Doctor Used Skills Learned in 'Killadelphia' in Iraq

Dec. 5, 2007 — -- On one Saturday night in October, the trauma center at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania treated three gunshot victims.It was a typical night for Ben Braslow, one of the hospital's attending trauma surgeons.

Penn has the dubious distinction of being one of the busiest trauma centers in the United States. Doctors from other countries go there to learn about treating gunshot victims.

"Very often, we have visitors and guests from all over the world coming to observe," said Braslow. "We have a unique relationship with Swedish surgical teams. We've had people from Norway, South America. They hear about how busy our trauma center is, and they come here to survey, to get some insight as to how we run things, and how to really take care of penetrating trauma."

Dr. John Pryor directs Penn's trauma program and is a major in the Army Reserves. He spent months in the hospital unit at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and he says what he sees at Penn rivals what he saw there.

"This is really the first conflict where we have learned things on the civilian side because of all the violence in the inner cities. We've learned how to take care of these gunshot wounds, and we've applied those techniques to caring for soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq," Pryor said.

According to Pryor, what's happening in Philadelphia is a war.

When "Nightline" visited, Braslow was treating a patient with a gunshot wound to the chest that had "nearly transected" the patient's heart. At 1:37 a.m., with his left ventricle torn in half, the victim was declared dead. He was 23 years old.

According to Braslow, young men are typical trauma-center patients. "He's the prototypical trauma patient that we're seeing, with penetrating trauma from West Philadelphia." Then comes the hard part. "I gotta go tell his family now," Braslow said.

Notifying families of the death of their loved ones is not something new for Braslow. "Over the last few months, we're doing four of these [notifications] a week, three or four a week," he said.

And no matter how many traumas he sees, it is still emotional for Braslow, especially when the victim is so young. "Twenty-three-year-old kid. I don't know if he's a good guy, a bad guy, but it doesn't matter. He's a kid."

This kid was shot in an altercation outside a Philadelphia nightclub. As a man mopped up blood from the trauma bay, the victim's dead body lay covered in a white sheet, his belongings in a paper bag on the stretcher.

Outside the trauma bay, Braslow and a chaplain told the waiting family members that the gunshot patient didn't survive.

"Their first response is always anger, and sometimes directed at us, although I think most of the people realize that we're trying to help, but who knows what's going to happen tonight [if the brother] and his friends and the patient's friends get together and start looking for retaliation?" Braslow explained.

"The police don't always get all the information, but often, the shooters are identified, and it's just not mentioned to police, because the family and friends want to go seek their own justice, which just makes us busier and busier."