Gifted Hands: America's Most Significant Contributions to Surgery
"Everyday around the world, people are asked to entrust their lives and their loved ones to surgeons who take them to the brink of the death and then return them to a state even better than before. This profession, called Surgery, which at once, can restore function, re establish blood flow and give life remains mysterious to countless people. That is, until now. Seymour Schwartz, known to every medical student as a result of his brilliant bookPrinciples of Surgery, has now turned the focus inward in his bookGifted Hands. He examines the very genesis of our field and takes readers on a historical yet dramatic ride through the life and death decisions that set the tone for what has become modern day surgery. The hubris of the early surgeons can be stunning, yet Schwartz shows us how early surgeons hit that perfect intersection between audacity and achievability and how we all benefited because of it. Surgery has had a rough and sometimes gritty past, but it was always hopeful, and that message rings through loud and clear inGifted Hands. There is no question that this is a book about Heroes. They are compassionate intellectuals who forever changed the course of our medical history. Make no mistake; Seymour Schwartz is one of them." --Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Faculty Neurosurgeon Emory Clinic and Chief Medical Correspondent, CNN. Author ofChasing Life, the New York Times bestseller.