Surgery: No Place for Amateurs

The potential benefits to humanity from the transplantation of organs are so great that they are tempting insufficiently trained surgeons, warns Dr. Francis D. Moore (TIME cover, May 3, 1963). For kidney transplants, pioneered at Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, of which he is surgeon in chief, Dr. Moore says that skill is needed in four specialties: kidney physiology, the surgery of blood vessels, treatment of urological disease, and the use of potentially poisonous drugs to suppress transplant rejection.

Expertness in any one of these takes years to acquire. Yet Dr. Moore reports in Science that the Brigham is getting a stream of visitors who hope to spend only a few days learning the techniques before returning home to try transplants. Some restraint is needed to protect patients, says Dr. Moore. And the hazards are not limited to such rare operations as transplants. Even so common a procedure as giving a general anesthetic, he says, still carries enough risk to demand practitioners who are both expert and experienced.