A Great Teacher of Neurosurgery in Korea: Hun Jae Lee (1921-1983).

www.eymj.org Hun Jae Lee was born on November 11, 1921 in Unsu-myeon, a village of Goryeong-gun, in the province of Gyeongbuk, Korea (Fig. 1). He was the eldest son of Bong Hwan Lee, a patriot who served 3 years in prison for his independence act, and Yeon Bun Ihm. He graduated from Severance Hospital Medical School in 1944 and completed his medical internship in Pyongyang Christian Hospital in 1945. Then, he was recruited to serve as professor in the Department of General Surgery at Daegu Medical University. In 1950, the Korean War began, and he joined the army as a surgeon, where he gained considerable experience in neurosurgery at the mobile army surgical hospital (Fig. 2). At that time, there was no neurosurgical institute in Korea. His experience in the Korean War helped lead him to become a neurosurgeon. In 1955, he went to the United States in order to learn neurosurgery. He underwent resident training at the University of Michigan Medical School from 1955 to 1957. He obtained the American Board of Neurological Surgery in 1958. Professor Edgar Kahn regarded him as excellent, and asked him to write a chapter on metastatic brain tumors in his book Correlative Neurosurgery. Although Kahn attempted to persuade him to stay in the United States, he returned home to develop neurosurgery in Korea. After his return in 1959, he practiced at Soo Do Medical College, which is now the Korea University College of Medicine. Then, he moved to Yonsei University in 1966 as Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery. From that time, he dedicated 17 years to building a foundation for neurosurgery in Yonsei University, until he passed away in 1981. Over those 17 years, he performed stereotactic thalamotomy in a patient with Parkinson’s disease using a Cooper stereotactic frame. He reported the follow-up results of chemothalamotomy for seven cases of Parkinson’s disease and four cases of dystonia. He administered open cordotomy for cancer pain, retrogasserian rhizotomy, and percutaneous alcohol injection for trigeminal neuralgia. For the treatment of hydrocephalus, he performed an experiment on ventriculo-atrial shunt, and he applied it to a patient using a Holter valve. In addition, he presented on hypertensive intracerebral hemorrhage, microneurosurgery, and surgical treatment of cerebral aneurysms under hypotensive anesthesia. He had great interests and passion in the surgical treatment of intracranial aneurysms. As many essential surgical apparatuses were not available in Korea in the 1960s, he even developed his own surgical clips. To do so, he remodeled a remote cable releaser of a film camera into a remote temporary clip, and asked a jeweler to make metal spring clips from his own design. He began microneurosurgery in 1972. In 1973, the neurosurgical department got their own surgical microscope. By the early 1970s, the annual number of operating cases for cerebrovascular disease had already reached up to 100, and the first micro-neurosurgical training course was organized to foster competitive Korean neurosurgeons (Fig. 3). Not only did this accelerate progress in achieving better neurosurgical outcomes, but also it had a great effect on neurosurgical training. With access to a dedicated microscope in 1974, his surgical technique became much more sophisticated, especially in the surgery for schwannomas and pituitary adenomas. He operated on numerous cases of brain tumors, including glioma, pituitary adenoma, meningioma, schwannoma, craniopharyngioma, chordoma, etc. Dr. Lee first established a system of subspecialties in the neuA Great Teacher of Neurosurgery in Korea: Hun Jae Lee (1921–1983)