The Making of Peter Rhee, World-Renowned Trauma Surgeon
It seemed written in the stars for Peter Rhee to become a surgeon. When he was 6 years old and living in Uganda with his family, he saw a local villager with a spear in his belly brought to his surgeon-father, then watched as the elder Rhee rode away on the bed of a truck with the victim next to him.
Though the younger Rhee would consider engineering as a career path at one point in his life, partly because he was a rebellious teenager who didn’t want to follow in his dad’s footsteps, this dramatic scene never left him, and he would later come to embrace medicine for himself.
“It just felt right,” he explains in his new memoir, Trauma Red: The Making of a Surgeon in War and in America’s Cities, published earlier this year. The book, co-written with journalist Gordon Dillow, is the result of years of family and colleagues prodding the world-renowned trauma surgeon—perhaps most recognizable for his role in saving the life of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords—to share his story. Today, the 53-year-old doesn’t hesitate to tell his own children and the rest of the world how fulfilling his career—which includes serving as a frontline Navy surgeon in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been. But he notes he wrote the book not for himself, but first and foremost, for his profession.
“[Nearly] everyone knows what a brain surgeon is and what a heart surgeon is in this country,” says Rhee, sitting outside a Santa Monica café in July. “Maybe 20,000 people know what a trauma surgeon is.
“Trauma is one area where … it could be a kid, it could be an old mother, it could be a police officer, someone in prison, a drug addict—it doesn’t matter. I just get to take care of you, and I get to deal with all of society,” he says. “It’s a gift.”
Read full interview here.Â
