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Presidential Address

By the Numbers!

Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Wake Forest University, School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

^_* Address correspondence to Dr Hammon, Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Wake Forest University, School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC 27157 (Email: jhammon@wfubmc.edu).

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

Two things that Dr David Sabiston said during my surgical resident training at Duke have stuck with me. The first he said was that, "when doing research, think of how it will help patients." He only said that to me once (one morning when we were discussing patients), and then he asked about how my research was going. The second, he said many, many times; this expletive, "Numbers Please!" usually occurred on rounds when we would be discussing a clinical case and the resident doing the discussion would give an opinion on the method of treatment or the outcome. Dr Sabiston was intent on residents searching the literature for specific conditions and operations, and quoting that literature rather than giving their own opinion, because we had little experience on which to base our own opinions. This was his contribution to what we now call evidence-based medicine.

When at Duke, and then at Vanderbilt, I had significant experience in research, much of which was basic research that ended up having little clinical application. My clinical research was much more interesting, but frustrating, as much of my time was devoted to clinical practice. In 1958, Francis D. Moore (from Boston) made this statement, which I have paraphrased because it summarized my research career at the time I arrived in Winston-Salem and Wake Forest in 1991: "A surgical investigator is like a bridge tender channeling knowledge from biological science to the patient's bedside. Those at one end of the bridge say he is not a good scientist and at the other not spending enough time in the operating room. If only he is willing to live with this abuse can he continue to do his job well" [1].

Sabiston's statement about research and helping patients has now been implemented into a . . . [Full Text of this Article]