10 Alumni Journal - SUNY Upstate Medical University

the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine,
he pushed for seat-belt laws, airbags, and road improvements.
As a result of his work, he was included among 272 honorees in
Esquire magazine’s inaugural register of “Men and Women under
40 who are Changing America” in 1984.
Three years later, Schwab joined the faculty of University
of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, just as the 9-mm semiautomatic
pistol was released for commercial sale. As a result, the
spectrum of handgun injury changed from single-shot, minimally
destructive wounding to multiple-shot catastrophic wounds,
typically injuring multiple organs.
By the early 1990s, Philadelphia had one of the worst epidemics
of urban firearm injury in the United States, and at times
led the nation in gun homicide. The Hospital of the University
of Pennsylvania, located in West Philadelphia, was the receiving
center for hundreds of gunshot victims a year, peaking at more
than 500 cases in 1992.
Schwab was uniquely suited to treating such gun violence.
Following medical school at Upstate, Schwab joined the U.S.
Navy and did five years of surgical training at the Portsmouth
Naval Hospital in Virginia, where nearly all faculty members had
extensive experience treating combat wounds in Vietnam.
“The very core of surgery at Portsmouth was trauma surgery
and the focus was on how to manage the wounded warrior with
Dr. Schwab looks over a brain scan with a colleague.
“Only through legitimate research will we be
able to identify the root causes of why people
become violent. . . .At the same time, we need
short-term solutions to lower the toll and live safer
in a society that has chosen to live with guns.”
—C. WIllIAM SCHWAB, MD ’72
extensive injuries,” he says. He learned ballistics and triage—how
to make very important decisions about life and death (and to be
comfortable with it) with a minimum amount of data.
It was perfect training for being a future inner-city trauma
surgeon. The only problem was Philadelphia wasn’t supposed
to be a combat zone. Many of the deaths he saw were entirely
preventable. “The number of deaths of young, African-American
males was moving, to say the least,” Schwab says. “All these kids
who had just a few years earlier been seventh or eighth graders
were now dead on the operating room table.”
As a responsible physician, Schwab says he couldn’t continue
to just fix the anatomical injuries and turn the kids back out on
the street. “After awhile, you’ve got to ask, ‘Why is this happening,
and how can we get it to stop?’” says Schwab, whose
research helped inform the passage of the 1993 Federal Brady
Bill requiring background checks for gun buyers.
Schwab viewed the situation as a military surgeon would.
“You have to know something about the war you’re fighting,”
he says. He turned to data on firearm injury as a start. The only
problem was that the data did not exist.
“That was unusual,” says Schwab, considering such statistics
were readily available for death from causes such as motor vehicle
accidents, infectious disease, or drowning. In terms of firearm
injury, the most detailed available information was the FBI
Uniform Crime Reports, because they recorded every crime by
firearm. Although the availability of data has improved, partly
due to FICAP’s efforts, assembling comprehensive data on
firearm injury in the United States remains a challenge. FICAP
helped develop and support the implementation of the Center
for Disease Control’s (CDC) National Violent Death Reporting
System (NVDRS) that is now active in 16 states to study
patterns and risk factors for all violent injury.
In 1997, Schwab and colleague Therese Richmond, PhD,
Associate Professor of Nursing at Penn, created FICAP. They
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