Medicine: Surgery Made Plain

A small bright star at the American College of Surgeons’ Clinical Congress in Chicago last week was tiny, twinkling, 77-year-old Dr. Bertha Van Hoosen. She twinkled over a two-foot, mangerlike box. With this box and a kit of surgeon’s tools, she ran a surgical kindergarten, showed scores of women doctors how a Caesarean operation is done.

The box represented a woman’s abdomen. Inside, homemade in pink and red, were models of all the organs involved in childbirth. The pelvic cavity was an oval fruit basket. The walls of the box, as well as the pelvis, were covered with pink silk, imitating the peritoneum, glistening lining of the abdomen. Red yarn, knitted by Dr. Van Hoosen herself, showed the pattern of abdominal muscles, Fallopian tubes, ovaries. The mouth of the uterus was knitted in a purl stitch, the body in plain stitch. Inside the womb was a rubber doll, encased in a bag of Cellophane, attached to the placenta (a dark red knitted cap) by an umbilical cord of red corrugated rubber balloons.

When Dr. Van Hoosen opened the woolen uterus and lifted out the “baby,” the women all stood up and clapped.

Dr. Van Hoosen believes that, since a medical student must practice, it is better to practice on a box full of organs than on a patient. She has used similar boxes to show operations for adhesions, removal of the uterus, hemorrhoids.

Born on a farm near Rochester, Mich., Dr. Van Hoosen worked her way through the University of Michigan Medical School by teaching anatomy. Later she taught at Northwestern, the University of Illinois, finally settled down in Chicago at Loyola, where she is now professor emeritus. She still operates four days a week, is famed for making the world’s smallest appendix incisions—half an inch.

She also established the first mothers’ milk bureau in the U. S., sent a supply to the infant Dionne quintuplets. Her favorite hobby is campaigning against tobacco and alcohol.

Dr. Van Hoosen never misses an opportunity to give mere man a piece of her mind. Once, when she was about to operate on a woman infected with gonorrhea, she learned that the patient had caught the disease from her husband. She sent for him forthwith, made him stand by and watch the operation. Thrice he fainted; thrice Dr. Van Hoosen called to her assistants: “Throw some water on him. . . . He’s responsible for this thing and he’s going to see it through.”