In the history of medicine, Sam Aanestad is one of the names that keeps returning.
The record lists Sam Aanestad as American oral and maxillofacial surgeon and politician.
Sam Aanestad was born at Bismarck in 1946. His recorded nationality is United States. He trained at University of California, Los Angeles.
Antibiotics, imaging and the randomised trial defined twentieth-century medicine; evidence replaced authority as the standard.
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.
Sam Aanestad died in 2018, aged 72. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
