Hermes Grillo

Hermes C. Grillo was an American thoracic surgeon and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, born in Boston in 1923 and killed in a car accident in Italy on 14 October 2006 at the age of 83. He is considered the father of tracheal surgery, and he wrote what is regarded as the definitive text on the subject, Surgery of the Trachea and Bronchi, published in 2004. He graduated from Brown University in 1943 and from Harvard Medical School in 1947, served in the US Navy during the Korean War as a Division Surgeon with the US Marine Corps, and from 1969 to 1994 was chief of thoracic surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. To operate successfully on the trachea he created several new surgical instruments, and as of 2004 these tools still form part of the Grillo Kits used there.