Obituary: Anne Barnes, 85, surgeon and medical educator

Anne Utley Barnes, 85, of Feasterville, a surgeon and educator, died of pneumonia Saturday, Feb. 18, at St. John Neumann Nursing Home in Northeast Philadelphia.

In 1960, Dr. Barnes became a resident at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked under surgeons I.S. Ravdin and Jonathan Rhoads. She also was chief resident at Jeanes Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia.

By the mid-1960s, she was a professor of anatomy at Temple University Medical School, a surgeon at Jeanes, and chief of surgery at Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry.

Dr. Barnes joined the faculty and the surgical staff of Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, now part of Drexel University College of Medicine, in 1966. She was also a surgeon and taught residents at Frankford Hospital. She received several awards for excellence in teaching, and helped develop trauma surgery as a specialty, according to a son, James, also a physician.

In her final years of surgical practice, Dr. Barnes concentrated on the treatment of breast cancer patients, her son said. She retired from surgery in 2001, but continued to teach until 2007.

A native of Nashville, she earned a bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University in 1948, then went to work for the Bureau of Vital Statistics in that city.

After surviving thyroid cancer at 24, she decided to become a physician, and received a medical degree in 1955 from Vanderbilt. There she met her future husband, the Rev. Sidney Barnes, then junior pastor at the Presbyterian church on campus.

Dr. Barnes interned at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville. She had surgical residencies at Medical College of Virginia and Northwestern University. At the latter, she worked with Thomas Starzl, who would later perform the first liver transplant.

Her surgical residencies were geographically scattered because she followed her husband to his pastoral assignments, and her training was lengthy because it was interrupted by the birth of two children, her son said.

She and her husband moved to Philadelphia in 1960 when he became chaplain at Eastern State Penitentiary. After it closed in 1970, he was chaplain at Graterford Prison for many years. He died in 1994.

Dr. Barnes was an avid rose gardener and exhibited at the Philadelphia Flower Show. She was a longtime member of Abington Presbyterian Church.

In addition to her son, she is survived by a son, Sidney; a brother; and three grandchildren.

Dr. Barnes requested that no memorial service be held and asked that instead of donations, friends and family "do a kindness for someone in need."