A Miracle And A Privilege [antikvár]

Preface My surgical experience as a child was confined to appendicitis at age 12 and a fractured knee at 14. After the appendix operation, my rowdy friends came to call, and we got to laughing. It hurt. Surgery. As for the knee, maybe that carried some sort of an academic message, because Frederick Christopher, a surgeon of Winnetka, thought my fractured knee was unusual (as I was certain, of course, that it was). It was depicted in his Textbook of Minor Surgery. Impressive. I still have the volume as a memorial to my adolescent trauma. In 1933 as a sophomore in college, I decided to apply for admission to medical school. As a third-year medical student in 1937 I resolved to try for a surgical internship and started out as a fledgling surgeon on July 1, 1939. Just halfway between those two decisions, in June 1935, Laura Bartlett and I were married. My decisions to enter medicine as a profession and the field of surgery as a calling had at least some basis in my childhood experiences. Although there were no physicians on either side of my family as far back as we could trace, I enjoyed science and especially biological science. As a child I had the privilege of being the patient of several remarkable doctors, two of them surgeons. Surgery was probably the inevitable choice, as I enjoyed a certain degree of manual dexterity, whether it be playing the piano or tinkering in the tool shop. Being by nature more a participant than an observer, I favored the interventionist mode as an approach to IX