Frederick E Mohs

Frederic E. Mohs was a great mind of our more recent times when it came to health advances. Mohs was born on March 1, 1910 in Burlington, Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and studied as a medical student. While a student in college, Mohs accidently discovered a technique to remove certain types of skin cancer lesions and would later develop the Mohs Micrographic Surgery, or MMS Technique, to remove these lesions in 1938.

As a physician and surgeon, Mohs was a well-respected man who was described as larger than life and down to earth and was a man who never seemed to tire or need rest. He always treated his patients with professionalism and respect. Mohs was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word.

When it comes to Frederic Mohs, you will find that he was a man of biostatistics. Biostatistics is a combination of Biology and Statistics and is the collection, summarization and analysis of data from medical experiments and interpretation of the results (Riegelman, R. 2010). This is a core discipline that Mohs was dedicated to. Mohs kept meticulous records dating from 1941 (Brodland, D. G., Amonette, R., Hanke, C., & Robins, P. 2000). Because of his collection and analysis of all of his testing and data, he was able to convince some people in the surgical field that he had an effective treatment for skin cancer. It was a slow moving process and there was still great suspicion. These suspicions were multiplied when physicians saw the open and slowly healing wounds when witnessing the procedure and also when seeing the pain that the patients experienced. However, they could not deny that overtime there was a high cure rate and acceptable results of healing (Brodland, D. G., Amonette, R., Hanke, C., & Robins, P. 2000).

Mohs always acknowledged the contributions of the many before him that made the concept of Micrographic Surgery possible. The first significant contribution was the concept of killing cancer tissue with...