History of Pediatric Surgery Podcast: Sneak Peak

Have you ever wondered how the field of pediatric surgery was born? Here's a sneak peek into the storybooks as told by Doctors Nakayama and Ponski. So when that blast happened and all the people were at the windows, it killed thousands and it maimed thousands of others and utterly devastated the medical community there. And so a call came out almost immediately for relief, and it was a 37-year-old surgeon named William Ladd who responded. Now Ladd had already found an interest in pediatric surgery some years before, after he had trained at Harvard, and he organized a convoy of 40 physicians and nurses to go through the winter. They had had a snowstorm at that time. and so they had to go by train and they reached there only 2 days after the blast itself and they set up shop at a ruined church that was still serviceable. They took care of the injured and took care of hundreds of kids. They stayed for a month during the December and January of the holiday season of 1917 and 1999, so that was a kind of unofficial start and it as a myth grew because people started to say that that's where Ladd got his inspiration to go to pediatric surgery. And although that's a great story, it wasn't true. Ladd had already made the commitment to go into pediatric surgery before then, but it just shows the level of his commitment, and that was something that Mary Falle, as president of ABSA last year talked about the need for pediatric surgeons to be committed to the care of kids, particularly kids who have been injured, and it's a powerful message that continues today. You know, you had mentioned that children really have been a part of the history of surgery for a long time. Can you go through some examples? Yeah, kids have always been part of the most famous events in medicine. Children happen to have been the first patient in a number of signals. Achievements such as the first smallpox vaccination in 1796. That was an 8-year-old that was immunized by Edward Jenner. One of the first patients to get anesthesia by Crawford Long was a teenager who had a finger amputation. And then finally the first splenectomy for blunt trauma was a 14-year-old who had fallen from a scaffold. He ruptured his spleen and he got his spleen out, but that was the first time that someone recognized that someone was about to die from a ruptured spleen, and they did an operation that saved his life. The history of surgery is rich with patients of childhood age. Oh, and to listen to the rest of the podcast, visit the Stay Current app. And later, join us, the Stay Current and pediatric surgery team, as we partner with Behind the Knife to bring you the highlights of APSA's 50th anniversary meeting.