In the history of medicine, George Miller Sternberg is one of the names that keeps returning.
The record lists George Miller Sternberg as American physician (1838–1915); 18th U.S. Army Surgeon General from 1893 to 1902.
George Miller Sternberg was born at Cooperstown in 1838. His recorded nationality is United States.
Anaesthesia, antisepsis and germ theory arrived within fifty years and made modern surgery possible for the first time.
The test of medical work is whether practice changed, not whether the argument was elegant.
That the work was done from United States matters: hospitals, training and research funding are unevenly distributed, and they decide which questions can be asked.
George Miller Sternberg died in 1915, aged 77. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
