He may have officially retired in 2013, but Frank Kellogg, M.D., is still a practicing pediatrician. He works one day a week at Strong Families Medical Group, in Anaheim, where he cares for an underserved medical population.It is the latest stage of a long medical career marked by service.
Dr. Kellogg graduated from Anaheim High School on D-Day. Two days later, he and the rest of the boys from his senior class reported for active duty.
The U.S. Navy sent him to begin pre-medical training at UCLA, which he finished in two years. Next, he went to Stanford Medical School, followed by an internship at San Francisco City and County Hospital. The Korean War interrupted his pediatric training for two years, while he served as a physician on the aircraft carrier USS Antietam.
After returning, Dr. Kellogg completed his residency at Stanford. In 1955, he became the first chief resident of pediatrics at the new UCLA Medical Center. And in 1956, Dr. Kellogg returned to Orange County to open a private practice in Garden Grove.
“I have learned that when what you do is important, it does not have to go on forever to still be important.”
CHOC pediatrician Frank Kellogg, M.D., on the importance of community service.
Pediatrics: Circa 1956
Today’s newly minted pediatricians would scarcely recognize the pediatric world in which Dr. Kellogg began his practice. In 1956, pediatricians were still seeing polio and epiglottitis. Rho(D) immune globulin had not been developed yet, and Dr. Kellogg routinely performed exchange transfusions for newborns with ethryblastosis fetalis.
Dr. Kellogg, who is an original member of CHOC’s medical staff and served on the hospital’s executive committee and board of directors, has also seen a complete shift in the way hospitals care for their youngest patients. When he was an intern, parents could only visit one afternoon a week. After they left, there would be complete pandemonium because the children knew their parents wouldn’t be back for a week.
“They sobbed all night long,” Dr. Kellogg said. “Child Life? It didn’t exist because it wasn’t seen as important.”
And today, Dr. Kellogg marvels at the highly sophisticated patient care CHOC provides, especially the 24-hour access to expert pediatric specialists. At the beginning of his career, pediatricians sat with seriously ill patients in the middle of the night to start and restart IVs. To this day, Dr. Kellogg still gets a little nervous if he sees a low IV bottle.
“CHOC is really quite something,” he said. “Whoever thought we’d have a place like this.”
What Goes Around . . .
By the time Dr. Kellogg closed his private practice, he had cared for three, maybe four generations of children in some families. Not long ago, he treated an infant with an unusual, but familiar last name. That patient turned out to be the great-great grandson of the Anaheim physician who treated Dr. Kellogg for pneumonia when he was a child. What a tremendous way for such an admirable medical career to come full circle.
