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Between 1968 and 1986 only 1,300 patients were treated in Stockholm and in the same time interval only approximately 110 papers were published. The going was slow and great skepticism prevailed in the neurosurgical community. Leksell was not fond of traveling to meetings and as soon as he learned that I planned to get into medicine he started asking me to travel in his stead. When this happened he often asked me with less than a week’s notice. I vividly remember a meeting of the Indian Neurosurgical Society in 1969. We had treated less than 10 patients and he asked me to travel to Bhubaneshwar to report on what we had accomplished so far. At this meeting, and subsequently at too many others to remember, I always started my talk by showing an engraving by the Renaissance German artist Matthias Greuter (Fig. 9). I said – don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you anything new. What I will be talking about was done already in the 17th century – and everybody laughed. When I had delivered my talk, nobody was laughing. It was not believable at the time that you could do anything in the brain without a prior craniotomy. The crowd was upset, I was called a charlatan and the chairman of the meeting gently but resolutely led me out of the meeting center and out of harm’s way.

Fig. 9. 1600 – radiosurgery for mental disorders.

I often think of the three world wars of SRS. The first war was with the neurosurgeons who refused to believe that there could be a tool better than their own hands. It lasted for 20 years, from 1968 to 1988. I will get to the other wars later.

Following the installation of the prototype in 1968, Stockholm would remain the only place in the world where GKS was offered to patients until 1983, when a GK was installed in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A year later, the UK followed suit with the installation of a GK in Sheffield. Both these centers were pioneered by previous disciples of Leksell. Dr. Roberto Chescotta and Dr. David Forster had both spent time with Leksell in Stockholm before returning to their home countries. Considering the paucity of published evidence in favor of SRS I think both of them took significant professional risks in convincing their institutions to invest in the technology.