Echoes from the Operating Room: Vignettes in Surgical History

Every day in every operating room, the same names are spoken over and over again. These names are the names of the great surgical innovators and teachers of the past. Surgeons call out for Kocher clamps and Deaver retractors. They perform Billroth gastric resections and Bassini hernia repairs. Those names have echoed from the sterile environments of operating rooms for over a hundred years. In Echoes from the Operating Room, Dr. Boyd tells the stories of the principal events and great men of surgery and science and their accomplishments in a concise and compelling style. From the sad story of the men who discovered anesthesia to the romantic reason rubber gloves were first worn by surgeons, the historical highlights that form the basis of modern surgery are brought to life. Every historical vignette concludes with a famous aphorism. Surgeons, nurses, medical students, and surgeons in training will find these stories essential to their heritage, and the public will be drawn in to that sacred and serious place where the stories unfold.

Dr. Carl Boyd is a professor of Surgery and past chairman of the Department of Surgery at Mercer University School of Medicine in Savannah, Georgia. He teaches medical students and residents in surgery from many institutions. He is an internationally recognized lecturer who has presented and taught in fourteen different countries and has published over sixty scientific articles. Dr. Boyd lectures on presidential assassinations, the history of surgery as told through art, biography, and aphorism, as well as many other topics in surgical care. He has served as a reviewer on numerous editorial boards of medical journals. Echoes from the Operating Room is fostered by his thirty-five years of experience in the operating room coupled with a love of history. For twenty-five years, Dr. Boyd was chief of Trauma Surgery and Surgical Critical Care at a level-one trauma center at Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah, Georgia.