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The Best Doctors in New York

New York Magazine, June 10, 2002

HALL OF FAME 2002

Dr. James "Butch" Rosser
Minimally Invasive Surgeon

CLAIM TO FAME:  "Putting a stethoscope to someone's chest just gives you voodoo information," says Dr. James Rosser - Butch to his friends and patients.  "We've basically declared war on the stethoscope."  Having been a pioneer in laparoscopic surgery in Ohio and made Yale a superpower in the field, Rosser has just arrived at Beth Israel Medical Center to establish the Advanced Medical Technology Institute.  A 10,000-square-foot complex on East 16th Street - which Rosser points out will be shaped like the Starship Enterprise - AMTI will provide training in high-tech surgery, telemedicine (house calls via laptop), and any further research-and-development Rosser dreams up.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE:  It was Dr. Anthony Antonacci, the chairman of Beth Israel's department of surgery and a onetime Rosser trainee ("I'm the chocolate Yoda, and he's one of my Obi-Wan Kenobis," Rosser says), who hired him for AMTI.  "He has reinvented the way we educate in surgery," says Antonacci.  "We're changing our entire program, and he's going to be a true foundation piece."  A week into Rosser's new position, his equipment is still in boxes, his research center still a blueprint.  But the outsize former offensive lineman (120 pounds lighter after a laparoscopic gastric bypass last year) talks excitedly over a video of him assisting live laparoscopic abdominal surgery in Ecuador via laptop.  "The technology," he pronounces, "will allow Butch Rosser to be in more than one place at one time."  With a raft of training CDs and not one but three memoirs planned, he's practically ubiquitous already.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS:  "It was earth-shattering," says Rosser of the first stirrings of his technophilia.  "It was The Jetsons, Elroy had this thing in his room with a TV screen that helped him with his lessons.  That was a PC!"  He was born in rural Mississippi, in 1954.  "I didn't have any role models that looked like me.  I couldn't even drink from the same water fountain as you." Rosser finished high school at 16 and played football at the University of Florida before giving up a potentially glorious athletic career to graduate from the University of Mississippi.  "I didn't grow up shackled with hatred of white people," he says.  "I thought if you gave me an honest chance, maybe you'd like me."

SPREADING THE WORD:  "He's taking laparoscopy to the common man, the day-to-day surgeon who has a busy practice," says Dr. Richard Satava, a professor of surgery at Yale who's known Rosser for almost a decade.  "I bring a lot of old-time country doctors to the twenty-first century," Rosser says.  "He was very compassionate," agrees patient Marjorie Rife, 79.  "He put his arms around me and told my daughter he was going to treat me like his own mother."  Another doctor had told her he'd have to remove her colon; Rosser removed a polyp laparoscopically and had her home in a week.

...Boris Kachka