The Surgeon's Cut

I don't think I have watched a documentary series (four episodes on Netflix) that has made as great an impact on my consciousness as The Surgeon's Cut. Made in 2020, it follows the lives, careers, and in-operating-room activities of four surgeons. One is a brain surgeon who removes tumors, one performs surgery on fetuses in utero, one is a liver specialist who does live-donor transplants, and one is a heart surgeon who specializes in repairing holes in the hearts of small children.

The heart surgeon's practice is in India, where a large proportion of the population has congenital heart issues. India also has many languages (the doctor speaks to his patients in the languages that they communicate best in), a great deal of poverty (people can pay what they are able to pay when they go to his clinic for their operations), and several religions (it goes without saying that he respects all faiths).

The liver surgeon, the only American-born doctor in the bunch, is a perfectionist who likens the process of doing an operation to the process of playing music: for her it is an art. She is also talks about what it was like to go to medical school in the second part of the twentieth century, when only a small percentage of the students in medical school were women.

The brain surgeon was an undocumented migrant worker from Mexico who taught himself English as a young adult, got a university education, entered medical school, and then fell in love with the brain.

The doctor who performs fetal surgery invented the process of saving twins that share the same blood supply (in-utero) but do so unequally. Sometimes the process of cutting and reconnecting tiny blood vessels so that each baby has its own blood supply results in the delivery of two healthy twins, and sometimes it doesn't.

The scenes in the operating room are fascinating, and are filmed in such a way that they welcome you to look. I have no idea how the camera people managed to do it, but I am very grateful that they did.

If you need something to remind you of the greatness and nobility present in the human spirit, these four hours will do the trick.