When the Surgeon Was an Uneducated Barber
Come here,” the vascular surgeon told me during a lull in activity. I stepped closer. “Put your hand where mine is.” I burrowed my hand into the open abdomen, my wrist sliding past a mess of slippery intestines that occasionally contracted with a wave of peristalsis.
“You feel that?” he asked me. I nodded as a strong, steady pulse pushed against my fingers. “That’s the aorta.”
Over the past few weeks as a medical student on my surgery rotation, I had begun learning many of the tasks essential for a variety of operations. I had practiced suturing wounds closed, tying surgical string to my scrub pants so that I could hone my knot tying skills in between surgeries. I had grown familiar with how each surgeon liked to organize the array of wiring and tubes responsible for inflating the abdomen to improve visibility, vacuuming blood to locate the source of bleeding, and burning tissue to cauterize blood vessels. I had learned how to replace the arms on the behemoth that is the approximately $2 million da Vinci robot frequently used by some of the surgeons at my hospital, marveling at how much money could be put to work in a single room.
Medicine had been based on one man’s anatomical romp through the animal kingdom.
Each little task represented centuries of progress and innovation, the result of countless surgeons and non-surgeons
