Interview
Being a young resident in anaesthesia, I (S.N.) am curious about the Greats in the field of anaesthesia, and especially in airway management; their way into anaesthesiology and what moved them to develop new devices. I am wondering if I might get some advice for my future career in anaesthesia and its application in airway management. Professor Giulio Frova, the inventor of many devices in this field, i.e. the Frova catheter (a device to facilitate intubation e Cook Medical, USA), the Percutwist (a rotation procedure for percutaneous tracheostomies e Teleflex Medical, Ireland) and the Easycric (an emergency cricothyroidotomy set e Teleflex Medical, Ireland), was visiting the anaesthesia department in Bern where I studied and worked in June 2017. It was my pleasure to get the chance to interview Giulio Frova for the journal Trends in Anaesthesia and Critical Care after his presentation at our department (see Fig. 1). Giulio Frova was born on the 30th of November 1938 in Venice, Italy. After he had been living there for the first 8 years of his life, the family moved to Milan, the Lombardia capital, where Prof. Frova attended primary and high school. He was able to advance over 1.5 years and started his medical studies at the University of Milan at a relatively young age. The question of why Giulio Frova chose to study medicine was difficult to answer for him. He had an early contact with medicine because his grandfather and three of his uncles were physicians. His father, in contrast, was a chemist, but his mother was also interested in medicine from an early age on. However, during this time, when he had to decide what to study, Giulio Frova was attracted by architecture. On the day he decided to join university, the admission office was closed for holidays and Giulio Frova had to wait for many weeks till the end of summer. During these weeks, the young Giulio Frova went to see his uncle who asked him to help over the summer with his exciting doctor’s activities in the field in a small town near Vicenza. Giulio Frova began to know and love emergency medicine. Even in retrospect, now as the well-known Prof. Frova, he was intrigued by the fact that his uncle, like most of the physicians of the past, was proud to treat nearly every ailment successfully at home, and not sending the patient to the hospital. At the end of that summer, when Giulio Frova returned to Milan to join university, his new interest was finally medicine and not architecture any more.
After graduating in medicine at Milan University, the young Dr. Frova started his residency to become a specialist in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at the University Policlinic of Milan in 1962. But his interest in anaesthesiology started even before having his degree whilst already working as a medical student in different surgical departments. The reason why he chose anaesthesiology was e he confesses – partly for economic reasons. He wanted to be independent from his family. At that time, there were not so many anaesthesiologists and therefore it was easy to find work in that speciality. Giulio Frova was also interested in the field of psychoanalysis, but it was difficult to earn money in this field of medicine back then, therefore he decided to favour anaesthesiology. After his residency, he became assistant before and viceconsultant after at the San Carlo Hospital in Milan for the next 5 years; afterwards he became the head of the anaesthesia service in a seven-hundred-bed hospital near Milan until 1988. In this year Dr. Frova changed his employment and moved to Brescia to one of the biggest hospitals in Lombardia; at that time it provided about 2.400 beds. He became consultant and head of the anaesthesia and intensive care department until his retirement in 2005. Prof. Frova had about 90 anaesthesiologists under his indirect supervision as chief of the department at the Brescia Hospital, where more than 30,000 anaesthetic procedures were performed each year. Even though Giulio Frova worked in Brescia approximately 80 km away from Milan, he never left it completely since his childhood. He only had a room in Brescia and took the train for the 45 min ride from Brescia to Milan on his weekends off work, where his family was living. Nowadays, Prof. Frova sometimes feels a bit nostalgic about not having chosen to be a psychoanalyst, another field of his interests, because in his opinion, in anaesthesia the relationship between doctor and patient is someway lacking. Anaesthesia however e he said e has a virtue, that is similar to an art; and he likes to use his hands. In the anaesthesiologist’s hands, the patient literally puts its breathing and life; and this is particularly true in airway management. In this field Frova’s interest was always to be skilled with every device and modify them sometimes or to create something new, always looking at simplicity and easiness of its use. For that reason being curious about feasibility is a very important feature. Anaesthesia could be boring sometimes e he says e but In contrast this discipline can also be suddenly exciting and challenging but consequently also very stressing. This is one reason why Prof. Frova thinks that it is worth to completely leave the direct clinical work when an anaesthesiologist arrives at retirement and even before. After the end of his hospital career and his retirement in 2005, Prof. Frova continued only to teach and worked further on as a consultant for the court, mainly for airway management cases.
