Interview with George E. Green, MD by Norma M.T. Braun, MD

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US AA155.INT169

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Interview with George E. Green, MD by Norma M.T. Braun, MD

Date(s)

  • 6/13/2017 (Creation)

Extent

1 DVD (1:06:58)

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Biographical history

Dr. George E. Green was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. He attended Yale College and Yale Medical School. He returned to New York to intern at Bellevue Hospital and complete a residency at Saint Vincent's Hospital and the Veterans Administration Hospital. He also completed a residency in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery at New York University Medical Center. Green began working with microsurgery techniques while working with Dr. Max Sones at Beth Israel Medical Center. Dr. Sones was looking for a better solution to the reconstruction of the esophagus post cancer treatment. In order to improve on the technique, Green introduced himself to Julius H. Jacobson, MD who was newly arrived at Mount Sinai Medical Center, and was the first American to publish about using a surgical microscope to anastomose the smallest blood vessels. Green was given access to Jacobson's lab to practice the same procedure. In 1965, while presenting a paper on these procedures, Green met Donald B. Effler, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic, who was lecturing on the Vineberg Procedure, which was named for Arthur M. Vineberg, MD, who successfully used the internal thoracic, or mammary, artery, to tunnel it into the heart muscle to establish collateral circulation to the coronary vessels. This meeting produced many trips to the Cleveland Clinic for Green, collaborating with their physicians which eventually led to Green performing the ITA bypass procedure on a person. In 1970 Dr. Green was hired to establish St. Luke's Hospital cardiac surgery program, and by 1982 St. Luke's was doing approximately 1800 cases a year, which was the biggest program in the state. In 1986 his work was verified by Dr. Airlie Cameron, who conducted a fifteen-year follow-up study of the coronary artery bypass surgery and presented documentation of improved survival rates with the internal thoracic artery compared with the saphenous vein bypass. The first of its kind, the study was published in 1986, with a 20-year follow-up study is published in 1995.

Name of creator

(1937-)

Biographical history

Dr. Norma Braun (neé Wang Mai Tsen) was born in Shanghai, China during the third Japanese invasion, before the World War II. Prior to the war her family was well off and very well educated. Both her grandfather and father spent time in American universities. Norma, however did not attend school until age 10, because of the war. In 1949, she, her mother and siblings relocated to Philadelphia. Norma, who desired to be a doctor from a young age, started medical school at Temple University but transferred to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (Class of 1963) after being offered a scholarship. She completed her internship and residency at Bellevue Hospital and began working at St. Luke’s Hospital in 1982, as a cardio-pulmonary fellow under A. Loomis Bell, MD, who ran the cardiopulmonary laboratory. Eventually she narrowed her specialty to pulmonary medicine, and continues to work in that area at St. Luke’s, now Mount Sinai Morningside.

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Dr. George E. Green is an innovator in the application of micro-suture techniques to coronary artery surgery. He is also the first American surgeon to perform a left coronary artery bypass graft using the internal thoracic artery sutured to the left anterior descending coronary artery to bypass obstruction to the heart circulation. He developed these techniques in 1968, and in 1970 brought them to St. Luke’s Hospital to establish a cardiac surgery program that by 1982 was seeing approximately 1,800 cases a year - the biggest program in the state.

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Transcript is available.

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Copyright is held by Mount Sinai. Please contact the Archives (MSArchives@mssm.edu) for more information.

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      DVD was a DVD-R containing MP4 file; copied to Azure 11/13/2017. Video sent to MediaScribe for transcription 11/13/2017.

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