The Pharos - Alpha Omega Alpha

neurosurgeon
Dr. Pendleton is a second-year resident in
Neurosurgery at Jefferson Medical College.
Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa (AΩA, University of
California, San Francisco, 2004) is an associate
professor of Neurosurgery and Oncology
and Director of the Pituitary Tumor Center at
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Har vey Cushing, the founder of
American neurosurgery, began his career
as an assistant surgical resident
and then as a senior surgical resident at the
Johns Hopkins Hospital under the supervision
of Dr. William Stewart Halsted. Examination
of Hopkins’ surgical files throughout Cushing’s
four-year general surgical residency under
Halsted shows how he developed the experience,
vision, and operative skills he needed to
transform neurosurgery into a successful subspecialty
during the early twentieth century. 1–4
As the demands of subspecialty surgical training
increase, and the length of general surgical
training decreases, it is worthwhile to reflect
on the important role of broad general surgical
education in the early development of a surgical
subspecialty in the United States.
Structured surgical training programs grew
out of an early desire to distinguish tradesmen
barber-surgeons from academically trained professionals.
In Paris in the thirteenth century, the
College de Saint Come identified the two groups
by coat length, those with the most formal training
having the longest coats. 5 This separation
of trained versus untrained gave way to the
establishment of formal apprenticeships in the
sixteenth century. 5 Apprenticeships provided
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