Father of bariatric surgery reflects on its past, present

John H. Linner, MD, marvels at the progress that has been made in the half-century since the humble beginnings of the procedure he helped pioneer.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Sept. 6, 2004.

This year, doctors are expected to perform 140,000 bariatric surgeries. That's a number researchers never dreamed of when they developed the procedure 50 years ago as a byproduct of experiments studying nutrition absorption in dogs, says surgeon John H. Linner, MD.

As a resident at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Dr. Linner, along with his mentor Arnold Kremen, MD, and fellow researcher Charles Nelson, MD, discovered that the dogs lost weight after they underwent operations bypassing much of their intestines.

After Dr. Linner went into private surgical practice, one of his patients asked him to use the technique on her in the hopes that she, too, would shed some pounds.

The Annals of Surgery published the results of that procedure in September 1954, and bariatric surgery was born.

AMNews recently interviewed Dr. Linner, who retired from practice in 1996 and is now a Food and Drug Administration consultant on new methods to treat obesity.

Question: Who was your first case?

Answer: It was done for a woman who was very unhappy with her overweight. Her height was 5 feet 4 inches, and her maximum weight had been 375 pounds. When we operated on her in March 1954, she weighed 285 pounds.

I had talked to her about what we had encountered in our experiments in dogs. We had learned that, with a very short intestine, a lot of fat was lost in the stool and the dogs lost weight. She said, well, I wish you could do the same thing for me. So we did, and bypassed two-thirds of the small bowel.