-JONES
Since retiring in December 2024 from a trailblazing and highly successful 45-year career as a surgeon and educator with KU School of Medicine-Wichita, Marilee McBoyle-Wiesner, M.D., is paying tribute to two of her most stalwart advocates and making sure their legacy, and hers to some extent, carries forward to future surgeons.
Earlier this year, McBoyle-Wiesner established a $25,000 endowed fund in her parents’ names. The Vincent and Laurel McBoyle KU Surgery Residency Skills Lab Award will provide an annual payout of $1,000 to support a surgery resident who has made educational contributions to the lab.
An example would be a resident creating a hands-on lab session for certain procedures, McBoyle-Wiesner said, like escharotomies, which are small surgical incisions made through tough, burnt skin to relieve dangerous pressure and help restore blood flow for a burn trauma patient.
McBoyle-Wiesner was instrumental in setting up the lab, located on the third floor of Ascension Via Christi St. Francis hospital, more than a decade ago. In the accredited lab, residents can practice skills and procedures — such as suturing challenging wounds, performing colonoscopies and learning fundamentals of laparoscopic and robotics-assisted surgeries — through simulations outside of the operating room. Medical students are also introduced to the lab to prepare for their surgical clerkship.
To acknowledge her impact in teaching surgical skills and her service as the lab’s medical director, the lab was renamed in her honor before she retired.
McBoyle-Wiesner described establishing the fund as “a heart-touching way to pay tribute to (my parents) who had made a lasting impression and impact in my life, and to provide support for something that I had helped establish” within the KUSM-Wichita Surgical residency program.
“I’ve felt for a long time that I’ve been blessed beyond measure, and I was able to stand on my parents’ shoulders because they did so many things the right way and provided me with untold opportunities,” McBoyle-Wiesner said.
“It’s so exciting that two things important to me have come together.”
Supporting from the start
“As a farmer, my father was very innovative in new ways of farming and methods to improve soil conservation; my mother, as an elementary school teacher, was the epitome of establishing learning goals with encouragement,” McBoyle-Wiesner wrote in a letter announcing the fund to the KUSM-Wichita Department of Surgery colleagues.
“Innovation, establishing learning goals and encouragement — it just seemed like those are three important pillars in our skills lab as well,” she said in an interview.
McBoyle-Wiesner, the oldest of three daughters, grew up on the family farm near Abilene, Kansas, during the 1950s and ’60s. It was a time and place where young girls didn’t get the same kind of confidence and inspiration that Vincent and Laurel McBoyle provided.
McBoyle-Wiesner, who often tagged along with her dad to farm stores and livestock auctions, remembers overhearing her dad’s response to other farmers who remarked it was too bad he didn’t have any sons.
He told them, “I wouldn’t trade my daughters for anyone else’s sons.”
“And I remember my mother always telling me I could be anything I wanted to be,” she said, particularly when she told her mom she wanted to be a doctor after receiving care from a female surgeon and reading about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a U.S. medical college.
Words and actions like that are what led McBoyle-Wiesner to break barriers as the first woman surgical resident at KUSM-Wichita in 1977 and the first board-certified female surgeon in Kansas.
McBoyle-Wiesner also became a nationally recognized surgery educator.
“It was a genetic predisposition since her mother was a teacher,” said Alex Ammar, M.D., the recently retired chair of KUSM-Wichita’s surgery department.
“Their strong Christian faith in the Lord has also been a tremendous influence in my life,” McBoyle-Wiesner said. Her parents had been high school sweethearts and were married for nearly 53 years when her dad died in November 2000.
Her mother died in November 2011.
Investing for the future McBoyle-Wiesner established the endowed fund through a qualified charitable distribution (QCD), which can be a tax-savvy way for donors to support KU Endowment.
“I’m 73, so I needed to start taking money out of some of my retirement plans,” McBoyle-Wiesner said, referring to IRS guidelines on some types of individual retirement accounts that are triggered at age 70.5.
“I’ve been putting in money for a long time, and this was something that I could do that would be lasting.”
A QCD is made directly from a qualifying IRA, usually a traditional IRA, to a qualifying organization, such as a nonprofit educational institution or hospital. Because the QCD is made directly to the receiving organization, the donor avoids income tax on the gift, plus all or part of the QCD can be used to satisfy IRS required minimum distributions.
To donate to the Vincent and Laurel McBoyle KU Surgery Residency Skills Lab Award fund or provide other financial support for KUSM-Wichita, contact Brad Rukes, KU Endowment senior development director-Wichita, at 316-293-2641 or [email protected]