Life and Death on the Operating Table

After reading this interview of Dr. Starzl by Dr. Paula Chen, I think I am going to have to Dr. Starzls' memoir, "The Puzzle People."

After finishing a difficult liver transplant, when the fear of losing the individual on the table has finally passed, it is hard not to step back for a moment and wonder about the surgeon who did the very first such operation.
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At the end of the operation, he writes, “[Bennie] was wrapped in a plain white sheet after being washed off by a weeping nurse. They took him away from this place of sanitized hope to the cold and unhygienic morgue.... The surgeons stayed in the operating room for a long time after, sitting on the low stools around the periphery, looking at the grown and saying nothing.... It was not the last time I would see this scene, both in my dreams and in reality. I never heard anyone who was there describe this as ’the Solis case,’ or the first human liver transplantation. If they mentioned it at all, it was always just about Bennie.”

I recently spoke with Dr. Starzl, who at 83 continues to be involved in transplantation research and with patients (he excused himself from one of our conversations to take a call from a patient). He shared some of his thoughts on the patient-doctor relationship, health care reform, and on being a patient and doctor...