A native of Watertown, New York, Toby Cosgrove was a self-described average student. He graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts before going onto medical school – the only one of 13 he applied to that accepted him – at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville.
Residency training was interrupted by the Vietnam War. Dr. Cosgrove worked in a hospital in Da Nang and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for his work as chief of the U.S. Air Force Casualty Staging Flight; at age 28, he and his small team evacuated more than 22,000 wounded.
After returning to the States, Dr. Cosgrove completed his clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital and Brook General Hospital in London.
Diagnosed with dyslexia in his 30s, Dr. Cosgrove says he chose surgery over other professions because it relied less on reading and writing and more on his dexterity. In a cardiac surgery career that spanned nearly 30 years, he earned an international reputation for expertise in valve repair.
Fourteen years after joining the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Cosgrove in 1989 was named chairman of the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. After being named Cleveland Clinic President and CEO in 2004, succeeding Floyd “Fred” Loop, MD, Dr. Cosgrove stepped away from his surgical practice.
During Dr. Cosgrove’s tenure (2004-2017), the number of physician-scientists nearly doubled, from 1,800 to 3,400; patient visits increased from 2.8 to 7.1 million; the number of caregivers soared to 52,000; research funding grew to $260 million; and new construction was prolific.
“One of the reasons Cleveland Clinic is a success is because it’s in Cleveland,” Dr. Cosgrove says.
“Cleveland is a good filter. People are not coming here to go to the beach or to ski. They’re coming here to work,” he says. “So, when you recruit someone here, they are coming to participate.” And then “they inevitably fall in love with the city.”
One such recruit was Tom Mihaljevic, MD, who joined the hospital system the same year Dr. Cosgrove became CEO. In his first “State of the Clinic” address, Dr. Mihaljevic credited his successor with leading the Cleveland Clinic to astonishing heights, noting that in 2017 alone, Cleveland Clinic ran one of the largest graduate medical education and training programs; opened the $276 million, 377,000-square-foot Taussig Cancer Center; built new rehabilitation centers and urgent care facilities; logged thousands of telemedicine visits; and continued to increase its uncompensated care and community activity.
Author of a book (“The Cleveland Clinic Way”) and nearly 450 journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Cosgrove has filed 30 patents for surgical innovations. In July 2018 he was named executive adviser to Google’s Healthcare & Life Sciences team.
Dr. Cosgrove is married to lawyer Anita Cosgrove and has two daughters.
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