The Surgeon

(Doubleday & Company, 1963)

In Heinz's second novel the reader discovers what it is to be a surgeon; what one human being feels when he saves – or loses- the life of another; what it is that drives a man to sacrifice the prime years of his life in pursuit of training for a profession that is revered and, too often, misunderstood by millions.

In this novel you will accompany an eminent thoracic surgeon on a journey through a day in his life. You will share Dr. Matthew Carter's thoughts as he hides the truth from a patient who will die within a week of inoperable cancer; you will feel his elation at having succeeded in curing a young boy of a serious prenatal malformation; you will look on as he faces the acid test of a grueling three-hour operation during which, with a human life at stake, his knowledge and his skills race against the minute hand of the operating room clock.

The Surgeon is as exciting, profound, and moving as it is precise in its wealth of intimate, exact detail. It is a minute-by-minute, inside picture of part of a day in the life of a great surgeon – from the moment he is awakened at 6:45 a.m. to the conclusion of a harrowing bout with death at 2:55 p.m. During this brief period he performs one simple operation and one extremely difficult one. He visits several patients in various stages of pre-operative preparation and post-operative recuperation. He relives, in his thoughts, some of the most thrilling – as well as routine – operations he has performed in his career. As you, the reader, accompany him, you come to know and understand this surgeon's ambitions and fears, the significant events of his early life, the evolution of his religion, the development of his attitude toward death and the origins and growth of his skills.

The Surgeon is dramatic fact, published as fiction only because it draws upon the true stories of several dedicated doctors. Every case is actual. Every clinical detail is accurate. Every emotion is real. The Surgeon is like no novel you have ever read, for it brings you as close as a reader can get to the life-and-death business of medicine and to the human truth about that most powerful - and vulnerable - of men, the surgeon.

The Surgeon was a selection of the Literary Guild of America and The Book of the Month Club and was reprinted in twenty-five editions in twelve languages.