Charles McBurney (surgeon)

Charles Heber McBurney was an American surgeon, born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on 17 February 1845 and died in Brookline, Massachusetts on 7 November 1913. He graduated from Harvard College in 1866, took his medical degree at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in 1870, and trained in Europe for two years before practising in New York. As surgeon-in-chief of the Roosevelt Hospital from 1888 he did his best known work on appendicitis, reporting on operative management in 1889 and describing the point of greatest tenderness now called McBurney's point, and in 1894 the incision that bears his name. He also introduced rubber gloves in his operations to improve aseptic technique, and he led the medical team that treated President William McKinley after the shooting of 1901.