The McMechans’ 1937 Loving Cup

Among the many treasures that the Wood Library-Museum secures for the International Anesthesia Research Society, certainly one of the greatest is the loving cup (left) that the IARS had dedicated in 1937 to its founders (right), Dr. Francis “Frank” McMechan and his wife Laurette. Seventeen years after her husband had succumbed to complications of crippling rheumatoid arthritis, in 1956, the Widow McMechan retired from their Ohio home to southern California. The loving cup disappeared for decades until it was curatorially recovered from New Mexico in 2011. Dusting off the long-lost trophy revealed the part of the inscription thanking the McMechans for their “devoted services and splendid achievements for the organization, economics, research, practice, teaching, journalism and fellowship of the specialty of anesthesia….” (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists, Inc.)