Surgeons and Something More: The History of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania

Biographical sketches of the nineteen chairmen who have guided the evolution of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and surgery department, America’s first, from 1765 to the present day

In Surgeons and Something More, Clyde F. and Elizabeth D. Barker chronicle the evolution of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and surgery department, America’s first, begun in 1765. In the turbulent time before and after the Revolution, with medicine and surgery then in a primitive state, the new school’s leaders numbered not only the doctors but also some of America’s most conspicuous political and military figures. Over the next 250 years, the new nation experienced a dozen wars, four presidential assassinations, several devastating epidemics, and the expansion of US territory nine times over. This book reveals how Penn surgeons played prominent roles in these events as well as in the concomitant medical advances, such as anesthesia, antisepsis, heart surgery, x-rays, transplantation, cancer chemotherapy, intravenous nutrition, and gene therapy.

The biographical sketches of the nineteen chairmen who have guided Penn Surgery over its development detail the department’s progress and depict some of its setbacks. These trailblazers wrote the first textbooks, taught the first classes, started the field’s journals, and led its academic organizations. By inventing new procedures they saved lives but, by ignoring antisepsis, lost many others. They operated on Supreme Court justices, paupers, prisoners, and gravely wounded presidents. Three of them became US surgeon generals. Others fought duels, explored the frozen Arctic seas, and conducted clandestine love affairs. In war, they parachuted behind enemy lines and invented SCUBA to swim underwater and disrupt enemy shipping. They built World War II’s largest hospital in the Burmese jungle to care for wounded commandos and in Korea’s MASH tents they were the real-life Hawkeyes struggling to save the lives of stricken GIs. This is the story of how surgery evolved to its present, still imperfect form, and of the role played by the doctors of a single institution, the University of Pennsylvania, in advancing the surgeon’s science and art.

Clyde Barker, the Donald Guthrie Professor of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, is a native of Salt Lake City and a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Cornell University, and Cornell University Medical College. His entire career has been at the University of Pennsylvania. He trained at Penn, spent ten years on transplant immunology in the department of genetics, practiced vascular and transplant surgery for forty years, served under eight of Penn Surgery’s nineteen chairmen, and for eighteen years, chaired the department himself. He has published 425 scientific papers, four books, and an essay on Thomas Eakins that won the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities. He has also been president of the American Surgical Association and the American Philosophical Society.

Elizabeth Barker has an AB in Art History from Princeton University. She has worked as a finance director for education reform initiatives at Edison Learning, the New York City Department of Education, and New Classrooms Innovation Partners. She brings a twenty-first century perspective and technical expertise indispensable during the book’s extensive research. Her background in art history helped in the selection of illustrations that bring the text to life.