Dr. Dolan

Interested donors and the medical community formed the Dolan Lecture Committee to assure memory of Dr. Dolan would be carried on through a lecture series that provided the highest level of medical education for medical students and the clinical medical community.

Dr. Dolan spent several years at the beginning of his career working as a physician in France during WWII. He helped build the first hospitals on Omaha Beach to care for the wounded and also assisted in gathering pathological data for the Nuremberg war trials.

Upon his return to Arlington, Dr. Dolan learned that medical students still spent much of their training in school rather than in the field. He spearheaded a partnership between his alma mater, the Georgetown University School of Medicine, and Arlington Hospital, to provide medical students with rotations providing real world experience caring for patients. This partnership grew throughout Dr. Dolan’s career, offering educational opportunities to students, residents and community physicians for more than 40 years.

If Dr. Dolan believed something was needed to further the education and practice of medicine, he made it happen. He was deeply involved in the development of an emergency medical department to train EMTs when only a few other hospitals had one, the creation of the county’s cancer detection plan, and the launch of the American Blood Commission, a national system for producing an adequate and safe supply of blood for medical use. He served as the Commission’s President in the early 1980s.