George Crile Jr.

Description

Dr. George Washington Crile, Jr. was known as Barney to distinguish him from his father, also a doctor named George Washington Crile. Following his father's footsteps, he graduated from Yale University, then earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1929. He did residency at the Cleveland Clinic, then joined the surgical staff in 1937. During World War II, he served in the United States Navy with a team of enlistees from the Cleveland Clinic. He saw many risky radical procedures performed on soldiers, and as a result, he became adverse to surgery which may endanger the patient. He began to search for nonsurgical treatments for thyroid cancers, and then turned his attention to the radical mastectomies that were routinely performed during the 1950s on breast cancer patients. He was interested in the practice of combining partial mastectomy with radiation treatment, which was more common in Europe at the time. In 1961, he published a paper demonstrating that survival rates for lumpectomy or simple mastectomy were similar to those for radical mastectomy. Although other doctors were sceptical, and the public debate became emotional at times, a cultural change in the doctor-patient relationship in the 1960s helped bring his method into favour. In 1968, he retired as head of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, although he continued as emeritus consultant until his death. In 1973, he published What Women Should Know About the Breast Cancer Controversy, which he followed in 1978 with Surgery, Your Choices, Your Alternatives.