Close call in the ER: How one desperate young doctor became a surgical visionary

Noted: More than a decade after Pugh?s emergency-room heroics at Howard University, I?m in her lab at the University of Wisconsin hospital finishing up a hernia operation. Just about done?all I need to do is put in the last few stitches. The miniature camera attached to the end of the two long needles I?m clumsily manipulating doesn?t lie: I?m a lousy surgeon. Fortunately, the patient isn?t alive. In fact, he never lived?he?s actually a cloth box with different layers of mesh?which look like the internal organs of a human?and laparoscopic tools, all of which sit on a base consisting of two Frisbees.