Surgery: The Best Hope of All

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SURGERY

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The grey-gowned figure in charge looks like a visitor from another planet. Between skull cap and mask, his head sprouts a startling pair of binocular spectacles. His hands move with confident precision and his even voice snaps with authority, but his very words seem part of an alien language—a communication designed solely for his colleagues:

Fours on Frenchies, please. Twos on threes . . .

Let's get those little bleeders up there. Give 'em a little current!

Suction! Suction!

Swift yet unhurried, the tense drama of the operating room plays itself out as Dr. Francis D. Moore, surgeon in chief of Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, removes a breast afflicted with cancer.

Yet for all its otherworldly air, that drama is utterly human. Silent, motionless, unconscious, and all but invisible under her surgical drapes, the leading actor is the human patient.

Under the bright lights that illuminate the surgical incision with brutal clarity, the achievement of the surgeon and his assistants becomes one of the greater glories of science. Man may strain ever farther into space, ever deeper into the heart of the atom, but there in the operating room all the results of the most improbable reaches of research, all the immense accumulation of medical knowledge are drawn upon in a determined drive toward the most awesome goal of all: the preservation of one human life.

Hospital Truism. In hospitals all over the U.S., surgeons now make a routine performance of lifesaving procedures so radical that they were almost unimaginable a few years ago. There is hardly a place in the human body that surgeons have not been, hardly an operation too daring for themi to perform; yet the surgical patient can face his ordeal with more confidence than he ever could before. Per haps the proudest measure of the surgeon's success is the built-in assurance of today's hospital truism: "If they can operate, you're lucky."

That grisly hospital cliche, "The operation was successful but the patient died," is as out of style as the street clothes worn in the 19th century operating room. Even as the men-in-white of the 1930s have switched into the soft greys and greens and blues of today's surgical gowns, they have learned to do more than mere knife work: now they know what can go wrong both before and after an operation; they know how to take care of the whole patient. Their patients' lives are guarded by a vital fund of knowledge born after a long-overdue marriage of surgery and medicine.

"Why in God's name is there such a great difference between a physician and a surgeon?" cried the great 13th century physician Gilbertus Anglicus. And after seven centuries, his plea has been answered. Ever since medical science and surgery began keeping house together, they have inherited one bonanza after another from rich uncles to whom they did not know they were related: nuclear physics, polymer chemistry, rheology (flow of liquids), gas dynamics, cybernetics, electron microscopy. Out of a rich harvest of intelligence from the physical and biological sciences, surgeons have learned how to use heart-lung machines, artificial kidneys, X-ray cameras to take pictures inside the heart—a whole host of machines that could never have been made or