Outgoing Vascular & Endovascular Surgery Society (VESS) President Mark Conrad, MD, used the 2024 VESS presidential address to illustrate how he got into vascular surgery, what determines success for different generations, what does and does not factor into building a career, and how he would advise those coming into the profession.
“It actually started at Henry Ford Hospital with Alex Shepard,” the chief of vascular surgery at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton, Massachusetts, told those gathered in Sun Valley, Idaho, for VESS’ annual winter meeting (Jan. 18–21). “My first two months as an intern were on vascular; it was the most horrible experience I can ever describe. Every time my pager went off, I got a shot of adrenaline that made me want to throw up, because it meant someone was dying, someone needed to be intubated, someone needed something else.”
Shepard wasn’t the only one to have a lasting impact on Conrad and his career. Former VESS President Emerick Szilagyi, MD, the Hungarian vascular pioneer, taught at Henry Ford in Detroit after working as a medical director at a rubber plantation in Brazil for the Ford Motor Company.
Szilagyi’s skepticism of technology around how its advancement could lead to a lack of fulfillment for surgeons in their jobs led Conrad to ponder technology’s role: does it lead to a lack of fulfillment and a lack of success? “It made me question, what determines success? Certainly, most of us think of success by outside factors … I think you’re judged based on your timeline, and I think that’s important,” Conrad stated. “Success based on a person’s timeline is an interesting concept, but it makes sense: we don’t look back at the failures of doctors such as Szilagyi, we look at their successes for the changes they helped create in the medical world.”
Conrad then looked ahead to the future of medicine, as Generation X doctors slowly give way to millennials. He mentioned how he and other Gen X doctors have tended to try to teach millennials to network the way they had been taught, but found that, “you see there are certain students that take over, they lead it, they pass it on, and it’s just this organic thing that happens. Maybe we need to step back and let the millennials do it their own way,” he told VESS 2024.
Closing, Conrad reflected again on one of those people who got him into vascular surgery—Szilagyi—and called upon his words. “The art of surgery is not yet perfect and advances now unimaginable are still to come. May you have the wisdom to live with them with grace and humanity,” Conrad recited to the crowd. He finished with a quote of his own: “We can’t imagine what’s going to occur in vascular surgery by 2074. As you progress through your career, don’t be derailed by outside influence. Be true to yourself.”
