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George Berci: The forgotten, humble doctor who changed surgery for all mankind
20 September, 2024
The cursory shortlist of Melbourne University alumni on its website is a curious document. It lists a comedian of whom I’d never heard, Gillian Triggs, whose calamitous years as president of the Australian Human Rights Commission resonate still, and Germaine Greer, whose dreary prose once littered bookshops.
I called the university to ask about the death of George Berci. They had never heard of him.
But there he is, in capital letters in the Faculty of Melbourne Handbook 1969 as: Reader in Experimental Surgery, GEORGE BERCI, M.D. (Szeged).
Others named that year include Frank Macfarlane Burnet, the virologist who won a Nobel prize for medicine in 1960, Gustav Nossal, who led the world in the study of the formation of antibodies and immunological tolerance, and David Penington, who helped make Australia the leader in responding to the threat of HIV and promoted the idea of needle exchanges – a world first.
Berci changed more lives than all of them. He quietly pioneered the art of non-intrusive surgery, inventing laparoscopy so that our organs could be comprehensively examined, treated and repaired via a keyhole insertion through the skin.
The instruments and techniques he developed – and the decades he spent teaching their use – changed modern medicine the world over, saved lives, extended them, and made medical intervention less painful and perilous. He was an inventor, understood how surgical instruments might be improved, and a esteemed conductor of medical “orchestras” thankful that fate had cast them into his orbit.
None of which was a surprise. For generations, the Berci family business was making music.
He began to revolutionise surgery in Melbourne where he arrived in 1956 from Hungary after that country’s attempted revolution was murderously suppressed by the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev.
Stepping from a ship at Melbourne’s Station Pier, he spoke not a word of English. (Another young Hungarian arrived there that same year and neither could he speak English, but Gab Kovacs would go on to pioneer IVF.)
Berci set out to learn 100 English words a day every day. Within a year he knew more than most native speakers and certainly enough to interest Melbourne University and the Royal Melbourne Hospital. He was soon suggesting new technology to make crudely invasive surgical procedures easier and more comfortable for all concerned. No longer would doctors slice a large access point to examine your colon, prostate, oesophagus, bladder or kidneys.
Through laparoscopic techniques the gallbladder, spleen and appendix could be removed. Urological and thoracic surgery was greatly simplified, the hernia and colon could be repaired and gynaecological disorders rectified with remarkably fast recovery times. Modern car mechanics use similar techniques. A “waterproof HD Endoscope USB type-C borescope inspection snake camera” was on eBay yesterday for $13.22.
The large fixed-imaging equipment bearing a television camera would in time give way to small, flexible tubing with a minute camera at its tip relaying images to a screen in the surgery that many doctors at once could examine. The modern endoscope was born. At this stage not all Australians had a television.
Later, Berci would develop a low-radiation fluoroscope for live X-ray imaging.
In 1967, he was lured to Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles where he worked the rest of his life, turning up to his office this year at the age of 103.
He was a humble man whose background rumbled deeply from the tectonic clashes instigated by Germany from the 1930s and could so easily have become an almost anonymous statistic of hate.
But he survived, sought an education his family could afford, and not the indulgence of music – his father and grandfather had both been recruited from Hungary to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra when he was a child and he had taken violin lessons from the age of three (“I missed a lot of soccer games,” he would recall).
The family fled Austria, returning to Hungary where he was arrested and recruited to a labour camp of 5000 young men for two years (wearing a yellow star to denote his religion) and forced into building defensive lines across the mountains. It was cold and they were barely fed. Many died. Being transferred to Auschwitz they changed trains in Budapest. “It had been bombed and everyone had disappeared. We escaped … an interesting moment.”
His father and grandfather had been consumed by the Holocaust, but his mother survived. Australia was still a decade away. Berci contracted Covid last month.
His family recall him inserting scopes into violins and cellos marvelling at what happened there: “It was amazing,” he said.
George Berci, surgeon and inventor. Born, Szeged, Hungary, March 14, 1921; died, aged 103, in Los Angeles, August 30.
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What a fantastic story about someone about whom I know absolutely nothing – to my shame!
What a fabulous and inventive contribution!
David.
Thanks for sharing David, a great read and someone I look into more. Its nuggets like these that stand this blog out. Really appreciate your time David.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting, and great achievements. Strange how it goes largely unnoticed.
ReplyDelete