Atypical appendectomies
Jayant Radhakrishnan Nathaniel Koo Chicago, Illinois, United States The Silversides Appendectomy was photographed by XO Roy Davenport, at the patient’s head. Thomas Moore is the dark-haired bearded man in the T-shirt. From the USS Flier Project. Appendectomies are routine procedures—until they are not. Three cases of auto-surgery and three other semi-pro appendectomies are worth […]
Tutorial for surgeons by Lawrence Peter Berra
Jayant Radhakrishnan Chicago, Illinois, United States The above photograph is from the archives of the Cook County Hospital when it closed. It was taken in the amphitheater in the main building. Autopsies were an indispensable part of surgical learning in the past. In this photograph two autopsies are being carried out simultaneously. The year […]
Bristol Children’s Hospital and esophageal atresia
Richard Spicer Bristol, United Kingdom Fig 1. Bristol Children’s Hospital 1885-2001. Photo by the author. Bristol Children’s Hospital The Children’s Hospital in Bristol began as the Free Institution for Diseases of Women and Children in 1857. In 1885 it moved to a purpose-built neo-Gothic building (Fig.1) and continued to treat women and children on […]
Nobel Laureate Surgeons
Jayant Radhakrishnan Darien, Illinois, United States Mohammad Ezzi Jizan, Saudi Arabia Originally published in the World Journal of Surgery and Surgical Research 2020; 3: 1206 under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Republished with author permission. Introduction The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine has been awarded to 219 scientists in the last 119 […]
Nicholas Senn, the great master of abdominal surgery
Photo of Nicholas Senn. From A group of distinguished physicians and surgeons of Chicago… by F.M. Sperry. 1904. Via Wikimedia. Public Domain. Nicholas Senn was a man with an extraordinary capacity for work, an innovator, always trying new methods, even new experiments that he first conducted on himself. Born in 1844 in St. Gaul, Switzerland, […]
George Crile Sr., founder of the Cleveland Clinic
Portrait of G. W. Crile. Credit: Wellcome Collection. (CC BY 4.0) Early days George Crile was an exceptional man, a skilled surgeon who lived at a time when American medicine was emerging from its horse and buggy period and was embracing the principles of aseptic surgery and scientific medicine. Always full of new ideas, he was […]
The memorial of Thomas Johnson, eighteenth-century barber surgeon
Stephen Martin Durham, UK, and Thailand Fig 1. Monument to Thomas Johnson, Brancepeth. Source: photo © author. Public domain for non-commercial use In the churchyard of St. Brandon in Brancepeth1 village, County Durham, UK, is an unusual headstone monument.2 (Fig 1) Dating to the very last year of the eighteenth century, it has three […]
Lawson Tait, father of aseptic surgery and gynecology
Robert Lawson Tait. via Wikimedia. Robert Lawson Tait was fifth in a dynasty of pioneers who helped transform surgery from a primitive craft to a sophisticated life-saving art. They all worked for a time at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary—James Syme (the “Napoleon of Surgery”), Robert Liston (“time me, gentlemen”), James Simpson (“made childbirth painless”), and […]
William Sands Cox—surgeon and founder of the Birmingham Medical School
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom Drawing of William Sands Cox by T H Mcguire. 1854. Public domain. Via Wikimedia In the early nineteenth century Birmingham was the second largest city in England. It was an industrial powerhouse, known as the city of a thousand trades, but it did not have its own medical […]
Alfred Skirrow Robinson: the colorful life of a Roaring Twenties surgeon
Stephen Martin Durham, UK & Thailand Fig 1. Bentley Speed Six. Source: Craig Howell, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia In 1926 my grandfather started work for Dr. A.S. Robinson in Redcar, a small town on the Yorkshire coast. The doctor needed a driver—at least that was the plan at first. He sent him for a […]