Rudolph Matas, M.D.
Dr. Matas was highly revered by his colleagues and students, but he was not without his idiosyncracies. According to Dr. John Ochsner, who as a child was acquainted with the famous surgeon through his physician father, "[Dr. Matas] had one bad quality in that you could never shut him up when he started talking. . . . Dr. Matas would call and would never get off the phone, so my father would put the phone on the table and occasionally say ‘Yes, Dr. Matas,’ just to make sure he wasn’t insulting him and [he would] keep on working." And, although known as a good, if verbose lecturer (who once gave an hour and a half of remarks on a 40-minute presentation), Dr. Matas is not known for having trained large numbers of significant practitioners of academic medicine, as are many other surgical pioneers.
Dr. Matas loved to read trashy mystery novels and was a devotee of silent motion pictures from their inception. Before his death, glaucoma and cataract and a failed operation to alleviate them eliminated sight in his left eye, leaving him completely blind in 1952—the year of the first aneurysm resection of the aorta with graft replacement—the next great achievement in aneurysm surgery after his own. Dr. Matas died 5 years later, on Sept. 23, 1957, after a year of hospitalization.
"Even in the eighties (1880s), noli me tangere was written large on the head, chest and abdomen, and their contained organs were still held as in sanctuaries which no one dared to open with unhallowed hands."
—Rudolph Matas, M.D., in "Surgical Operations Fifty Years Ago" (Am. J. Surg. 1951;82:111-21)
More information about Dr. Matas can be found in the following sources:
• "A History of Vascular Surgery" by Steven G. Friedman, M.D. (Mount Kisco, N.Y.: Futura Publishing Co. 1989).
