He also has written a book, Cutting Remarks; Insights and Recollections of a Surgeon. It's about his surgical training in San Francisco in the 1970s, aimed at the lay reader with the goal of entertaining with good stories, informing with understandable details of surgical anatomy, procedures, and diseases.
Here is a little taste of what you can find on the Surgeonsblog --good stuff!
If there's such a thing as mild OCD, I think I have it. For a surgeon, I'd say that's generally a good thing. In my practice, I was pretty obsessive over making sure everything was as it should be: the right instruments available, all lab and paperwork hand-carried to the OR the night before surgery. I liked the look of putting sutures in perfectly spaced, each bight the same size as the last. I took certain stairs, walked the hospital halls in ways that required the least amount of retracing steps, achieving maximumfficiency. Back stairs to the top floor, down a particular hall where the first patients were, then to the nurses' station, then another hall, down the front stairs to the next floor. Like that. The down side is that I often over-reacted if things weren't just so: if during the thousandth time I was doing a particular case, the suture (for example) that I always used wasn't readily available, it could drive me nuts. Less in terms of going ballistic (oh, there were times) than getting stressed out.
1. Thanks!
Posted at 11:28AM on May 26th 2007 by Sid Schwab