When my family first arrived in the United States from Cuba, the very first care we received in this country was at Cook County Hospital. And it’s truly public, urban hospitals like these that have served as the pillars of surgical training and have provided urgent lifesaving treatment in our major cities. Participation in documentaries about these urban trauma units are my way of helping people to understand that this isn’t “ER,” or like anything else you see glamorized on television.

What is real is the lifesaving emergency trauma surgery provided in trauma centers in America every day. And I hope that the people who watch these programs understand the need to support urban hospitals as well as academic trauma centers, and help get the word out to political leadership in every city that we need these hospitals, which provide critical treatment to all people at their moment of greatest need. 

Another major interest of yours has been community outreach in the area of violence prevention, projects for which you’ve been commended by the king and queen of Spain and the governor of California, among many others. How does this kind of outreach tie to your work as a trauma surgeon?

To me, this work is an extension of my social conscience. I’ve always said that medicine is the greatest vehicle for social change. As a trauma surgeon, what you see in a trauma center is all the evils of our society — domestic abuse, elderly abuse, drug abuse, urban violence, every type of violence and injury imaginable — converging in one place. My own kid brother was a victim of urban violence. He was killed in a robbery attempt, which took his life. Trauma is a surgical disease, and the very disease I fought every day was the disease that took my brother away. That was a culminating moment in my life. And I wanted to do something about it.

I started a community outreach violence prevention program called the Trauma Outreach Program, which has reached more than 15,000 at-risk youth in Philadelphia Los Angeles, Newark and Miami. I am extremely concerned now about the violence in my own hometown in Chicago. We work to engage children in these cities in constructive endeavors, to try to get them to focus on other things than gangs and the kinds of conflicts that breed urban violence. The point is to not just treat the end result of these conflicts but to be a leader in these communities, to enact and demand accountability.

How and why did you choose to attend Rush Medical College?

The reason I chose Rush was because of its history and its trajectory. Rush has played such a tremendous role in the development of American medicine and particularly surgery. Rush has produced some of the greatest figures in American and world surgery, surgeons such as Brainard, Fenger, Senn, Murphy, the famous cardiovascular surgeon Willis Potts, Charles T. Parkes, an outstanding surgeon who was a pioneer in the treatment of abdominal gunshot wounds, and Moses Gunn and Daniel Brainard, a trauma surgeon who’d treated soldiers in the Civil War. And then some more contemporary surgeons, including Evarts Graham, Dallas Phemister, Lester Dragsted, Henry Harkins, Geza De Takats and Ormond Julian, great pioneers in cardiovascular surgery, and Kellogg Speed, the surgeon who founded the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma. There are so many other names here, like my professors in thoracic surgery: Dr. Penfield Faber, a superbly knowledgeable, stern teacher, Dr. Frederick Kittle, a superb surgeon and lover of Sherlock Holmes, and Robert Jensik, the epitome of speed and excellence in an operating room, my professors in thoracic surgery whose surgical abilities heavily influenced me, and then Dr. Hushang Javid, my professor of cardiovascular surgery — the list goes on.

As Rush alumni, we truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Rush has had a collection of amazing graduates and faculty. It was a tremendous source of pride for me that the people who had been at Rush before me had made such tremendous contributions to surgery. Well, I was greatly influenced by my own professors at Rush, and now, all these years later, who would believe that a poor Cuban immigrant who put himself through medical school by working as a Chicago Transit Authority train conductor and rail worker would be following the same path as some of these surgeons? That connection to Rush and its history is still there for me; I live and breathe it every day. You have something so great that it spurs you on to achieve greater and greater things, and that’s why I came here. It was an amazing opportunity.

You’ve trained more than 150 visiting international scholars in surgery as well as a large number of surgical residents and trauma surgery fellows in more than 50 countries, all of whom have gone into academic surgery. How were you shaped by your own professors at Rush? Who were some of your greatest influences?

