The Importance of an American Institution
One institution that played a very important part in the advancement and betterment of plastic surgery, and of surgery in general, was Johns Hopkins. It was there that Dr. William Stewart Halsted created the first general surgery training program in the United States. In 1904 he published “The Training of a Surgeon”, which laid the foundation for what was to become the prototype for all modern surgical training programs. With this the U.S. could finally claim a level of surgical sophistication on par with Europe. It wasn’t long before the U.S. began to surpass the rest of the world, especially when it came to the subject of specialization within the field of surgery.
Johns Hopkins was also home to Dr. John Staige Davis, who was considered by most to be the first American to dedicate his practice solely to plastic surgery. He spent many years of his life working to establish specialized divisions within the practice of plastic surgery, and in 1916 he contributed a landmark paper to Journal of the American Medical Association which described the role of plastic surgery within the medical establishment, again emphasizing the importance of specialization within the field.