Max Thorek

Max Thorek was a Hungarian-American surgeon who lived from 1880 to 1960 and is remembered less for a single operation than for the institutions he built. Born into a Jewish family in rural Hungary to a physician father and a mother who was a midwife, he emigrated with his family to Chicago after antisemitic violence, worked his way through the University of Chicago by playing in its band, and took his medical degree at Rush Medical College in 1904. He practised obstetrics, gynecology and general and reconstructive surgery, co-founded the American Hospital in 1911 to treat patients regardless of ability to pay, and in the 1930s introduced a technique that lowered deaths in gallbladder surgery. He founded the International College of Surgeons in 1935 and the International Museum of Surgical Science in 1954.