John w kirklin biography
John w kirklin biography
John w kirklin biography obituary...
John Webster Kirklin, MD
The founder of the nation’s first formal educational program to train surgeon assistants, John Webster Kirklin (1917-2004), was also a pioneer in the development of cardiac surgery.
He modified and made clinically workable a heart-lung bypass machine (Mayo-Gibbon pump) when none were reliable. He made innovations and taught precision in operative techniques, patient care, pathophysiology of cardiopulmonary bypass; and he wrote and co-edited a current standard textbook in cardiac surgery.
His concept of training surgeon assistants as a new type of physician assistant in the late 1960s was based upon his contention that physicians were maldistributed by region and by specialty, even if there were no actual shortage of them.
He believed that physicians were over-trained in many respects for tasks they performed and envisioned qualified assistants, properly trained and supervised, performing some of the more routine tasks traditionally performed by physi