Thomas J. Fogarty - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

On February 25, 1934, Fogarty was born into a poor, Irish Catholic family as the youngest of three children living in Cincinnati. His father worked as a railroad engineer, but he died when Fogarty was just eight years old.

Fogarty assumed a role of greater responsibility at a young age, but, as he points out later in life, his father’s absence also nurtured his own creative nature as an inventor. He fixed things that his mother needed fixed, and he worked with soapbox derby cars and model airplanes. "I just had a natural inclination and inquisitive nature about building things. I looked at things and just naturally thought, 'Okay, how can I make this better?'" His business side was evident in childhood as well. The model airplanes that he built were sold to neighborhood kids. When he became frustrated with motor scooter gears, he built and sold a centrifugal clutch.

As for Fogarty’s educational background, he was not a top-notch student, and his original career goal was to be a boxer. “I wasn’t a very good kid. They sent me to a camp to keep me out of trouble. One of the routine activities was boxing. I became the Midwest Golden Glove champ.”

To help his family get by in the late 1940s, fourteen-year old Fogarty started working at Good Samaritan Hospital during a time when hospitals were still exempt from child labor laws. He began the job cleaning medical equipment in the eighth grade, but he continued working during his high school summer vacations and was soon promoted to scrub technician, a person who handed medical instruments to surgeons.

During his last year of high school, Fogarty discovered that he wanted to be a doctor. At the age of 17, he quit his boxing career after he broke his nose in a match that ended in a draw. A family priest gave him a recommendation, and because of his awful grades, he was admitted to Cincinnati’s Xavier University on probation. In order to get through college, Fogarty took on three jobs and received financial assistance from Dr. Jack Cranley, Fogarty’s mentor and one of the most prominent vascular surgeons in the United States. Fogarty was Cranley’s private scrub technician at Good Samaritan Hospital. “I had a mentor who encouraged me and helped to persuade me to go to college…He had 10 kids and I became the 11th. He always told me, ‘You are smarter than you think.’”

Fogarty graduated from Xavier University with a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1956 and went on to attend the Cincinnati College of Medicine where he graduated in 1960. From 1960 to 1961, he interned at the University of Oregon Medical School in Portland, Oregon, and he completed his surgical residency at the same school in 1965.