The book brought it all back. When we were first year residents we were told to scrub with Dr. Kelman because the senior residents were pretty sure the whole bizarre enterprise was a malpractice nightmare. By the time we were senior residents we were pretty sure this was the next big thing and wouldn't let the juniors scrub.
I remember feeling that we were in the center of the ophthalmological universe. Visitors came from all over to see what was happening. Among them the Japanese who came in groups each member of which had a camera and a notebook. One day I was assisting Byron Smith on a lid procedure. He was complaining about the operating chair of which there were two kinds. The one he preferred had a large leather tractor type seat like a Harley-Davidson. The one he had been given was narrow and round like a Honda seat.
"I hate this seat. Cuts your balls off." He grumbled.
"What he say" From the corner of the room.
"Kutchur barsoff" From another corner
This was dutifully copied into several notebooks to be translated later.
Mikhail Leonidovich Krasnov was the leading ophthalmologist in Russia, more famous even than Fyodorov. He came to see what was going on accompanied by two bodyguards who never spoke and accompanied him everywhere. They even changed into scrubs and stood quietly in the corners in the OR. One day at Grand Rounds the topic of intraocular lenses came up. Dr. Troutman was at that point extremely critical of the procedure and said to Dr. Krasnov, "Would you put one of those in your mother's eye?"
"No, but I put one in your mother's eye" was the heavily accented response.
There was a brief silence and rounds moved on.
Henry Pollock '71