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Ann Thorac Surg 2007;83:361-369
© 2007 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

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Presidential Address

Navigating the New "Flat World" of Cardiothoracic Surgery

Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts

^_* Address correspondence to Dr Levitsky, Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, LMOB 2A, 110 Francis St, Boston, MA 02215 (Email: slevitsk@caregroup.harvard.edu).

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

	Introduction

 

Sidney Levitsky, MD

I am deeply honored by your trust and faith in electing me as your President of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS). I consider this past year of stewardship as being the most important position that I have had in my entire surgical career. It has been immensely satisfying to serve the Society.

With our present concerns about attracting residents into our specialty, it is important to look back into our own careers to determine who were the role models that helped us along the way. In 1956 (3 years after the first open heart operation by Dr John Gibbon), when I was a freshmen medical student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, I responded to an advertisement by Dr Charles Ripstein, an early closed heart surgery adapter, and Dr Robert Goetz, a cardiac physiologist, who were looking for a student to build a heart-lung machine and initiate a research laboratory program to obtain surviving animals after cardiopulmonary bypass.

This experience changed my focus from psychiatry to surgery and led to a senior student, surgical elective at Johns Hopkins, where fortunately for me, Dr Alfred E. Blalock assigned me to a young assistant professor, Dr David C. Sabiston, who has remained a mentor and adviser during my entire career (Fig 1). I was fortunate to obtain general surgical, cardiovascular, and general thoracic surgical residency training at the Yale-New Haven Medical Center under the influence of Drs William W.L. Glenn, the developer of the Glenn shunt, and Gustaf E. Lindskog, a pulmonary surgery pioneer (Fig 2). After military service, I joined the Clinic of Surgery at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under Dr Andrew G. Morrow, where I learned to become a serious surgical investigator (Fig 3). I then served . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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