Author: Hiram C. Polk Jr. MD Publisher: Small Batch Books, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2025
BOOK REVIEW: FIRST CLASS!- The Words That Define Them
Author: Hiram C. Polk Jr. MD Publisher: Small Batch Books, Amherst, Massachusetts, 2025
I
Review by Mary Barry, MD
am going to say it.“ The man, the myth, the legend,” is how one starts out describing Dr. Polk, who recently turned 90 and had the misfortune due to sudden mishap to miss his own party( although we all mourned the unfairness of that, it was incredibly fun to hang with lots of surgeons whom I love dearly and have missed much since I retired).
The legend part is not just surgical. During medical school at Harvard( his admission interviewer was none other than Dr. Arthur Guyton, author of the Textbook of Medical Physiology, who lived in Oxford, not far from Dr. Polk’ s hometown of Jackson, Mississippi), he earned meal and book money as the New England correspondent for The Thoroughbred Record weekly out of Lexington, Kentucky. He sent in racing dispatches from Suffolk Downs, Narragansett Park, Rockingham Park and Lincoln Downs, rushing home with notes and then hand-delivering the typed article to the Boston post office, timed to arrive each Monday, for the princely sum of $ 35 per. Little did he know then that he would one day own and race thoroughbreds.
Dr. Polk has published 11 books and has written or co-written over 450 scholarly articles. He was the Editor in Chief of The American Journal of Surgery from 1986 to 2004 and remains Emeritus Editor in Chief. A Harvard Medical grad who trained at Barnes / Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Polk has been president of every single surgery society that matters, and in 1995 was inducted as an Honorary Member to the Royal College of Surgeons( he spent a sabbatical at the Lister Institute in London in 1969). He served as Chair( named after him in 2012) of the UofL Department of Surgery from 1971 to 2005, after spending four years on the University of Miami faculty, where he cared for many victims burned in a maritime disaster.
30 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE