The Bovie Smell

The Bovie Smell.

This deserves its own post.

What is that you may ask?

Well, first let’s get technical.

The Bovie is an electrosurgical knife created in 1926 by William Bovie. It uses high frequency alternating current to cut through tissues and vessels coagulating blood as it does so to decrease bleeding. It’s a tool still used today in surgery.

What is the Bovie smell? Well, I’ve got to say, you’ve got to experience it to know the smell. But I’ll try to explain.

Have you ever been to Sachsenhausen or probably any other Holocaust concentration camp for that matter. I visited Sachsenhausen several times as a child living in Berlin. Aside from the eerie sense of being in a place of evil and of great suffering, there’s a funny smell in the air a whole half century later. It’s a smell that gets under your skin. If you’ve been there, you may know what I’m talking about. Multiply that by a thousand – that’s the Bovie smell. shudder I was always thinking about Holocaust concentration camps when I was a medical student in a surgical rotation.

But that’s not the worst of the Bovie smell. Sadly, it’s also hunger stimulating. I’m sorry, burning flesh is burning flesh and when you’ve eaten nothing because you’ve been up at 4:30 am pre-pre-rounding, then pre-rounding, then rounding, then scrubbing into case after case, you can’t help but get hungry. Doesn’t matter that it’s 8 in the morning. Suddenly, all I want is a juicy steak. Sounds awful I know. But on the bright side, I’ve survived surgical rotations and still eat meat. Certainly all the “eating meat is bad for you” propagandists won’t get to me!