Veteran Spotlight: Honoring Late School of Medicine Alumnus James Styner, MD '67

On Nov. 19, the UC Irvine School of Medicine will host a flag ceremony to honor the memory of James Styner, MD, an early alumnus of the School of Medicine, Korea War-era U.S. Navy corpsman, and trailblazer in modern American trauma care. After a long career as a surgeon in Nebraska and later a sports medicine practitioner in California, Styner, who battled Lewy body dementia for several years late in life, passed away in January 2023. His son, Randall Styner, himself a veteran and UC Irvine’s director of emergency management, will lead the ceremony.

Styner graduated from the UC Irvine School of Medicine in 1967 as part of the second cohort to complete the program. Before embarking on his medical career, he served as a corpsman at a VA hospital in Washington, D.C. After his military service, he initially pursued a teaching degree at Humboldt State University. However, recognizing his potential, one of his professors encouraged him to shift his focus to biology, leading him to the osteopathy program at Rio Hondo College in Whittier, California. Then, when UC Irvine established its Medical Center, he transitioned to its medical degree program.

Following his education, Styner completed his residency in orthopedics in Denver before moving to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he became a well-respected physician in a rehabilitation clinic and served as an emergency surgeon at Lincoln General Hospital. Tragically, his life was forever altered by a plane crash in rural Nebraska in 1976, which injured himself and his four children and claimed the life of his wife Charlene, an auxiliary nurse. In the aftermath of this disaster, Styner’s frustration with the chaotic medical response ignited a passion for improving trauma care in smaller communities.

“After the crash, we were stuck in the field for eight hours, and when we finally reached a hospital, they were overwhelmed and unsure how to proceed,” recalled Randall.  “That was the way it was everywhere,” he added. “Bigger cities had a sophisticated approach to trauma, but smaller clinics didn’t have any methodology.”

Realizing this, Styner and his colleagues developed a standardized trauma care protocol that could be used to train medical staff at rural hospitals. This protocol became known as the Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS) program, which provided essential guidelines for treating trauma victims. The first ATLS course was held in Auburn, Nebraska, in 1980, and quickly gained traction, eventually becoming the U.S. Department of Defense's primary standard for mobile field hospitals.

Later in his career, Styner was recognized as a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and became a pioneer in the development of artificial hip procedures. He continued to serve patients until his semi-retirement in 1986, after which he moved to California and focused on sports medicine and workers' compensation practices.

Randall hopes that the flag ceremony in his father’s honor will recognize the impact he made on countless lives through his dedication to medicine. “It really means a lot that the School of Medicine is having this ceremony,” he said. “It does my dad a great honor."