George Crile Jr.

George Washington Crile Jr., known as Barney, was an American surgeon who spent more than fifty years at the Cleveland Clinic and became one of the best known critics of radical breast cancer surgery. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on 3 November 1907, the son of the Cleveland Clinic cofounder George Washington Crile, he studied at Yale and took his medical degree at Harvard in 1933, graduating first in his class. After his residency he joined the Clinic surgical staff in 1937 and headed its general surgery department from 1956 to 1969. During Navy service in the Second World War he concluded that a ruptured appendix was less dangerous than believed, so that penicillin could be used until a patient reached a better equipped hospital, and he developed a catheter drainage method for pilonidal cysts. After performing his last radical mastectomy in 1954 he argued publicly for simple mastectomy and lumpectomy, writing in Life magazine and in the 1955 book Cancer and Common Sense. Colleagues resisted, so he appealed through patients, and the alternatives he promoted are now standard treatment. He died in Cleveland on 11 September 1992.