Medicine: It Keeps You Watching

There were no spectators to get in the surgeon's way as he operated on a rectal fistula one morning last week at the University of Kansas Medical Center. "Yet 140 students watched his every move and each turn of the knife more closely than if they had been jostling each other and craning their necks to look over his arm. The students were in an auditorium, 100 yards away, watching the operation on color-television receivers.

Thus began the first regular schedule of color-TV demonstrations for undergraduate and graduate students in a U.S. medical school. It marked the biggest advance in the techniques of medical education in many a year.

The students were even more enthusiastic about it than the surgeon-professors. The University of Kansas has used black & white TV for two years, but the switch to color ("like the difference between a wheelbarrow and a Cadillac") makes it far easier for students to tell a nerve from a tendon, something which was impossible among confusing shades of grey. Color TV is also an improvement over color movies. Says one Kansas student: "In the movies, you always knew everything would come out all right. Here, you never know when the guy will strike a snag. It keeps you watching."

In the operating theater, the TV camera's lens turret is mounted in the overhead light, directly above the surgeon's table. This has two advantages: it keeps the lens turret out of the surgeon's way, and it keeps him out of the camera's way—no surgeon gets in his own light while operating. To cut down reflected glare, some of the shiny instruments have been given a dull, gun-metal finish.

The operating surgeon wears a throat microphone so that he can explain every cut and stitch. Another professor listens in with the students; if he thinks that anything is unclear, he can use his half of the two-way circuit to ask the operating surgeon to spell it out. On another circuit, a senior surgeon can give advice to the operator, unheard by the students.

The $35,000 TV setup will cost at least $8,000 a year to run. But, says Head Surgeon Paul W. Schafer, "We figure it's worth it ten times over."