Paging Dr. Page...

Killian Page '09 got a taste for surgery at Mass General Hospital last Thursday. As a student in Mr. Donovan's senior lab in anatomy and physiology, Page and a dozen of his classmates made their way to Mass General's etherdome, where the first administration of an anesthetic was recorded in1846.

Page, pictured here practicing thoracic surgery (to remove a Lifesaver with a surgeon's tools), underwent three training sessions with a Mass General surgical team: setting up a ventilator, using instruments to recussitate a patient, and conducting surgery with the aid of a arthroscopic camera.

Mr. Donovan knows that doing it beats studying it--and so took his students to see one of his hometown's proudest accomplishments in medical research, Building 149 in Charlestown. That's home to Mass General's top research facilities in genetics and MRI imaging. There they met genetic researchers like Dr. Calum MacRae of the Cardiovascular Research Center, who spoke of his current genetic research with the zebra fish. They also spoke with post-doctorate research fellows about their work as they conducted live research on subjects with Siemens 7 and 9-tesla scanners, magnets that are hundreds of times stronger than the force of the earth's gravitational pull.


Mass General is the largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, the oldest hospital in New England, and the recipient of the most research funding of any hospital in North America.

Pictured: Mr. David Donovan and his class of surgeons-in-training.