UNREASONABLENESS REDEFINED
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
–George Bernard ShawOne of the greatest transformations within the history of surgery has been the paradigmatic shift away from open surgery and into the realm of operative video-laparoscopy, an approach that truly captured all that minimally invasive surgery was meant to mean. Many have described the advent of operative video-laparoscopy as a change to surgery as “revolutionary to this century as the development of anesthesia was to the last century.”
Indeed, video-endoscopy is today the most common surgical procedure performed by gynecologists, colonoscopists, and gastroendoscopists.[2] As for our own discipline, gynecologic laparoscopists were some of the earliest believers in the new way. Indeed, by 1986, it was estimated that more than 1 million laparoscopic sterilizations were being performed in the United States alone.[3] Today, gynecologic operative video-laparoscopy has freed millions of women from the era when debilitating, multiple laparotomies were the norm for even mild pelvic pathologies.
NEZHAT AND THE ADVENT OF ADVANCED OPERATIVE VIDEO-LAPAROSCOPY
However, getting to this point of general acceptance — a process that is not even complete yet — actually took years of persistent insistence and ingenuity.
