Tag: Surgery
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The scorn of slow stitches
Anthony GulottaBethesda, Maryland, United States As a third-year medical student on my first surgery rotation, I had been standing consecutively for almost three hours. Until now, I had stood silent, watching as the attending surgeon excised a gangrenous gallbladder. Then, my focus was rapidly disrupted. “Over here!” bellowed the surgeon. I was being called to suture for the very…
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The grim horrors of the orlop deck
Richard de GrijsSydney, Australia The often awe-inspiring works of art immortalizing historic naval battles usually belie the harsh reality of war. Amidst clouds of billowing, black smoke and the deafening roar of cannon fire, sailors faced the real danger of life-threatening injuries. Injured sailors were carried, dragged, or stretchered to the surgeon’s “cockpit,” a dimly…
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The name of gratitude
Giulio NicitaFlorence, Italy Florence was covered in a blanket of snow. Only three patients were sitting in Guido’s waiting room. Others had canceled because of the weather. A young pregnant woman waited with her husband and was soon ushered into the office. When the couple was seated at the doctor’s desk, he asked the woman…
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Denis Burkitt, surgeon and epidemiologist (1911–1993)
At the age of forty-three, Denis Burkitt acquired eponymous immortality by having an important disease named after him. Born in Northern Ireland in 1911, he received an early education in a highly religious family that emphasized prayer, study of the Bible, and service to others. At age eleven he suffered a serious accident when someone…
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Richard Wiseman, “father of English surgery”
Richard Wiseman. Photo by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. Hunterian Museum, London. Via ArtUK. Richard Wiseman lived in the turbulent seventeenth century that devastated Western Europe by its internecine conflicts. Germany was torn apart by the Thirty Years War, France by the rebellion known as the Fronde, and England by the Civil War…
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“Man’s greatest pleasure”: Dr. Richard Selzer, as patient
Mahala StriplingFort Worth, Texas, United States A Yale-New Haven surgeon-writer, Richard Selzer wrote stories about his patients that illuminated their souls. But he did not really know what it was like to be a patient until a dramatic, transformational event occurred on the last day of March, 1991. Returning home from a long speaking tour…
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John Douglas of the “high” stone operation
Instruments used by John Douglas for the “high operation.” From Eric Riches, The History of Lithotomy and Lithotrity, January 24, 1967, p. 193. John Douglas was born in 1675 in Baads near Edinburgh. He had six brothers, the most famous being the anatomist James Douglas, remembered eponymously for describing the Pouch of Douglas (an extension…
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C. Walton Lillehei, father of open-heart surgery
Dr. Clarence Walton Lillehei (1918–1999) was born in Minneapolis, received his medical degree from the University of Minnesota in 1942, and spent his entire career on the staff of the University of Minnesota Medical School. In the early 1950s he began to experiment with cross-circulation, a technique in which the blood vessels of a patient…
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Francisco Graña, eminent Peruvian neurosurgeon
Francisco Graña. Via International Museum of Surgical Science Facebook. Francisco Graña (1879–1959) was a Peruvian neurosurgeon who once removed a subdural hematoma using 2,000-year-old tools, including a saw of volcanic obsidian glass and a bronze chisel, borrowed from the Peru National Museum of Archaeology. Born into a family of medical professionals, Graña studied medicine at…
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James Hardy, heart and lung transplant pioneer
James D. Hardy was an American surgeon who performed the world’s first human lung transplant in 1963 and human heart transplant in 1964. Born in Alabama in 1918, Hardy obtained his medical degree from the University of Alabama in 1942. He served in the army during World War II, then returned to the University of…