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J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2003;125:12-19
© 2003 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery

Honored Guest's Address

Beyond Flatland

From Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children National Health Service Trust, London, United Kingdom.

Read at the Eighty-second Annual Meeting of The American Association for Thoracic Surgery, Washington, DC, May 5-9, 2002.

Received for publication May 29, 2002. Accepted for publication July 2, 2002. Address for reprints: Marc R. de Leval, MD, FRCS, Cardiothoracic Unit, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust, Great Ormond St, London WC1N 3JH, United Kingdom (E-mail: delevm@gosh.nhs.uk).

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

	Introduction

 

Mr President, thank you for your kind introduction. Members of the Association, ladies and gentlemen, I am flattered to be the honored guest of The American Association for Thoracic Surgery. This is a unique opportunity to publicly express my gratitude to the Association for having been awarded the 1973 Evarts Graham Fellowship, which has been a cornerstone in my career.

It is a privilege to pay tribute to my North American mentors. Three of them were presidents of the Association: Frank Gerbode, Dwight McGoon, and Robert Wallace. I should also like to mention Donald Hill from the Pacific Medical Centre in San Francisco and Gordon Danielson from the Mayo Clinic. Finally, I should like to share today's honor with all my colleagues at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London.

The topic chosen for this lecture is an old one that I have, I am afraid, touched upon on several occasions. I will attempt today to show how my thoughts on these matters have evolved, but I must apologize for some inevitable repetition.

In 1884 a Victorian headmaster, Edwin Abbot, wrote the well-known story Flatland under the pseudonym of A Square. ¹ Flatland describes a race of beings who are 2-dimensional; triangles, squares, rectangles, polygons, and circles. They are unaware of the existence of anything else outside their universe. For A Square, it is truly impossible to appreciate the full reality of our 3-dimensional universe, called Spaceland. To illustrate this deficiency, Abbot imagines A Square watching a still pond being visited by a 3-dimensional being named A Sphere (Figure 1). A Sphere goes down into the water and rises again before disappearing. A Square can see only the part of the sphere intersecting his plane. He sees only a succession of 2-dimensional circles changing size in time. A Square cannot be convinced . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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