At this year’s ESS annual Symposium, we look forward to unveiling the 2024 edition Surgeon to Soldiers by Edward D. Churchill, MD, FACS. This monograph on Dr. Churchill’s wartime experiences as chief surgical consultant in the North African and Mediterranean theater of operations (MTO) in World War II was first published in 1972. This book was one of his last acts as an author as he passed away of a heart attack later that year while on his farm in Vermont. For this newsletter, I thought it would be interesting to recount some of the background details on the genesis of this new edition.
Motivation for this Project
First, why was it necessary to re-publish this historic book? To be very clear, this reflective memoir certainly can stand alone as it has for more than 50 years. Yet, as a new generation of military surgeons sought to purchase copies of this historic reference, it became increasingly difficult to find intact copies at an affordable price. Even the most reliable outlets for rare books listed this out-of-print book as either “unavailable” or at an exorbitant price. Ultimately, the wisdom contained in these pages risked being lost to history. To make it readily accessible at an affordable price, a new edition was required.
The need to re-publish this historic work was first recognized by Jay Johannigman, MD, FACS, in Iraq in 2006 after John Holcomb, MD, FACS, introduced him to “the best book he [Holcomb] had ever read to prepare a military surgeon for deployment.” I first heard the idea of re-publishing Surgeon to Soldiers at an American Association for the Surgery of Trauma annual meeting a few years later. At our early morning military liaison committee meeting at that conference, Jay Johannigman and Juan Asensio, MD, PhD, FACS, FCCM, enthusiastically promoted this concept. Having read Surgeon to Soldiers a few years earlier and having discovered how hard it was to find a copy when I wanted to give one away as a gift, I instantly recognized the wisdom of this proposal.
Early Efforts
As some of you will appreciate, the path to the finish line in the publishing world is often nonlinear. Consequently, like many other pursuits in life, major projects like this require persistence and a willingness to actively learn along the way. The first thing I learned is this book still falls under copyright protection; however, the original publisher (Lippincott) no longer exists. To further add to the challenge, the trail of past royalty checks had completely disappeared. I was fortunate to connect with Keith Donnellan thanks to a little assist from LinkedIn. Donnellan is a senior editor at Wolters Kluwer, the company that had acquired Lippincott years ago, and he is responsible for their surgical product line, including notable titles like The ICU Book and Mastery of Surgery. He embraced the vision of this unique project—re-publishing a wartime memoir with modern commentary for the benefit of military and civilian surgeons and medical planners alike—and became an important advocate for the project’s success.
At just about the same time, after lots of digital and archival digging, both Donnellan and I found the original copyright for Surgeon to Soldiers in the Library of Congress (Figure 1, above). Interestingly, I also encountered some of Dr. Churchill’s correspondence with his editor from Lippincott in my research in the Countway Library in Boston (Figure 2, below). Now, the challenge was to find any surviving family that might hold claim to this copyright. More internet digging, including a search in Ancestry.com turned up one of Dr. Churchill’s grandchildren, Eric Churchill, MD. He works in Family Practice just outside of Boston and serves as the de facto ambassador for the Churchill family on all aspects related to the Churchill medical legacy. I will forever cherish my first telephone conversation with Eric who generously took time to share his family’s perspective on his late grandfather’s contributions to military and civilian surgery. Eric then supplied several digitized historic photographs that greatly enhanced my presidential address and write-up on Expeditionary Surgeons published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. Eric rallied the support of his family for publishing a new edition of the book, and he has proven to be a great source of encouragement along the way.
Additional key stakeholders then rallied around this project with very strong support. Michael Sutherland, MD, MBA, FACS, Director of ACS Member Services, was instrumental in our meetings with the publisher that convinced them to back this project. Mary M. (Peggy) Knudson, MD, FACS, and Eric Elster, MD, FACS, also provided key endorsements that led to project approval.
