It is as if Michelangelo in his 70s had written a book on how to paint. Of all the great lights in the renaissance of vascular surgery of the last 25 years, Linton, in the eyes of a large number of people, has shone the brightest. Not that he is responsible for the breakthroughs, such as angiography, fabric grafts, and embolectomy catheters, but that he had the vision, the perseverance, and the supreme technical ability to forge from them the most successful of all patterns of treatment for extracardiac vascular problems.
When he was a young surgeon starting at the Massachusetts General Hospital, he was considered by the house staff to be among the "slickest" of the operators. And this, in those days, meant the fastest. Gastrointestinal tract surgery, particularly the liver and biliary tract, was his prime interest. In the late 1930s vascular problems began to claim more of