My Dominant Hemisphere

An Ongoing Surgery

Bonjour everyone! Today, I’m going to share with you some high yield keywords that should hopefully help you breeze through your surgical rotations in med school. Call it a checklist if you will. The objective is to facilitate memory recall and help you gear up with areas that you just have to familiarize yourself with, ideally before the start of your rotations. Understand that these are just keywords, with a special emphasis on surgical instruments, and you’ll really need to read some good books to develop your knowledge base. For a rapid-fire review I suggest Surgical Recall. For basic surgical skills, you might like RM Kirk’s Basic Surgical Techniques. It is also a good idea to refer to specific sections (for pictures of incisions, instruments, etc.) of a good reference book on the surgical specialty you’ll be rotating in. Finally, like we all know, surgery is an area that is incredibly skill based and different people have different preferences when carrying out the same thing – be it tying a knot, controlling a bleeder or what have you. You’ll learn to modify the way you do things depending on the specific ways of your surgical team.

I’ve also interspersed keywords specific to two areas that I have an interest in with regards to surgery, or rather surgical oncology to be exact – general thoracic surgery and colorectal surgery.

I shall be updating this list as the need comes. Comments, corrections and feedback are always welcome! Bye for now !

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Akin to the multistage launching of a space-ship or satellite, the use of the “Jump flap” technique/wrist-transported abdominal “pedicled tube flaps” for reconstructive surgery of the face, lower limb, etc. never ceases to amaze students of surgery. Pedicled-tube flaps were first pioneered by Sir Dr. Harold Gilles who is considered as the father of modern plastic surgery and who widely used tube flaps during the First World War. The Gilles Archive at Queen Mary’s Hospital, UK contains fascinating pictures of his work. For more on the contributions of Dr. Gilles one might also want to check out Project Facade, an interesting venture that aims to compare plastic surgery as it was practised during WWI to how it is practised now, depicting how far the science has come & what the future might hold. War Surgery & Medicine, a book maintained by the New Zealand Electronic Text Center contains some interesting historical photographs depicting the jump-flap technique of reconstructive surgery.