Bud Shaw Humanism in Medicine Lectureship

Born in 1950 in the Cleveland hospital where his father was six months from completing his residency, Byers Wendell Shaw Jr. grew up the oldest child of a general surgeon in rural south-central Ohio. Although he was the valedictorian of his high school class, he was forbidden from giving the valedictory. It was, after all, 1968 and Shaw had a history of acting out and protest. 

He finished his undergraduate studies at Kenyon College in 1972 with an AB in Chemistry and an enduring love of literature.  Returning to his birth institution in Cleveland, he received his MD degree from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in 1976.  He completed a general surgery residency at the University of Utah in 1981 under the leadership of Frank Moody, and a transplant surgery fellowship in 1983 at the University of Pittsburgh under Thomas Earl Starzl, the father of liver transplantation, and Shunzaburo Iwatsuki.  During his time at Pitt, Bud performed an ever-increasing portion of the liver transplants as well as the liver portion of the world’s first heart-liver transplant. 

After four years in Pittsburgh, Shaw, along with surgeon Patrick Wood, nurse Laurel Williams Salonen, and organ procurement specialist Robert Duckworth left in 1985 to start a new transplant program in Nebraska that, with critical support from Surgery Chair Layton F. Rikkers and Medicine Chair, Michael F. Sorrell, and numerous others quickly became one of the most respected centers in the world.  The fortieth anniversary of their first liver transplant will arrive July 19^th, 2025.

Starting in early 1997, Bud served twelve years as chairman of the UNMC department of surgery. An author of 300 journal articles, 50 book chapters, and more than 200 invited presentations, Bud was also a founding editor of the prestigious journal, Liver Transplantation.

With encouragement from his mother, Bud has been active in creative writing since childhood.  By second grade, he was writing stories of adventure about an eight-year-old and his pony.  His mother praised then edited them extensively.  In 1996 Shaw took a sabbatical to write a novel. It yet haunts his hard drive.

In 2007 he quit surgery altogether.  That summer he was selected to attend the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop in Fiction, and the following year he was one of the original physician participants in Steve Langan’s Seven Doctors Creative Writing Project.

In 2008, with funding from UNMC, Nebraska Medicine and the clinical practice group, Shaw vacated the Surgery Department Chair to become Director of The Advanced Computer Applications Program ACAP —  an enterprise to build specialty-specific clinical point-of-care applications that demonstrably improved the speed, accuracy and readability of clinicians’ documentation chores.  By 2012, the team, which included Hubert Hickman as lead programmer, had fourteen employees and over 500 campus users of their applications.  Although they received budget approval for three more years, the program was abruptly terminated in early 2013.  Looking for a job, Bud began teaching medical students from matriculation to graduation.  In 2022, UNMC and the Department of Surgery presented him with the Medical Student Faculty Educator Award “in recognition of excellence in clinical teaching of third year medical students”  Today, Bud also hosts two electives for senior medical students: one teaches students to use reflective writing as part of the Department of Psychiatry’s Stress Management program; in the other students read literary books and watch award-winning movies.

Shaw’s own writing breakthrough occurred in 2011 when Susan Orlean chose his essay, My Night With Ellen Hutchinson, as the winner of a writing contest hosted by Creative Nonfiction Literary Magazine. The essay received Special Mention among the 2013 Pushcart Prize entries.  His first book, Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon’s Odyssey was released by the Plume imprint of Penguin Random House in September 2015. He has also published essays in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and online at Electric Literature.

Today Bud Shaw lives and writes north of Omaha with his wife, award winning poet and novelist Rebecca Rotert.