Tag: Surgery
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Yurii Voronoy, Ukrainian kidney transplant pioneer
Yurii Yurijevich Voronoy was born in 1896 in a village in the region of Poltava in Ukraine, where his father was a professor of mathematics. In World War I Voronoy was a volunteer corpsman in the Ukrainian contingent, and after the war he studied medicine in Kyiv. He then joined the department of surgery in…
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John Woodall, author of The Surgeon’s Mate
John Woodall was a seventeenth century English physician and Paracelsian chemist known for his writings on medicine and health. Born around 1570 in Warwickshire, he was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to a London barber surgeon but did not finish his apprenticeship. From the age of nineteen in 1589, he gained experience as a…
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The surgeon who invented the Penrose drain
Charles Bingham Penrose. Via Wikimedia. Charles Bingham Penrose was born in Pennsylvania in 1862. Tall and athletic, he once traveled on horseback from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls and back. He also swam fifteen miles in the ocean in five hours. In 1897 on a hunting trip in Montana he killed a bear cub and was…
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Pierre Fauchard (1678–1761), dentistry’s founding father
Brody Fogleman Cristin Grant Harsh Jha Noel Brownlee Spartanburg, South Carolina, United States Pierre Fauchard (1678–1761) Dr. Pierre Fauchard was a French surgeon and dentist who worked in Paris.1 He is widely accepted as the father of dentistry because of his many important contributions to the discipline and is particularly well-known for his work…
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Thomas Curling (1811–1888)
George Dunea Chicago, Illinois, United States Thomas Curling. US National Library of Medicine. The appointment of young Thomas Blizard Curling as assistant surgeon at the London Hospital through the influence and recommendation of his uncle, Sir William Blizard, raised eyebrows and caused at least some resentment, for he was barely twenty-one years old and…
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Forgotten pioneers of pediatric cardiac surgery
Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States Credit for pioneering heart surgery in children is primarily given to Robert Gross of Boston Children’s Hospital and Alfred Blalock at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. However, two Chicago surgeons who saved many lives with their innovations in the same era have been largely forgotten. In the first half of…
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William Webster, the first modern Canadian academic anesthesiologist
Kush Patel Ajax, Canada Dr. William Webster. Photo by the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society (CAS), 2004. Archival Resources, Preserving the Heritage of Canadian Anesthesiology, p. 5. Permission obtained by the CAS Archives and Artifacts Committee. Until the early twentieth century, anesthetics were a black box, and even though ether and chloroform were commonly used, their…
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Unconventional wisdom: A risky business
Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. – Carl Sagan Illustration of veno-arterial ECMO in a neonate. Arrows show the direction of blood flow. Blood is withdrawn via a catheter placed at the junction of the superior vena cava…
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Ernst von Bergmann, the surgeon who heat-sterilized surgical instruments
Ernst von Bergmann. Meisenbach Riffarth & Co., Berlin, c. 1890. Via Wikimedia. After Louis Pasteur showed that diseases were caused not by miasmas but by bacteria, Lord Lister pioneered antiseptic surgery by seeking to exterminate these unwelcome organisms with his carbolic acid pump. This martial approach was later followed by aseptic surgery, in which bacteria…
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Claudius Amyand (c. 1680–1740) of the first appendectomy
On the southwest corner of London’s Hyde Park once stood St. George’s Hospital, now relocated to the suburbs. It had been founded in 1733 by a group of surgeons who moved there from the Westminster Hospital. Among them was a surgeon whose Huguenot parents had fled from France after the revocation of the Edict of…