The Surgical Legacies of Hawkeye Pierce

Abstract

The title of the story I want to tell today is “The Surgical Legacies of Hawkeye Pierce.” Hawkeye Pierce is the dedicated master surgeon, fun-loving romantic, acerbic observer of the foibles of his associates, and successful football team leader invented by Richard Hooker in his book, M*A*S*H. Richard Hooker was the pseudonym adopted by Richard Hornberger, a surgeon and alumnus of the Cornell Medical School. All of you know that the book later became a successful motion picture and a longrunning television series. Dr Otis Apel published a reallife account of a mobile Army surgical hospital (MASH) surgeon in his book MASH: An Army Surgeon in Korea. Hooker’s book joins a long line of darkly humorous works about war experiences, including the cartoons of Bill Mauldin and novels by such authors as Heller and Vonnegut. Recent additions to this lineage include an important comic novel about the war in Iraq entitled Fobbit by David Abrams. I became interested in the legend of Hawkeye Pierce when reading the obituary for Dr Keith Reemstma after his death in 2001. The obituary stated that Dr Reemstma had been the surgeon that Hooker had used as the model for Hawkeye. Of interest is the fact that I knew of at least 3 other surgeons who had been identified as the model for Hawkeye. One of them was a former member of the Southern Surgical Association and a valued friend, Dr Alvin Bronwell. It is unlikely that there was a single model for Hawkeye. In fact, in the author’s foreword he states that Hawkeye was a composite of personalities he had encountered in Korea and was not modeled after a single surgeon. The Southern Surgical Association has a history of supporting military surgeons during and after wars. In his Presidential Address in 1917, William D Haggard reflected on the patriotism of military medical personnel. Dr Haggard reminded the audience that the first American killed in World War I was a surgeon who was part of the staff of the Washington University Medical Unit