A Surgeons World

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives. At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor. Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

A New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize | Named a best book of the year by The Guardian "Enthralling. Harrowing. Heartbreaking. And utterly redemptive. Lindsey Fitzharris hit this one out of the park." —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile Lindsey Fitzharris, the award-winning author of The Butchering Art, presents the compelling, true story of a visionary surgeon who rebuilt the faces of the First World War’s injured heroes, and in the process ushered in the modern era of plastic surgery. From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: humankind’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured. In the midst of this brutality, however, there were also those who strove to alleviate suffering. The Facemaker tells the extraordinary story of such an individual: the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to reconstructing the burned and broken faces of the injured soldiers under his care. Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world’s first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of practitioners whose task was to rebuild what had been torn apart, to re-create what had been destroyed. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero, but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of the wounded but also their spirits. The Facemaker places Gillies’s ingenious surgical innovations alongside the dramatic stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine can be an art, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

The Making of a Surgeon is the memoir of an apprentice. It is William Nolen's story of his transformation from student to practitioner, from a brash medical school graduate to a surgeon possessing skill and judgment. And, as in the best memoirs, in the brilliant flash of his self-discovery, William Nolen illuminates the world outside himself. First published in 1970, The Making of a Surgeon received critical acclaim and touched a world audience. The book's universal themes propelled it to the rarified heights of a best seller. In this reprinted edition, with a foreword by the author's daughter, his classic returns. Book jacket.

Winner, 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly A Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian "Warning: She spares no detail!" —Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the squeamish—and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course of history. Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister’s career path to his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to Lister’s contemporaries—some of them brilliant, some outright criminal—and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers. Eerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world.

This book is a collection of short accounts of the lives and works of surgeons who began to use techniques in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that were to form the basis of reconstructive and cosmetic surgery and give rise to the specialty of plastic surgery. Descriptions of the intricate and novel surgical operations undertaken by these pioneers are included, but the emphasis is above all on stories of widely varying and fascinating characters, from the strange or eccentric, such as Hippolyte Morestin, to the serious or ambitious and a few, such as the Dutchman Johannes Esser and the legendary Sir Howard Gillies, who were accomplished in other fields, including business, sport and art. It is related how the two World Wars played a key role in the development of new techniques and how the endeavors of the pioneers were sometimes rejected by obstructive or abusive colleagues, impacting on careers and reputations. Pioneers in Plastic Surgery will appeal to all with an interest in the history of the discipline and the figures who shaped its birth and growth.

George Chapman was a remarkable man. He was an internationally known healer and gifted trance medium. In his entranced state he surrendered his identity to a distinguished surgeon named William Lang who had passed away in 1937, just a decade before he first spoke through Chapman. Through Dr Lang, Chapman was responsible for many extraordinary cures, and he travelled all over the world on his healing mission. The evidence for his claim to be the mediumistic channel for William Lang is extremely impressive, involving not only former patients but also Lang's family members and former medical colleagues. When asked about the mission, Chapman once said: 'The real purpose of Dr Lang's spirit return, I am convinced, is not solely to cure sick people. lt is to touch the soul and to give us a new convincing insight and understanding of the spiritual reality which surrounds us'. This fascinating and inspiring book tells the story of George Chapman and Dr Lang, whose relationship has a significance that goes beyond the healing of physical bodies. Roy Stemman, a well-known author and journalist specialising in the paranormal, penned the first edition of Surgeon From Another World with George Chapman. He has now produced this updated and expanded edition, with the cooperation of Michael Chapman, George's son. It includes previously confidential material about the special medical contract under which Chapman worked for many years under the direction of William Lang's daughter.

The author recounts his experiences as a surgeon during World War II, from November of 1944 during the fighting for Alsace-Lorraine to the end of the War, when the men of his unit were among the first into Dachau