Brewer, Lyman A.

Lyman August Brewer III was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1907. He was educated at Amherst and received his medical training at the University of Michigan. Upon his graduation in 1932 Brewer spent several years learning thoracic surgery under the guidance of Evarts A. Graham and John Alexander, among others. In the late 1930s he established a practice in Los Angeles with Frank S. Dolley.

From 1942 to 1945 Brewer served as a surgeon in the Army Medical Corps in North Africa, Italy, and France. He helped establish the first US Army Chest Surgical Center at Bizerte, Tunisia, where with fellow surgeons Thomas Burford and Edward Churchill, spearheaded a review of thoracic injuries in the Mediterranean theater. The group insisted that chest surgery should be a separate specialty. They developed new techniques and established criteria for emergency thoracotomy and for the management of thoracic and thoracoabdominal injuries that would become the world standard. Brewer's classic paper, "The wet lung in war casualties" (1946) was born from his military experience. It became further defined during the Vietnam War as adult respiratory distress syndrome. Among his discoveries was the use of pressure breathing to combat pulmonary edema, development of the Bennett ventilator, and the use of pericardial fat to buttress the bronchial stump (Brewer fat graft)

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