Wanderjahr. The Education of a Surgeon

As we train in medicine, we learn of Ghon complexes, Leriche syndrome, and Roux-en-Y abdominal operations, yet we know very little about the personalities behind these names. When did these scientists and doctors exist, and where did they live? Wander]ahr. The Education of a Surgeon, edited and annotated by J. Gordon Scannell, M.D., an emeritus Professor of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, describes many of the characters that dominated medicine and surgery in the early twentieth century. Dr. Edward D. Churchill was the John Homans Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School from 1931 to 1961 and an important figure in the development of thoracic surgery. In 1926, fresh out of his residency training, he was granted a Moseley Travelling Fellowship, entitling him to his year of wandering, during which he visited the pioneers of the field of thoracic surgery. "His Wanderjahr took him to Blair Bell in Liverpool; to Berlin and Prague; to Sauerbruch in Munich; to deQuervain, Kocher's successor in Bern; to Enderlen in Heidelberg, Krogh in Copenhagen, Brauer in Hamburg." His recollection of this year and its influence on the future events of his brilliant career are presented in informal travelogue fashion, based on a series of oral history interviews conducted as Churchill was nearing retirement. Here we read of a promising young American surgeon with the luxury of 12 months to visit the great laboratories of Europe, to ski in the Bavarian Alps, to drink port in Cambridge, and to honeymoon at the Savoy. He remembers the excitement of thoracoplasty operations for tuberculosis, the failures of treating asthma surgically, and the first heart-lung machines. Churchill describes the German nationalism of Sauerbruch and the meticulous technique of Brauer. Closer to home, he offers his point of view of the rivalry between Harvey Cushing's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital surgery program and Churchill's own Massachusetts General Hospital program. This is a short book, one that can be read in one sitting. While it does not offer a complete discourse on the development of thoracic surgery, it does serve its purpose-to bring the reader to Europe between the World Wars and to Harvard in the days of Cushing. To the historian of medicine, it offers a personal glimpse of the towering personalities in modern surgery. And to the uninitiated medical student, like me, it transforms the Kochers and Halsteads from surgical instruments to men of science.