Robert F. Spetzler

Robert F. Spetzler
Fields	Neurosurgery
Institutions	Barrow Neurological Institute
Alma mater	Knox College, Northwestern

Robert F. Spetzler (born 1944) is a neurosurgeon and the J.N. Harber Chairman of Neurological Surgery and Director of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. He is also Professor of Surgery, Section of Neurosurgery, at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, Arizona.

Spetzler specializes in cerebrovascular disease and skull base tumors. Extremely prolific, he has published more than 300 articles and 180 book chapters and has co-edited multiple neurosurgical textbooks, including The Color Atlas of Microneurosurgery (2000).

Spetzler was born in Stierhöfstetten (Oberscheinfeld, near Würzburg) in Germany to where his parents had been evacuated due to the Second World War. When he was 11, he moved with his parents to the United States. He performed spectacularly in the American school system, despite the fact his first language was German.

He received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1967 from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He spent a year at the Free University of Berlin, and then entered medical school at the Northwestern Medical School in Chicago in 1967, receiving his M.D. in 1971. He completed post-graduate training at Wesley Memorial Hospital–Northwestern and a residency in neurosurgery at the University of California, San Francisco, training under Charles B. Wilson. In 1983, Spetzler was named Chair of the Division of Neurological Surgery at Barrow Neurological Institute. He was named director in 1986.

Spetzler played a dominant role in the use of the standstill operation in treating large or dangerous cerebral aneurysms. One notable application of this method occurred in 1991 when Spetzler successfully removed a large aneurysm in a 35-year-old American woman named Pam Reynolds. Prior to the operation proceeding, Reynolds was placed under general anesthesia, then had her eyes taped shut and a monitoring device placed in both of her ears. She was later induced into clinical death by Spetzler and his team, which was necessary for the operation to take place. Despite being clinically dead and under intense monitoring and medical observation whilst the procedure was ongoing, Reynolds claimed to have had a profound near-death experience in which she was able to accurately recall the sequence of events within the operating theater, the surgical instruments used, and the conversations that had taken place. In an interview that took place for a BBC documentary in 2002, Spetzler affirmed many of the observations that Pam had made and later admitted that he had no explanation for them. In February 2007, Spetzler performed his 5,000th aneurysm procedure. He travels and lectures frequently on the most recent advances in neurosurgery.

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