Fact & Fun In Surgery

Book excerpt: "When I review my own professional life and its many satisfactions, the greatest is not the surgical operations I have performed, nor the thousands of patients that I have cured, but the successful young surgeons whose instruction and training I have directed." (George Heuer, 1882-1950). This is very true of my four-decade-long surgical career too. In the process of instruction and training of the young surgeon, I have had the habit of noting down various little bits of surgical, medical, and general facts to help me remember details, and recall, of the same. These have been taken from books and journals read, as well as noted down from conferences and meetings attended. Entries were made into little yearly diaries. Over the last two decades, I have used these as a good source of my material for the numerous surgical quiz shows I have conducted for the relevant audiences (mainly surgical postgraduates and residents of the MS and DNB general surgical streams) at City, State, and National levels. Also, as part of my Quiz shows are numerous 'filler slides' of surgical aphorisms, myths, and humour, making it into a whole session of 'Quizotainment'. I have now attempted to put together all these surgical and medical facts into some sort of order and grouping to help easy reference and retrieval. I have included surgical aphorisms and humour, too, to offer an angle of fun while assimilating the fact, hence the title Fact and Fun in Surgery. It is important to note that the vast majority of the facts and quotes are NOT my own, and for many of them, I have not been able to trace their origin. I immensely thank all these unmentioned contributors for having shared their facts in the surgical literature or discussions. I have listed the broad references of the books in which the majority of these facts and fun quips are mentioned, but the list is not complete. It is also relevant to note that these fact listings are not exhaustive, nor do they cover all disciplines of medicine. They are predominantly surgical, with a few from the grey areas between surgery and other specialities. By compiling this book of surgical and medical facts, I do hope to fill a small void in surgical learning at the student level. I have always maintained that a person with no sense of humour has no sense at all and so used the aphorism, the pun, and the light-hearted wit, judiciously, to cool down the burden of memorisation, and later, to help in the recall. The combination of fact with fun definitely helps retentiveness and recollection of the fact. The book will, perhaps, help teachers too, in their preparations for teaching sessions.