Theodore Schwartz: belief

Transcript context

…Why do so many neurosurgeons get divorced? I think it’s the same thing. When you have a career where not only are you out of the house for a long time, and you get called out of the house at awkward times, so that could be on Valentine’s Day, that could be at 2:00 in the morning. But even when you’re there, even when you’re at home, there’s part of you that’s always absent. One thing that I realized is, no matter where I am, there’s always part of me that’s thinking about the patients that are in the hospital that I operated on last week and how they’re doing, and maybe one of them is struggling a little bit, and I have to be aware of that. I’m thinking about the patients I’m going to operate on next week, and the challenging cases coming up, and how those are going to go. I’m visualizing them in advance constantly. The past and the future of what you do is weighing on you all the time so that even when you’re present at home, you’re not fully present at home. It’s just a very demanding career, and it’s an unforgiving career. I write in the book about stories of some famous neurosurgeons like Harvey Cushing or Gazi Yaşargil. People don’t necessarily know all those names, but there’s a famous story about Cushing, who was really the founding forefather of neurosurgery in the turn of the century, 1905. He really was the first surgeon to dedicate his career to neurosurgery, which at the beginning of the century had a mortality of about 50 percent, and at the end of his career, it was down to about 8 percent. Really remarkable, what he had done to make neurosurgery safe. He went in to operate on a Saturday morning on a patient, and he got the news that his second son who had just graduated or finished his third year at Yale was in a car crash and died. He got the news in the morning, and he walked into the operating room, and he did the full operation that he was set to do, and then he went and claimed his son’s body when the operation was done. That just tells you something about what kind of a human being he was, what sort of focus, dedication, self-restraint, and discipline was required of Harvey Cushing to move the field forward the way he did. But wouldn’t a substitute be called for? If I’m the patient, I would want it arranged in advance that my surgeon — if that happened, they would sub in someone else. Maybe they raise the price to me. Even if some individuals might do it just fine, I would never know that.…

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