Abstract
This article examines the personal narrative of death and sorrow that played a key role in the development of pediatric surgery as a medical discipline during the mid-twentieth century. It approaches this argument by exploring the two most influential innovations in the discipline’s genesis: Morio Kasai’s hepatic portoenterostomy (Kasai operation) for biliary atresia and Alberto A. Peña’s PSARP (Peña operation) for anorectal malformation. These operations, being the most cited in academic journals and universally implemented in operating rooms, present a transnational medical history connecting such diverse places as Boston, Tohoku, and Mexico City. As a discipline, pediatric surgery was established on shaky ground as it relied on reluctant collaboration between surgeons and pediatricians. Until the late 1960s, when pediatric surgery gained wider recognition, early practitioners of this field were isolated from each other and lacked their own journals or other institutional links. Thus, they experimented with surgical techniques separately and strove for innovations through isolated trial and error. As Kasai and Peña’s operations showed, such technological innovations were often critically indebted to the tragedies of the practitioners themselves. In this sense, their namesake surgeries could be seen as tragic miracles born of agony and life-saving acts.
Published Version
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