The names we still say in the operating room

Harvey Cushing

American neurosurgeon

Widely called the father of modern neurosurgery, Cushing was also a relentless problem solver at the table. He introduced small silver clips to control bleeding in the brain, and in 1926 he worked with the physicist William T. Bovie to bring electrosurgery into the operating room. Both ideas came from the same frustration: the tools of the day could not keep up with the operation he wanted to do.

The Mayo family

Rochester, Minnesota

The Mayo scissors on the cover of this book carry the name of the Mayo Clinic, built by Dr. William Worrall Mayo and his sons, William J. and Charles H. Mayo. More than a century later a Mayo scissor sits on nearly every surgical tray in the world, which is about as good a definition of a lasting design as there is.

Philip D. Kerrison

Ear surgeon, 1861 to 1944

Dr. Kerrison was an American otologic surgeon and the author of Diseases of the Ear, a standard textbook that went through several editions in the early twentieth century. The rongeur he pioneered was made for careful, controlled bone removal in tight spaces. More than a century later it is one of the most used instruments in spine surgery, refined again and again by makers and surgeons, yet still recognizably his idea.

It is also where this story starts. ACE Medical Company began with one set of Kerrison rongeurs bought with cash, and the Wiggins name became known as the home of the original black Kerrison.

Leonard I. Malis

American neurosurgeon

Malis made bipolar coagulation practical for the microscope era, developing the equipment that let surgeons control bleeding precisely in delicate tissue. Generations of bipolar forceps, including several in this book, trace back to the problem he set out to solve.

M. Gazi Yaşargil

Microneurosurgery pioneer

Working in Zurich, Yaşargil helped bring the operating microscope into neurosurgery and then built the instruments that the microscope demanded, including the aneurysm clips that carry his name. He is a reminder that a new way of operating usually needs a new set of tools.

Albert L. Rhoton Jr.

University of Florida

Rhoton spent much of his career in Gainesville at the University of Florida, where his study of microsurgical anatomy changed how neurosurgeons are trained around the world. The microdissectors that carry his name are on trays everywhere, shaped by his insistence that an instrument should follow the anatomy.

William S. Halsted

Johns Hopkins

The first chief of surgery at Johns Hopkins changed the operating room in ways large and small. When his scrub nurse, Caroline Hampton, developed a reaction to the harsh disinfectant of the day, he had thin rubber gloves made for her. Within a few years the whole team was wearing them. The fine hemostat known as the Halsted mosquito forceps is still on nearly every tray.

Wilder Penfield

Montreal Neurological Institute

Penfield founded the Montreal Neurological Institute and mapped the human brain while his patients were awake on the table. The slender dissectors that carry his name remain some of the most familiar instruments in neurosurgery, a small tool that outlasted a very large career.

Alfred W. Adson

Mayo Clinic

A pioneering neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic, Adson gave his name to the delicate toothed tissue forceps that surgeons of every specialty reach for when closing. Few people who pick up an Adson forceps know who he was, which may be the purest form of the name on the instrument.

Lars Leksell

Karolinska Institute

The Swedish neurosurgeon behind the stereotactic frame and the Gamma Knife also designed the double action rongeur that bears his name. His work is proof that the same surgeon can think in both the largest and the smallest scale.

John R. Cobb

Orthopedic surgeon, New York

Spine surgeons say his name every day twice over: once for the Cobb angle, the standard way to measure scoliosis, and once for the Cobb elevator, the instrument used to strip muscle from the spine. One surgeon gave the field both its yardstick and one of its working tools.

John H. Gibbon Jr.

Cardiac surgery, Philadelphia

Gibbon spent the better part of twenty years building a machine that could take over for the heart and lungs during surgery, while many colleagues doubted it could be done. In 1953 at Jefferson in Philadelphia he used it to close a hole in a young woman's heart, and open heart surgery became possible.

Michael E. DeBakey

Cardiovascular surgery, Houston

While still a medical student, DeBakey designed a roller pump that later became a key part of the heart lung machine. He went on to build the cardiovascular program at Baylor in Houston, and the atraumatic DeBakey forceps, made to hold vessels without crushing them, are now used across nearly every specialty.

Sir John Charnley

Orthopedic surgery, England

Charnley worked like an engineer, testing materials and friction until he arrived at the low friction hip replacement in the 1960s. He also pushed for ultraclean air in the operating room to bring infections down. Millions of people walk without pain because he refused to accept a joint that wore out.

Sir Harold Gillies

Plastic surgery, England

Faced with thousands of soldiers returning from the First World War with devastating facial injuries, Gillies invented much of modern plastic surgery as he went. His name lives on in the needle holder and the skin hook that plastic surgeons still use.

Sir Harold Ridley

Ophthalmology, London

Ridley noticed that fragments of acrylic from shattered cockpit canopies sat quietly in the eyes of injured pilots. That observation led him to implant the first intraocular lens in 1949. It took decades for the profession to accept the idea, and it now restores sight to millions every year.

Kurt Semm

Gynecology, Germany

Semm designed many of the instruments and insufflation devices that made operative laparoscopy possible, and in 1980 he performed the first laparoscopic appendectomy. He was widely criticized at the time. Today minimally invasive surgery is the standard in general surgery, gynecology, urology and beyond.

Hugh Hampton Young

Urology, Johns Hopkins

Often called the father of modern urology, Young led the Brady Urological Institute at Johns Hopkins and designed instruments to match the problems he saw, including a punch for relieving prostate obstruction through the urethra. He showed that a specialty can be built around the tools its surgeons invent.

Takanori Fukushima

Skull base surgeon

Dr. Fukushima was one of the most accomplished skull base surgeons of his generation, known for his work in the cavernous sinus and for a long list of microsurgical instruments that carry his name. He was also a close friend of the author. Together they designed the reverse action bipolar forceps, built to let a surgeon work in very narrow anatomy with a relaxed hand. He is the one surgeon given a named tribute in this book.