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Halsted's Hands - Michael Sarr: James C. Masson Professor of Surgery, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine

Halsted's Hands Fall 2011

Michael Sarr: James C. Masson Professor of Surgery, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine

Date: November 1, 2011

Sarr
Michael Sarr

Growing up, Michael Sarr always thought he’d be a pediatrician like his hometown idol. Surgery was the farthest thing from his mind.

“I assumed all surgeons were gruff, not thinkers, not scientists and just wanted to cut people open,” he recalls.

Surgery was so low on his list of priorities that when scheduling rotations during medical school at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s, he put off surgery until his fourth year.

During his pediatrics rotation, Sarr soon discovered that the field was not for him: He found the nurses too protective, the parents too difficult, and he recalls one awful night putting an IV in an 18-month-old’s arm six times because the tot kept pulling them out.

Two weeks into his surgery rotation he realized he was having fun. Then he met surgical scientist John Cameron.

“I said to myself, here’s a guy who’s an educator and thinker,” Sarr says. During a phone conversation with his father, a urologist, he remembers saying, “Boom. This is it.”

Sarr went on to a surgical residency at Hopkins and a postdoctoral fellowship under Cameron’s mentorship. He’s now vice chair for surgical research and chair of the Division of Experimental Surgery at the Mayo Clinic, focusing on bariatric and upper GI surgeries, and big abdominal wall hernias.

Halsted’s Hands: How did your training at Johns Hopkins impact your career?

Sarr: Hopkins is a very academically oriented hospital. If you rank priorities, academics is first, education is second and clinical practice is third.

Where I am now, it’s just the opposite. Clinical practice is first, and education and academics are tied for second. At Hopkins, I focused on science, writing and research, and I liked that. At the end of my second year, I did an NIH research fellowship at the Mayo Clinic and saw it from an academic standpoint.

When I came back, I expected to continue that approach but found a different environment. I learned to maintain that orientation, but it’s been a difficult battle. I’ve had a funded lab for 26 years but never been asked to give a talk on what I do. It’s a great place to work, but not as academically oriented.

Halsted’s Hands: What do you
like about surgery?

Sarr: Surgeons like being confronted with a problem: You either fix it or you can’t deal with it, but you don’t take care of patients throughout their lives.

It’s incredibly exciting; you get to take things out. We do things in the OR that you would be arrested for outside the hospital. It attracts certain personalities. You have to be aggressive and like the adrenaline rush. It’s the best profession in the world.

Halsted’s Hands: What is your advice to current residents?

Sarr: Focus on a subspecialty and orient your academic career toward that specialty. When I left Hopkins, I had written 55 papers, but on a mix of topics—plastics, GI, transplant, etc.—I was a ‘broad-based’ surgeon. That, I think, I would change.

For the first two years of my academic career, I wrote 100 papers on pancreatic surgery and performed pancreatic surgeries for 10 to 15 years. Even though I don’t really do pancreatic work as much anymore, I’m still known as a pancreatic surgeon.

Halsted’s Hands: What do you most remember about your residency?

Sarr: I did my basic surgery training at Baltimore City Hospitals. I saw blue-collar workers and steel workers. The chief of surgery was Gardner Smith, who was a wonderful mentor. I later gave the first Gardner Smith lecture. I also did a subinternship in medicine under chief resident Larry Koepp. I had a great time. Larry helped me do my first hernia operation. It took three hours and he never chided me to hurry up.

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