What the Hands Know
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2025
This chapter is about discovery in a field that is extremely practical: surgery. When I started working in medicine, I thought my career would be satisfactory and interesting but not creative. It was only later in my life that I discovered the true creativity of a surgical procedure. Surgery is about feeling and touching. It is about tension in the tissue, traction, and countertraction. It is about beautiful sutures that lie back-to-back in the tissue. Perspective 1 is an extract of an article that was published in the journal Transplantation in 2015. It was written after the five-year follow-up results of the HIV-positive to-positive transplants that I pioneered at Groote Schuur Hospital and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Perspective 2 describes the hands’ work. What is this discovery – how does it feel? This perspective provides the story of hands in words. Perspective 3 is a sketch. It demonstrates the space in which the hands work. The things the hands do while discovering. Perspective 4 is the conversation that happens while the hands work.
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