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Shelley McKellar. Surgical Limits: The Life of Gordon Murray. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. × + 270 pp. 111. $45.00; £28.00 (0-8020-3739-9).
This is a well-researched, engagingly written story of a bold, brilliant, skilled, and cantankerous Canadian surgeon, Donald Walter Gordon Murray, whose successes and failures have the flavor of Greek tragedy. The author, Shelley McKellar, is a thirty-six-year-old professional historian who came reluctantly to biography, with special gelidily toward doing "dead white guy history," as she notes with whimsical frankness in her preface (p. vii). But her interest in technological innovation and Gordon Murray's 1940s work on the artificial kidney machine overcame her initial aversion to biography: she saw Murray not merely as a famous, controversial surgeon, but as one whose career shed light on a period of striking change in the nature of North American clinical practice and biological research during the early and middle twentieth century. It was her hope to present Murray fairly in these complex circumstances, and this reviewer gives her high marks on achieving her goal.
Gordon Murray grew up, the fifth of seven children, in a...