ECHOES FROM THE OPERATING ROOM

Trafford Publishing

Contents

1. A Moment in Montgomery....................................................12. Hippocrates of Cos: The Most Famous Physician.............................53. Mythology and Medicine: The Symbol of Medicine............................94. Mythology and Medicine: Achilles and Medusa...............................115. The Barber Surgeon and the Barber Pole....................................136. The Patron Saints of Surgery..............................................157. A Brief History of Cesarean Section.......................................178. Andreas Vesalius: Human Anatomy Redefined.................................199. William Harvey: The Circulation of Blood Described........................2110. A History of General Anesthesia..........................................2311. The First Use of Ether for Surgical Anesthesia...........................2512. Wash Your Hands..........................................................2713. The Birth of the Germ Theory and Bacteriology............................3114. The Discovery of Antisepsis..............................................3315. A Brief History Blood Transfusion........................................3516. The First Laparotomy.....................................................3717. The First Gastrectomy....................................................3918. The History of Appendectomy..............................................4119. Advances in Appendectomy.................................................4320. Pancreaticoduodenectomy..................................................4521. The First Perineal Prostatectomy.........................................4722. The Use of Rubber Gloves in Surgery......................................4923. The White Coat...........................................................5124. The History of Surgical Attire...........................................5325. The History of the "Scrub Tech"..........................................5526. The History of Surgery on the Mayo Stand.................................5727. The Father of Surgical Education: William Halstead.......................6328. The Father of Modern Hernia Surgery: Eduardo Bassini.....................6729. The Father of Neurosurgery: Harvey Cushing...............................6930. The Father of Pediatric Surgery: William Ladd............................7131. The Father of Modern Orthopedics: Willis Campbell........................7332. The Father of Cardiac Surgery: Michael DeBakey...........................7533. The Father of Modern Gynecology: J. Marion Simms.........................7734. The Blue Baby Turns Pink.................................................7935. John H. Gibbon: The Birth of Open-Heart Surgery..........................8336. A Button and the Surgical Clinics of North America.......................8737. Surgeon Nobel Laureates..................................................9138. Electrosurgery and a Man Named Bovie.....................................9739. Johns Hopkins and the Four Physicians....................................9940. The Mayo Clinic and the Mayo Brothers....................................103I George Washington, President 1789-1797.....................................107II James A. Garfield, President 1881.........................................109III Grover Cleveland, President 1885-1889, 1893-1897.........................111IV Dwight Eisenhower, President 1953-1961....................................113V Ronald Reagan, President 1981-1989.........................................115References...................................................................117

Chapter One

I think I should begin by telling you, the reader, a little about my own surgical history and why I wrote this book. I was twenty years old when I walked into my first operating room at St. Margaret's Hospital in Montgomery, Alabama. After graduating from high school, I lived at home in Louisville, Kentucky in order to attend the University of Louisville. But after eighteen months of very little study, my two major interests were rock and roll and Kentucky bourbon. At the end of a late night of too much of both, the Beatles blared out from the radio in my 1957 Chevy, cutting through my aimless adolescent confusion, and told me with their song's title that I was a "Nowhere Man". This unlikely instance of clarity suddenly took my life in a different direction. That same morning I joined the United States Air Force in order to grow up and to help my country, or so I thought, in Viet Nam. It was 1966 and the war was escalating rapidly to its peak. The recruiter assigned me to be a medic. After basic training, and then medic school, I was told I was to be an operating room technician. I was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama for training. After a week of learning the names of the instruments, the correct way to fold linens, and the details of sterile technique, Master Sergeant Cartledge sent me downtown to St. Margaret's to watch surgery for the first time.

The head nurse, who was a tall imposing Catholic nun, told me to go to room two, stay out of the way, and just watch. Doing as I was I found operating room two and pushed open the two half doors that hung in mid-air from each side frame much like the old bar room doors in a Roy Rogers western movie. The moment I stepped into that small operating room in Montgomery, Alabama, my life was changed forever. The surgeon was making an incision into a young man's knee. I knew at that second what I would do for the rest of my life. I had never seen anything so exciting, so interesting, so precise, and so meaningful. I knew I had to do it. That moment in Montgomery hit me like a thunderbolt from Zeus. I hurried back to my sergeant to tell him that I finally knew what I wanted to do, so he could let me go back to the University of Louisville and I could become a surgeon. Upon hearing this, after his laughter had stopped, he assured me that I had four more years to serve in "this man's Air Force" and that if I lived through Viet Nam then I could try college again.

I spent three more years in Air Force operating rooms with one of those years being stationed in Southeast Asia at U-Tapoa Air Force Base in Thailand. The horrible injuries and wounds I saw there did not deter me but further reinforced my desire to be the one making the decisions and doing the dissection. When I came home and was discharged, I immediately returned to the University of Louisville and started college all over again. I had but one goal and that was to become a surgeon, not a doctor, but a surgeon. After graduating college, the University of Kentucky accepted me into medical school and gave me the chance to get a M.D. degree. Then five years of intense training in surgical residency followed, and now some 30 years as an attending professor of surgery has passed since that fateful day in my first operating room. I have had the privilege of operating on many thousands of patients and the opportunity to teach hundreds of young men and women the satisfaction of caring for patients in and out of the operating room.

When I returned home and reentered college, I worked as a scrub technician for a truly talented surgeon named Benjamin B. Jackson. He had trained under the great professor of surgery Robert Ritchie Linton at Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Every day, as we operated, Dr. Jackson recounted the...