The surgeon and the musician.

These two quotations encapsulate my personal thinking about music. I cannot imagine my life without listening to music most of the time. Being both a surgeon and an amateur musician, I have been, for a long time, intrigued by the potential relations between medicine and music (Fig. 1). Indeed there have been in history, many famous people who were both musicians and physicians or surgeons [1]. Just in the field of cardio-thoracic medicine, Leopold Joseph Auenbrugger (1722—1809) and René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781—1826) provide brilliant examples; both were composers and excellent musicians; the former described chest percussion and the latter invented the stethoscope; both were able to use their musical abilities to implement their medical achievements. In a recent paper, H.M. Evans described three potential relations between medicine and music: (1) medical employment of music, (2) medical explanation of music and (3) music as a metaphor for medicine [2]. I would like to follow the same pathway to explore the potential relations between surgery and music and to try to convince the readers that surgery may also be music.