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Arch Surg. 2004;139:800-801.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

As a general surgeon with a subspecialty in trauma, I thoroughly enjoyed the article "High Success With Nonoperative Management of Blunt Hepatic Trauma: the Liver is a Sturdy Organ,"¹ in the May 2003 issue of ARCHIVES. Having attended numerous debates between the late Aubrey Maynard, MD, and Gerald Shaftan, MD, arguing the merits of operative vs nonoperative management of penetrating abdominal trauma (including hepatic), I thought a bit of surgical history relating the genesis of nonoperative management of abdominal trauma was in order. While I have no doubt that surgeons had tried this method even before the events of the story I will relate, I do believe that I am detailing the history of the first large-scale controlled study of this problem in a huge trauma center, the (at that time) more than 2200-bed Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, NY.

In 1954, I was a junior medical student at the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Noel H. Kleppel, MD