Lindskog, Gustaf Elmer

Gustaf E. Lindskog, thoracic surgeon at Yale, was born in Boston in 1903. He graduated from the Massachusettts Agricultural College (now University of Massachustts) in 1923, and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1928. He interned at Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland. From 1929 to 1932, he was a resident in surgery at Yale. The following year he was a National Research Council Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In 1933, he returned to Yale as instructor of surgery and rose through the ranks to become the William Carmalt Professor of Surgery in 1948. Lindskog chaired the department from 1948 to 1966. In 1971 he retired but remained active in the Yale community. During World War II, he served for four years as a commander in the Navy Medical Corps and was stationed part of the time at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. In 1943, he worked with Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman on the development of chemotherapy at Yale. They used nitrogen mustard in the treatment of a patient with lymphosarcoma. Lindskog was widely recognized for his contributions to thoracic surgery. He pioneered in the surgical resection of chronic pulmonary abscess. In addition to his many research articles, he was co-author with Averill Liebow and William Glenn on three editions of a major textbook of thoracic surgery, Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery with Related Pathology (1953, 1962, 1975). He died at the age of 99 in 2002.