The birth of stereotactic surgery: a personal retrospective.

The field of human stereotactic surgery was born at Temple Medical School in Philadelphia in 1947, with Ernst A. Spiegel and Henry T. Wycis its parents. I had the great fortune of walking into Dr. Spiegel's laboratory as a freshman medical student looking for a summer research project in 1956, when the field was just emerging from its infancy, and worked with Spiegel and Wycis for most of the next 13 years and Rolf Hassler the following year. The perspective of the early growth of the field of stereotactic surgery from this unique position and my wanderings through the field as it grew, contracted, and then blossomed are presented.