Tag: Surgery
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Richard Wiseman, “father of English surgery”
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 that culminated in the execution of its monarch in 1649. In 1665 London was devastated by…
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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
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 of the peritoneal cavity into the pelvis). Another brother, Walter, served from 1711 to 1714 as governor general of the Leeward Islands, where…
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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 (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 the National University of San Marcos in Lima, graduating…
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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…
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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 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 nearly mauled to death by…
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Pierre Fauchard (1678–1761), dentistry’s founding father
Brody FoglemanCristin GrantHarsh JhaNoel BrownleeSpartanburg, South Carolina, United States 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 Le Chirurgien Dentiste (The Surgeon Dentist). Before the…