pedicle

Aside from recalling some moments of professional competitiveness — Gillies vied with another doctor to be identified as the inventor of a reconstructive technique known as the “tubed pedicle” — Fitzharris depicts her hero as irrepressibly dedicated and unfailingly likable.

Harold Gillies, an early British plastic surgeon, popularized the tubed pedicle, a general technique for moving tissue across the body by shaping a flap of skin into a tube and inching it toward the site of injury through periodic cutting and reattachment.

Some time after the pedicle reached its intended destination, he quit medicine, bounced around a series of Buddhist monasteries in India, changed his name to Jivaka and settled down to write his autobiography.

For trans men, testosterone and mastectomy were common, but genital surgeries remained rare, in part because phalloplasty had only minimally evolved beyond Gillies’s tubed pedicle of the 1940s.

Think of it like the DLC model in video games, but instead of paying extra for access to new quests, you’re getting hot content like “Spinal Pedicle Screw Placement” and “Total Knee Arthroplasty.”