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Anesthesiologist & Artist

The photographs of Alfred Feingold, M.D.

HAND SURGERY: These surgeons are repairing some tendons while excising a Dupuytren's contracture—a condition causing the fingers to contract into the palm due to a thickening of deep tissue that extends from the palm to the fingers. From the left are orthopaedic surgeon John Nutting, M.D., resident Jorge Brito again, and DMS student Nikhil Thakur. Nutting, who trained at DHMC from 1980 to 1985, has been on the DMS faculty since completing a fellowship in upper extremity surgery at Harvard in 1986.

 

This is one of the images that I saw immediately when I walked into this OR. It's such a dramatic picture—this hand held open by the retractor. I want to draw people into the center, and this hand draws you right in. Any time you can pick a part of the body that everyone knows—faces, hands, eyes— there's a greater fascination. Most people don't know what a liver looks like, what a bowel looks like. But a hand everyone recognizes.


SURGEONS AT SEA: Otolaryngologist J. Oliver Donegan, M.D. (left), and resident Matthew Zavod, M.D., are wearing non-latex gloves because they're operating on a patient with a latex allergy. This OR is usually used for pediatric procedures and so has a mural on the wall. Feingold said he'd never before seen a mural in an operating room.

 

There was a sign hanging on the door of this OR alerting everyone to the fact that the patient was sensitive to latex. So using Photoshop, I placed the sign in the sand in the lower right corner. Then I used transparency to give a sense that the surgeons are part of the mural. The hand in the background is holding a scalpel, while the hand in the foreground is suctioning.


MAPPING THE BRAIN: Neurosurgeon David Roberts, M.D., is performing stereotactic surgery, using three-dimensional coordinates to guide him to a target within the brain. Roberts, a 1975 DMS graduate, also did his neurosurgery training at DHMC and is chief of the neurosurgery section.

 

Roberts is extremely well known. He's responsible for a lot of advanced instrumentation in neurosurgery. He uses the computer to map out the brain and decide where he's going to operate. So you're looking at a computer screen with the Windows icons, plus the three-dimensional computer-generated map that he's using to do the operation. Notice that there's one pair of hands coming out of the computer screen. I did that because the human becomes almost a slave of the computer. I made the microscope transparent so you can see the computer through it, and the plastic sheet on the right semitransparent. I do that sparingly; often it doesn't work, but here I think it worked very well.


TRANQUILITY: Anesthesiologist Steven Andeweg, M.D., is keeping a close eye on this assortment of monitors indicating the patient's condition—even though he appears to be floating in a bank of clouds above the Connecticut River.

 

This is a tranquility shot. Anesthesiologists have to deal with the very high-tech anesthesia machine and the tension and difficulty of the operating room and of delivering anesthesia. But then there are also quiet moments where your mind can wander and there's peace.

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