By Gregory K. Faucher, MD

When I first sat down to write about what it means to be a great hand surgeon, I immediately thought of the “greats.” People like Bunnell, Eaton, Littler, and Carrol laid the foundation for our field. They paved the way, by cobbling together a new discipline of medicine in response to wartime necessity. Certainly we owe our forebears a great debt of gratitude for their vision and perseverance. As I thought about it, however, this seemed to not totally hit the mark. Sure these were “the greats,” but, as a matter of fact, I have known many great hand surgeons who have not lent their names to instruments or surgical innovations. Moreover, these surgeons were not great in my mind because of their grandiose accomplishments, but because of the things that they did when nobody was looking. They called patients with difficult news and spent a little bit of extra time in the exam room to make sure that a diagnosis was well understood. They scrubbed in with a partner to assist with a difficult case, or took some time after the end of a long workday to give a talk to a resident or fellow. They drew diagrams to illustrate anatomic relationships for patients and patiently waited in the room until all questions were answered. They did not see a diagnosis, but a person. In short, they were excellent doctors, and that, in my mind, made them great hand surgeons.