By Allison Levy for Chabad.edu
Former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop, left, receives a collection of letters on health issues penned by the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, as a gift from Chabad at Dartmouth.
In late 1977, Dr. C. Everett Koop made national headlines when he performed surgery on a pair of conjoined twins who shared one heart, separating the two infants. But the news didn’t so much center on the operation itself – at the time, Koop, the future U.S. Surgeon General under President Ronald Reagan, was a famed pediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and foremost authority on the phenomenon of conjoined twins – as on the fact that the separation took place only after weeks of debate involving top doctors and one of the generation’s foremost authorities on Jewish law.
Former Surgeon General Looks Back at Hallmark Case Influenced by Rabbinic Law
By Allison Levy for Chabad.edu
Former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop, left, receives a collection of letters on health issues penned by the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, as a gift from Chabad at Dartmouth.
In late 1977, Dr. C. Everett Koop made national headlines when he performed surgery on a pair of conjoined twins who shared one heart, separating the two infants. But the news didn’t so much center on the operation itself – at the time, Koop, the future U.S. Surgeon General under President Ronald Reagan, was a famed pediatric surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and foremost authority on the phenomenon of conjoined twins – as on the fact that the separation took place only after weeks of debate involving top doctors and one of the generation’s foremost authorities on Jewish law.
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