When I came to Rush, I was very much influenced by the professors that I had. A major influence for me was my professor of biochemistry named James Hayashi. He became a mentor and a friend, and he was very influential in my critical thinking and analysis in not only my first two years basic science years, but through the remainder of my career. He was born in Alameda County, was interned in a camp in Utah, got out, joined the Army, and got educated. And then Stuart Levin is one of the most unbelievably astute clinicians with such a wealth of knowledge, a very distinguished man. Charles D’Angelo was a great mentor of mine, a wonderful neurosurgeon. Subsequently, I rotated with Alex Doolas, the man who was singlehandedly responsible for my becoming a surgeon, a man who grew up and pulled himself up by his bootstraps also worked for the Chicago Transit Authority, but also a tremendous surgeon with a tremendous wealth of knowledge and great confidence in his ability to operate. Those were very influential people. And then my professor in orthopedics was the former chairman, Jorge Galante. After graduation, I rotated in a surgical service at Rush, working for six months as an intern, and I found that Steven Economou, who was very erudite and has the most thoughtful approach to surgery. He’d get up at four in the morning and read and would ask you what you read each morning. He was very instrumental in my receiving my surgical training at Northwestern. And then of course, there is Professor Stuart Levin, my professor in internal medicine and infectious diseases, the most amazing clinician I have ever seen and will ever see, a man with such a breadth of knowledge and an approach to teaching that is truly the epitome of a great  scientist, which he is. His teaching still resonates within me.

To this day, the manner of teaching and superb knowledge of Levin, the character of Doolas, the science of Economou, the stalwart presence of D’Angelo, the elegance of Galante, and the critical thinking of Hayashi have all shaped my career.

What about your written work?

I currently have 445 publications, plus the sixth edition of my textbook is coming out, as well as a new atlas of surgery, and upcoming textbook of vascular trauma, and a number of other papers and presentations, but I’m very proud of a paper I’ve been writing about Rush.

I am presently writing a paper titled, “Historical Contributions of Rush Surgeons to American and World Surgery.” Rush as an institution and its surgeons are single-handedly responsible for the creation of the Chicago School of Surgery, one of five recognized schools of surgery in the United States, but in my opinion, the most powerful contributions to American surgery have come from Rush. Rush’s surgeons have been pioneers in the development of abdominal surgery, cardiac, thoracic and vascular surgery. Former students, residents fellows and professors of Rush were founders of the American Surgical Association, the American Medical Association, the American College of Surgeons, the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma, the American Board of Surgery, the Western and Central Surgical Associations, the Chicago Surgical Society, and the Society for Vascular Surgery. Eight percent of the 130 presidents of the American Surgical Association were Rush professors. They have served as president of the American College of Surgeons, as well as all of the other surgical societies previously listed.

A Rush alumnus, Dr. Frederick Christopher,  produced the most comprehensive textbook of surgery in the United States, originally known as the Christopher-Davis Textbook of Surgery, back in 1936. This textbook is now in its 17th edition and known as the Sabiston Textbook of Surgery. A Rush surgeon was the first president of the clinical congress of the American college of surgeons; the Surgical Clinics of North America was created by a Rush surgeon; and Rush surgeons have been departmental chairs of surgery at Northwestern, University of Chicago, Washington University and University of Washington in Seattle and have twice been departmental chairs at Johns Hopkins. The founder of Alpha Omega Alpha was also a Rush medical student who later became a surgeon.

The lists of “firsts” in surgery from Rush is extremely long and distinguished, and I hope to crystallize all of this in one single paper to help contextualize Rush as a major force in the evolution of surgery worldwide.

And you created a surgical technique?

I did. I created a surgical technique known as stapled pulmonary tractomy, which is a surgical technique that’s used the world over and especially now in Iraq and Afghanistan for the management of penetrating lung injuries. And this technique saves lives and spares wounded soldiers or civilians from having to have major lung resections, and avoiding grave consequences. Also, I described the multidisciplinary approach for the management of complex hepatic injuries from grades IV to V. This approach has reduced the significantly high mortality of these injuries.