Conrad J. Baumgartner; Surgeon in Ground-Breaking Use of TV

Conrad J. Baumgartner, 91, a surgeon who in 1951 participated in the first local closed-circuit color television showing of a surgical procedure. Televised from the old General Hospital to the Shrine Auditorium where hundreds of doctors were attending meetings of the American Medical Assn. on Dec. 4, 1951, Baumgartner, then an associate professor of surgery at USC, removed a thyroid gland from a patient. It was among the first uses of television as a teaching technique in the history of medicine. In Newport Beach on Oct. 11.